reptile – Page 4 – Nix Illustration

Weird Heads Month #24: Hook-Snouted Swimmers

Thalattosaurs were another group of weird Triassic animals, found in coastal marine environments all around the world. Their evolutionary relationships are unclear beyond “they were some sort of diapsid reptile”, and they were well adapted for aquatic life, with streamlined lizard-like bodies, short limbs with webbed feet, and long paddle-like tails.

Most of them had long narrow toothy snouts, but others had odd spear-shaped noses or downturned upper jaws.

Hescheleria rubeli here was one of the strangest, living in Europe during the mid Triassic, about 247-235 million years ago. It was one of the smaller known species of thalattosaurs, around 1m long (3’3″), and had a particularly bizarre-looking head.

A close-up of the head of the extinct marine reptile Hescheleria. The front of its snout is sharply downturned, forming a near-right-angled hooked shape, with small sharp teeth at the front of its jaws along with a pair of large conical bony projections in its lower jaw.

Its snout was so sharply curved downward that it formed a right-angled hook relative to the rest of its jaws, sort of resembling the initial interpretation of Atopodentatus but without the vertical split.

There were also small sharp teeth at the front of its mouth, along with a pair of large conical bony projections on its lower jaw.

This weird arrangement must have been highly specialized for something, but its actual function is still unknown. One suggestion is that the large jaw-spikes were used to crunch into hard-shelled prey, although there doesn’t seem to have been any reinforced surface in the upper jaw for them to crush against.

But I personally wonder if maybe these jaws were the equivalent of the hooked kypes seen in the males of some modern salmonid fish – structures associated with dominance fighting.

Weird Heads Month #07: The Wonderful Creeping Thing

The Triassic was an incredibly weird time, full of evolutionary experiments in the wake of the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history.

Teraterpeton hrynewichorum here was part of group known as allokotosaurs, a lineage of mostly-herbivorous archosauromorphs that also included the long-necked bull-horned Shringasaurus.

Living in Nova Scotia during the Late Triassic, around 235-221 million years ago, Teraterpeton (meaning “wonderful creeping thing”) was first named in the early 2000s based on a skull and partial skeleton, with some additional skeletal material being described recently in 2019.

Its head had a confusing mix of anatomical features, with a long beak-like toothless snout at the front of its jaws, small sharp interlocking cheek teeth further back, a huge nasal opening, and a closed-up fenestra at the back of its skull making it look more like the skulls of marine reptiles.

It also had a lizard-like body, perhaps up to 1.8m long (~6′), with rather long slender limbs and large blade-like claws, and more anatomical weirdness in the pelvic region convergently resembling those of distantly related groups like rhynchosaurs and tanystropheids. It had a sprawling posture, but its hind limb musculature suggests it might have been capable of getting up into a more erect stance when walking, somewhat similar to modern crocodilians’ “high walk” gait.

It was clearly quite an ecologically specialized animal, but quite what it was specialized for is still uncertain. It was presumably a herbivore like its close relatives, but it must have been eating a very different diet with its long beak, and its deep claws could have been used for scratch digging to get at roots and tubers.

Another possibility it that it could have been an insectivore with a diet similar to modern aardvarks or armadillos, probing with its beak and digging with its claws for insects, grubs, and other invertebrates. Since termite-like social insect nests do seem to have existed around the same time, it might even have been one the earliest known animals to specialize in myrmecophagy.

Weird Heads Month #05: Crested Snorkelers

Phytosaurs were a lineage of incredibly crocodile-like archosauriformes – essentially “crocodiles before crocodiles” – convergently evolving an incredibly similar appearance at a time when the ancestors of modern crocs were still small and terrestrial.

But while they had toothy snouts and bodies heavily armored with bony ostederms, unlike crocodilians their nostrils were far back on their heads up near their eyes, often in a sort of bony “snorkel” so they could breathe while almost fully submerged underwater.

Mystriosuchus westphali lived in Germany during the Late Triassic, about 215-212 million years ago. Around 4m long (~13′), it was even more aquatic than other phytosaurs, with paddle-like limbs and long slender gharial-like jaws adapted for catching slippery prey.

And along with the typical phytosaur snorkel, it also had raised crests along its upper jaw – which may have supported even larger keratinous display structures.

Weird Heads Month #03: Big Head Mode

In the last entry we had heads that looked much too small… so now how about heads that were too big?

Erythrosuchus africanus was part of an early branch of the archosauriformes, related to the ancestors of crocodiles, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs. Living in South Africa during the mid Triassic, around 247-242 million years ago, it was the largest predator of its time, reaching about 5m long (16’5″).

It was one of the earliest archosaurifomes to develop a more upright-limbed posture, and convergently evolved a very theropod-like head with a deep narrow snout full of large serrated teeth.

A head that was absolutely massive proportional to the rest of its body, measuring about 1m long (3’3″).

As a result of such a big noggin, Erythrosuchus must have also had some bulky musculature in its neck and forequarters to support it. And while its fairly short neck wouldn’t have been very flexible buried in all that tissue, it probably didn’t need to be – some of its main prey would have been large slow-moving dicynodonts, and its hunting strategy may have consisted of simply “aim at food and lunge”.

Hovasaurus

The Permian-Triassic extinction 252 million years ago was the most severe mass extinction in Earth’s history, so incredibly devastating that it’s been nicknamed the “Great Dying” – but there were still some animals that somehow just… didn’t seem to really notice it at all.

And one of these surprisingly resilient species was Hovasaurus boulei.

It was part of a group known as the tangasaurids, a fairly early evolutionary branch of diapsid reptiles from Madagascar and East Africa that originated sometime in the mid-Permian, just before the common ancestor of modern lizards and archosaurs.

Hovasaurus lived in Madagascar both just before and for some time after the Great Dying, dating to around 252-247 million years ago. Growing up to about 90cm long (~3′), it was one of the largest tangasaurids and was also highly specialized for aquatic life in freshwater rivers, with an eel-like tail twice the length of the rest of its body and heavy thickened ribs.

Hundreds of fossils have been found representing life stages from hatchling to adult, and juvenile Hovasaurus actually seem to have been almost fully aquatic – they had proportionally shorter limbs and may have behaved similarly to modern sea turtles, crawling into the water shortly after hatching and only returning to land as adults once they had longer better-developed legs.

Many fossils also preserve clusters of pebbles in their abdominal cavities, which are thought to have been used as extra ballast to help weigh them down in the water when hunting small fish and invertebrates.

It’s not entirely clear why these odd little aquatic reptiles were apparently unaffected by the Great Dying. Perhaps, much like the many freshwater species that survived though the later end-Cretaceous mass extinction, Hovasaurus was simply very good at dealing with sudden changes in its environment and food availability due to the variability of river habitats, and was able to weather though the worst of the extinction without much trouble.

Or maybe it was just one of the lucky ones.

Eons Roundup 4

Some more recent commission work for PBS Eons!

An illustration of an extinct entelodont, an omnivorous hoofed mammal. It has a hippo-like head and a body proportioned rather like a hyena, with high shoulders and long slender legs. It has cloven-hoofed feet and a short tail, and its body is covered in a coat of short bristly fur. — Eoentelodon

The entelodonts Eoentelodon and Brachyhyops, from “The Hellacious Lives of the Hell Pigs”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trJpxwMGoCw

An illustration of an extinct ichthyosaur, an ancient marine reptile. It has a short narrow snout full of rounded teeth, large eyes, a long tapering body, four flippers, and a long tail ending in a vertical fin. — Tholodus

An illustration of an extinct mosasaur, an ancient marine reptile. It has long triangular jaws full of many small sharp teeth, a long lizard-like body, four paddle-like flippers, and a long tail ending in a vertical fin. — Tholodus

The early ichthyosaur Tholodus and the mosasaur Pluridens, from “When Ichthyosaurs Led a Revolution in the Seas”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V342aXQs9XY

An illustration of an extinct early bat in flight. It has claws on all five fingers on each wing, along with small ears and a long tail. — Onychonycteris

An illustration of an extinct early bat in flight. It has claws on both its thumb and the first wing finger one each wing, along with small ears and a long tail. — Onychonycteris

The early bats Onychonycteris and Icaronycteris, from “When Bats Took Flight”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWeYCULC0UQ

Island Weirdness #26 – The Mauritian Giant Skink

Along with its unique birds, Mauritius was also home to many endemic reptile species. In the absence of terrestrial mammals giant tortoises were the largest herbivores on the island, and various geckos, skinks, and snakes helped to fill out the rest of the vertebrate ecosystem.

Leiolopisma mauritiana was a very large skink, one of the biggest ever known to have existed with a total length of around 80cm (2′7″). Its ancestors originated in Australasia, over 5600km away (~3500 miles) at least 3-4 million years ago – and they must have endured a particularly long ocean rafting journey without any island hopping stops, since none of the other islands along that route seem to have ever had populations of similar skinks.

It probably lived in rocky areas, possibly also being capable of digging burrows, and would have eaten an omnivorous diet of seeds, fruits, invertebrates, and smaller lizards and birds.

By the early 1600s it was already extinct, very soon after the arrival of humans, probably due to predation from invasive mammals like rats. However, its half-sized close relative Leiolopisma telfairii does still survive on rat-free Round Island a short distance to the north of Mauritius, and recent conservation efforts have been rebuilding its population and setting up new colonies on other nearby small islands.

Almost-Living Fossils Month #23 – Enamel-Armored Lizards

The glyptosaurines were a group of lizards that first appeared in the Late Cretaceous, about 85 million years ago. They were an early branch of the anguid lineage, originating in North America, and had heavily armored bodies covered in bony osteoderms – superficially similar to those of modern beaded lizards, but structurally much more complex with the outermost layer formed from a unique enamel-like substance called osteodermine.

They were some of the few lizards to survived through the end-Cretaceous extinction 66 million years ago (which killed off over 80% of the lizard species known at the time) and went on to become quite successful in the warm climates of the early Cenozoic.

They spread across to Europe and Asia and developed much larger body sizes, going from small 10cm-long (4″) forms in the Early Paleocene (~65 mya) to over 60cm long (2′) by the mid-Eocene (~40 mya). In North America and Europe they became common enough that they were probably important parts of the local ecosystems, and their widespread distribution suggests they were able to adapt to a variety of different habitats and environmental niches.

Their teeth resembled those of modern omnivorous lizards like blue-tongued skinks, suggesting they had a similar generalist diet – although their strong jaws have also been proposed to be specializations for crushing hard-shelled invertebrates such as snails.

Helodermoides tuberculatus here was one of the largest glyptosaurines, about 65cm long (2′2″). It lived during the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene (~34-33 mya) in the northwestern and midwestern United States, with fossils known from Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska.

One fossil shows evidence of having lost part of its tail, probably dropping it in a self-defense behavior to escape a predator. However, unlike the regenerating tails of many other lizards, the osteoderms of Helodermoides instead seem to have formed a thick rounded bony cap over the wound, preventing any significant regrowth and leaving its tail permanently stumpy.

During the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene the glyptosaurines began to disappear, probably struggling to cope with cooling and drying climates, and their last definite fossils date to about 30 million years ago. Possible fragmentary remains from as late as the Early Miocene of Central Europe (~16 mya) may indicate that a few isolated late-surviving members of the group persisted on for a while longer, but if they did hang on that long they were probably finished off by further sharp temperature drops in the mid-Miocene.

Almost-Living Fossils Month #20 – Some Very Spiky Turtles

The meiolaniformes were a group of terrestrial turtles that first appeared in the fossil record in the Early Cretaceous, around 125 million years ago. Although they were originally thought to be cryptodirans, more recent studies suggest they weren’t actually quite true turtles at all, instead being close evolutionary cousins to them in a much older and more “primitive” lineage that may go back as far as the Triassic.

They’re known mainly from South America and Oceania, but they may have had a more global distribution during the Cretaceous, with some fossils from the northern continents sometimes being classified as members of the group. However, only the South American meiolaniformes seem to have actually survived through the end-Cretaceous extinction.

The most distinctive meiolaniformes were the heavily armored meiolaniids, which first appeared in Patagonia during the Early Eocene (~48 mya). With large horns on their heads and thorn-like spikes along their long tails, they seem to have convergently evolved to fill the same sort of large-herbivore-tank niche as ankylosaurs and glyptodonts.

They also had fairly large nasal cavities, which might indicate a well-developed sense of smell – or may have been an adaptation for regulating the heat and moisture content of each breath, similar to the complex noses of ankylosaurs.

The South American meiolaniformes all went extinct around the end of the Eocene (~33 mya), but some meiolaniids had already dispersed across to Australia via Antarctica (before the continents had fully separated, and before Antarctica had frozen over) and they continued to survive there for most of the rest of the Cenozoic. They even went on to spread to various islands around Oceania, suggesting they were able to float and swim like modern giant tortoises.

The largest Australian meiolaniids reached sizes of around 2.5m long (8′2″), making them some of the biggest of all known terrestrial turtles. These giant forms went extinct in the Late Pleistocene, around 50,000 years ago, alongside much of the other Australian megafauna.

A few smaller varieties hung on in smaller islands to the east, with one of the latest-surviving species being Meiolania platyceps on Lord Howe island. It was only about half the size of its biggest Australian relatives – an example of insular dwarfism – and lived into the Late Holocene just 3000-2000 years ago.

Meiolania species on other islands seem to have gone extinct after the arrival of humans. But Lord Howe Island appears to have never been inhabited prior to European settlement in the late 1700s, so it’s unclear why this last of the meiolaniformes disappeared.

[Edit: A 2018 study of Meiolania platyceps’ anatomy suggests it may have been more aquatic than previously thought. It might have been something like a giant herbivorous snapping turtle or an armored reptilian hippo, bottom-walking around in coastal lagoons, with its big nasal cavity housing salt glands.]

Almost-Living Fossils Month #14 – Ancient Snakes

While the evolutionary origin of snakes is still rather poorly understood, one very early branch of their lineage – known as the madtsoiids – were a particularly long-lived group.

Originating back in the mid-Cretaceous (~100 mya), these “primitive” snakes were found mostly in the southern continents of Gondwana (known from South America, Africa, India, and Australia), but a few also spread into Europe. They were either some of the earliest true snakes or perhaps ophidians very closely related to them, and may have retained small hindlimbs that were slightly more well-developed than the vestigal ones of some modern snakes.

They ranged in length from under 1m (3′3″) to at least 7m (23′), with biggest of them rivaling some of the very largest living snakes in size.

They would have been similar to pythons, non-venomous and relying on constriction to kill their prey, although they had less flexible skulls than their modern relatives and couldn’t easily swallow animals much larger than their own heads. At least some of the Cretaceous species would have preyed on smaller dinosaurs, with one fossil even preserving a mid-sized madtsoiid in a sauropod nest alongside a hatchling.

Although the madtsoiids survived the end-Cretaceous extinction quite well and kept going throughout most of their range for the first half of the Cenozoic, most of them eventually disappeared in the Eocene-Oligocene extinction about 33 million years ago.

Aside from a single possible Late Olgiocene/Early Miocene record from South America (~29-21 mya), after that point the madtsoiids were found only in Australia, where they persisted almost into modern times.

Wonambi naracoortensis was one of the last of the Australian madtsoiids, living from the mid-Miocene (~11 mya) to at least the Late Pleistocene (~40,000 years ago). It was also one of the larger members of the group, 5-6m long (16′5″-19′8″), and seems to have been an ambush predator that lurked around waterholes to catch drinking animals.

The last madtsoiids went extinct at the same time as many of the other Australian megafauna, and it’s not clear exactly what caused them to die out. Humans had arrived in Australia about 20,000 years earlier, and hunting – either directly targeting the large snakes, or simply gradually reducing their available prey – combined with a changing climate may have been too much for them to handle.