ground sloth – Nix Illustration

Crystal Palace Field Trip Part 3: Walking With Victorian Beasts

[Previously: the Jurassic and Cretaceous]

The final section of the Crystal Palace Dinosaur trail brings us to the Cenozoic, and a selection of ancient mammals.

A photograph of the Crystal Palace palaeotheres, depicted as tapir-like animals. A smaller one on the left is in a sitting pose, while a larger one on the right is in a walking pose. — Image from 2009 by Loz Pycock (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Originally represented by three statues, there are two surviving originals of the Eocene-aged palaeotheres depicting Plagiolophus minor (the smaller sitting one) and Palaeotherium medium (the larger standing one).

The sitting palaeothere unfortunately lost its head sometime in the late 20^th century, and the image above shows it with a modern fiberglass replacement. Then around 2014/2015 the new head was knocked off again, and has not yet been reattached – partly due to a recent discovery that it wasn’t actually accurate to the sculpture’s original design. Instead there are plans to eventually restore it with a much more faithful head.

These early odd-toed ungulates were already known from near-complete skeletons in the 1850s, and are depicted here as tapir-like animals with short trunks based on the scientific opinion of the time. We now think their heads would have looked more horse-like, without trunks, but otherwise they’re not too far off modern reconstructions.

There was also something exciting nearby:

A photograph of the restored Crystal Palace Palaeotherium magnum statue. It's a chunky animal with a trunked tapir-like head, wrinkly skin, and a rhino-like body.

The recently-recreated Palaeotherium magnum!

This sculpture went missing sometime after the 1950s, and its existence was almost completely forgotten until archive images of it were discovered a few years ago. Funds were raised to create a replica as accurate to the original as possible, and in summer 2023 (just a month before the date of my visit) this larger palaeothere species finally rejoined its companions in the park.

Compared to the other palaeotheres this one is weird, though. Much chonkier, wrinkly, and with big eyes and an almost cartoonish tubular trunk. It seems to have taken a lot of anatomical inspiration from animals like rhinos and elephants, since in the mid-1800s odd-toed ungulates were grouped together with “pachyderms“.

An illustration comparing the Crystal Palace depiction of Palaeotherium magnum with a modern interpretation. The retro version is a chunky animal with a trunked tapir-like head and rhino-like body. The modern version is more horse-like, with slender legs and three-toed hoofed feet.

Island Weirdness #47 — Megalocnus rodens

Just 21km south of the Bahamas (13 miles), Cuba is the biggest island in the Caribbean and has a complex geological history. It originated as part of a volcanic island arc in the Late Cretaceous and during its existence in the Cenozoic it was colonized by a richer variety of mammals than the Bahamas ever had, including rodents, the enigmatic solenodons and nesophontes, and ground sloths.

The Caribbean ground sloths were all part of the megalonychid lineage — which eventually reached North America and produced giants — and they arrived on Cuba by the early Miocene, about 20 million years ago.

Megalocnus rodens lived during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene, between about 125,000 and 5000 years ago. It had unusually rodent-like front teeth, and while it was dwarfed compared to its mainland relatives it was actually one of the largest of the Cuban ground sloths — close to the size of a modern black bear, about 80cm tall at the shoulder (2’5″).

Subfossil remains show that Megalocnus survived well into the Holocene, and there’s been speculation that it may even have still been around in the highland forests as late as the time of European colonization in the 1500s.

However, radiocarbon dating of remains has given no dates younger than about 5000-4000 years ago, about 1000 years after the earliest arrival of humans in Cuba.

Eons Roundup

This year I’ve been lucky enough to have some of my work featured in several PBS Eons videos – and I even recently got the opportunity to do some custom images for them! Since I didn’t show any of these off at the time, here they are now: