dicynodont – Nix Illustration

Crystal Palace Field Trip Part 1: Walking With Victorian Monsters

This past week I’ve been out of town and unable to work on much art, but instead here’s something a little different. I finally got the chance to go visit some familiar old faces out in the wilds of south London, so let’s go on a little tour of these iconic Victorian-era retrosaurs…

A photograph of an informational sign in London's Crystal Palace Park. The text on it reads, "The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs 1854, a journey through time and science". Three of the iconic Victorian dinosaur statures are also pictured below the title, showing the Iguanodon, Hylaeosaurus, and Megalosaurus.

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs take their name from the original Crystal Palace, a glass-paned exhibition building originally constructed for a World’s Fair in Hyde Park in 1851.

In 1854 the structure was relocated 14km (~9 miles) south to the newly-created Crystal Palace Park, and a collection of over 30 life-sized statues of prehistoric animals were commissioned to accompany the reopening – creating a sort of Victorian dinosaur theme park – sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins with consultation from paleontologist Sir Richard Owen.

The Palace building itself burned down completely in 1936, and today only the ruins of its terraces remain in the northeast of the park grounds.

Two images of Victorian London's Crystal Palace building. On the left an old black-and-white photograph from around 1854 shows the original structure, a grand glass-paned building with ornate terraced gardens in front of it. On the right a more modern photo from 2011 shows what little remains today – just the ruins of the terraces and stairs. — *The Crystal Palace building then and now*
Left image circa 1854 (public domain)
*Right image circa 2011 by Mark Ahsmann (CC BY-SA 3.0)*

Six sphinx statues based on the Great Sphinx of Tanis also survive up among the Palace ruins, flanking some of the terrace staircases. They fell into serious disrepair during the latter half of the 20^th century, but in 2017 they all finally got some much-needed preservation work, repairing them and restoring their original Victorian red paint jobs.

A photograph of one of the surviving sphinx statues in the Crystal Palace ruins, reclining on a plinth beside some stone steps. It's recently renovated with a coat of terracotta red paint to match its original Victorian-era appearance. In the background the huge Arqiva Crystal Palace telecom tower can be seen.

…But let’s get to what we’re really here for. Dinosaurs! (…And assorted other prehistoric beasties!)

Rechnisaurus

Rechnisaurus cristarhynchus here was a member of the dicynodonts, a group of stocky herbivorous beaky-jawed synapsids that were distantly related to modern mammals. Living in what is now eastern India during the Middle Triassic, about 247-242 million years ago, it’s only known from a single fossil skull – but based on the body proportions of better-known close relatives like Kannemeyeria it was probably somewhere around 1.2m long (~4′).

It had a raised bony crest running down the middle of its snout, with deep bowl-like depressions on either side that probably served to make the crest seem visually larger it already was. (They probably didn’t house any weird soft-tissue structures, however, since these type of dicynodonts tended to have very extensive keratinous coverings over their snouts.)

It also had raised bony areas around its parietal eye, and extensive bony flanges covering most of its tusks giving its face a sort of jowly appearance. All these features were probably for visual display and may have been brightly colored in life.

And, while I usually like to reconstruct dicynodonts as extensively fluffy… recently some fossil specimens of Lystrosaurus have been found showing bumpy leathery skin impressions. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all dicynodonts were hairless (especially since there are still those Permian coprolites), but since kannemeyeriiformes like Rechnisaurus were quite closely related to Lystrosaurus, I’ve gone with no fuzz at all on this one.

Diictodon

Even before Lystrosaurus briefly took over the world, the dicynodont synapsids were a highly successful group. These herbivorous beaked-and-tusked mammal-cousins were abundant all over the supercontinent of Pangaea during the Late Permian and occupied a wide variety of ecological niches, ranging from rat-sized to almost bear-sized. (And later during the Triassic some got even bigger.)

Towards the smaller end of that size range were species like Diictodon. Living around 259-254 million years ago in Southern Africa (but with fossils also found in northern China, suggesting a much larger geographic range) this dicynodont grew up to about 45cm long (1’6″) and was a gopher-like creature adapted for digging, with a tubular body and short muscular limbs.

It was a very common animal, making up around half of all vertebrate fossils in some locations. Numerous preserved spiral-shaped burrows have been found concentrated in small areas, going down as much as 1.5m (5′) into the ground.

Several different species have been named within the Diictodon genus, but currently they’ve all been lumped together under the single name of Diictodon feliceps. There’s a lot of anatomical variation between specimens, though, with some notably being smaller and lacking the distinctive tusks seen in others – which may be evidence of sexual dimorphism, with the tuskless individuals possibly being females. (Although differences in inner ear anatomy may also indicate they were a separate species entirely, in which case female D. feliceps might instead be represented by fossils showing smaller tusks.)

I’ve illustrated one of the tuskless forms here, since they don’t generally get as much attention as the tusked ones. It’s also speculatively fluffy and iridescent similar to modern golden moles.

Lisowicia

Dicynodonts were a group of herbivorous animals with toothless beaks and protruding tusks, part of the synapsid lineage and much closer related to mammals than to reptiles. They were some of the most successful and widespread land vertebrates from the Late Permian to the Middle Triassic, with one genus even briefly taking over the world in the aftermath of the End-Permian mass extinction event.

And it turns out some of them got very big.

Fossils of a surprisingly large dicynodont were first reported in 2008, but it wasn’t until just recently (in late 2018) that this giant creature was finally given an official name – Lisowicia bojani.

Close in size to a modern elephant, at around 2.6m tall (8′6″) and 4.5m long (14′9″), it was by far the largest known example of its kind to have ever lived. And while most other dicynodonts had upright hindlimbs and sprawling forelimbs, Lisowicia seems to have developed a fully upright posture much more similar to that of quadrupedal dinosaurs and modern mammals.

It was also one of the very last of its kind, living during the Late Triassic of Poland, about 208 million years ago (although there was a possible later survivor in Australia). This was around the same time that early sauropod dinosaurs were likewise first starting to experiment with gigantism, suggesting that both groups were convergently evolving to exploit newly-available ecological niches.

Bulbasaurus

Who’s that synapsid?

It’s Bulbasaurus phylloxyron!

This creature was a member of the dicynodonts, a group of herbivorous mammal-relatives with beaks and protruding tusks. Its fossils are known from the Late Permian of South Africa, about 259-254 million years ago, and it would have been roughly the size of a cat, around 60cm long (2′).

It wasn’t officially named after the pokémon character Bulbasaur, but instead in reference to the bulbous bosses on its snout. But combined with how the species name “phylloxyron” means “leaf razor”, it doesn’t seem to entirely be a coincidence.

Geikia

Geikia elginensis, a dicynodont synapsid from the Late Permian of Scotland (~254-252 mya). Known only from a single skull discovered in the 1890s, it would have measured around 50cm long and was closely related to South African forms like Bulbasaurus.

It had an unusually shortened snout and forward-facing eyes – sort of like a pug with a beak – and a pair of protruding nasal bosses on its snout. It was probably a selective browser, biting off small pieces of vegetation at a time, and its large eyes and stereoscopic vision suggest it may have been nocturnal.

Unsolved Paleo Mysteries Month #08 – Everything Dies Except Lystrosaurus

The extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs is probably the most “famous” mass extinction, but it wasn’t the worst one in Earth’s history. That morbid honor goes to the Permian-Triassic extinction 252 million years ago – also aptly known as the Great Dying.

A truly massive amount of biodiversity was lost in this event, with 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species disappearing. Some marine ecosystems seemed to rebound fairly quickly, but overall it may have taken at least 5-10 million years for anything close to full recovery. Terrestrial vertebrates may even have taken up to 30 million years to regain previous levels of diversity.

And… we’re not sure why it happened.

One of the main potential culprits is the massive eruption of the Siberian Traps – one of the largest known volcanic events on Earth – but other explanations include an asteroid impact, methane-producing microbes, ocean anoxia, the formation of Pangaea, a nearby supernova destroying the ozone layer, and even dark matter.

Or it might have been a result of multiple causes at once, events that wouldn’t have been so severe individually but became disastrous in combination. This is known as the “Murder on the Orient Express Model”: maybe they all did it.

But there’s also a secondary element to today’s mystery. In the aftermath of the Great Dying, a small dicynodont synapsid briefly took over the world. For the first few million years of the Triassic, around 95% of the Earth’s population of terrestrial vertebrates were all Lystrosaurus – no other genus or species of animal has ever dominated to such a degree.

Why did these squat little dog-sized animals survive and thrive when everything else was struggling? They might have been opportunistic generalists able to deal with changing conditions better than other groups, the extinction of most large predators may have allowed their population to explode, or it might simply have been a matter of luck.

We just don’t know.