Retro vs Modern #16: Uintatherium anceps

Discovered in the Western United States during the early 1870s, Uintatherium anceps was part of one of the earlier major conflicts in the the Bone Wars. Nearly 30 different scientific names were applied to various fossil specimens of this mammal in under two decades, and the taxonomic tangle wasn’t properly sorted out until nearly a century later in the 1960s when they were recognized as actually all being the same species.


1870s

Paleontologist Edward Cope considered Uintatherium (under the name “Loxolophodon”) and its close relatives to be proboscideans – part of the elephant lineage – due to some of the similarities in their anatomy. The first reconstruction of these animals showed this version, depicting elephant-like animals with downward-pointing tusks, short tapir-like trunks, and the multiple bony projections on their skulls speculatively shown as attachment points for large antler-like horns.

Cope’s rival Othniel Marsh heavily criticised that interpretation of Uintatherium, arguing that these huge mammals were instead a separate group within the ungulates named dinoceratans – although this wasn’t really as huge of a classification difference as it seems today, since at the time proboscideans were also considered to be ungulates!

The dinoceratan ungulate interpretation quickly won out, and for a while in the 20th century Uintatherium actually became a fairly popular and well-known prehistoric mega-mammal, commonly included in collections of cheap plastic “dinosaurs” and usually depicted as more of a knobbly-headed sabertoothed rhino.


2020s

In recent years the dinoceratans seem to have fallen into obscurity and some degree of paleontological neglect, with little modern work on the group and no major studies for the last couple of decades – although this might be starting to change.

Despite the early ideas about them being ungulates, the evolutionary relationships of dinoceratans have become much more murky over the last century or so. Due to different elements of their anatomy being highly convergent with various other mammals it’s easy to find “false positives” in morphological comparisons, and they’ve been proposed as being connected to a wide variety of groups including “condylarths“, “insectivores“, rodents, and cimolestans. But some mid-2010s research suggests they were in fact ungulates after all, closely related to early South American forms like Carodnia – a lineage whose own evolutionary relationships are murky, but may have close affinities with modern horses, rhinos, and tapirs.

We now know Uintatherium anceps lived across the Western and South Central USA during the mid-Eocene, about 46-40 million years ago, at a time when warm wet climates extended up into the Arctic and lush tropical-style rainforests covered much of the continent.

It was similar in size and build to a modern white rhino, about 4m long (13′) and stood around 1.7m tall at the shoulder (5’7″). It had three distinctive pairs of “horns” on its forehead, snout, and nose, that were similar in structure to the ossicones of giraffids, probably covered in skin and hair rather than keratin. Its elongated canine teeth were protected by bony flanges on its lower jaw, and seem to have been a sexually dimorphic feature that was much more prominent in males.

It also had an oddly concave skull, with its forehead dipping inwards, and an unusually tiny braincase for its size. It probably wasn’t a particularly intelligent animal, but it didn’t really need to be – as one of the first types of herbivorous mammal to get truly huge in the early Cenozoic, a fully-grown Uintatherium probably had no natural predators at all.

Smilesaurus

Despite having a genus name that sounds more like it should belong to a cartoon dinosaur mascot for dental hygiene, Smilesaurus ferox was actually a real gorgonopsian, a predatory synapsid distantly related to modern mammals.

Living in South Africa during the Late Permian, around 259-254 million years ago, Smilesaurus was comparable to a medium-sized dog at around 1m long (3’3″). It had some of the longest sabre-like canine teeth of any known gorgonopsian, proportionally comparable to those of sabertoothed cats – and it may have hunted in a similar manner, using powerful grasping limbs to pin down struggling prey and then dispatching it with slashing bites.

…And it also turns out that when you don’t horribly shrink-wrap a gorgonopsian, you end up with something that looks rather like a bear-hippo.

(For some similarly chonky gorgonopsians, check out Tas’ @i-draws-dinosaurs reconstructions here. Bullet Man was definitely a bit of an inspiration in this.)

Tiarajudens

Synapsids just keep evolving saber teeth.

Both proto-mammals and true mammals have independently evolved oversized fangs quite a few different times in a lot of different lineages over the last few hundred million years (even in some modern ones), and one of the first to experiment with such a feature was Tiarajudens eccentricus.

Living in southern Brazil towards the end of the Permian period, about 265-260 million years ago, Tiarujudens was an early member of a group of known as anomodonts. These chunky herbivorous synapsids weren’t directly ancestral to modern mammals, but were instead evolutionary cousins, and their lineage eventually included tusked dicynodonts like the world-conquering Lystrosaurus.

Tiarajudens was around 1-1.2m long (3’3″-3’11”) and sported a pair of very long blade-like canine teeth in its upper jaw. Since the rest of its teeth were clearly adapted for eating plants – with one of the the earliest known examples of flat grinding molars that would have allowed it to chew up tough vegetation – these fangs probably served more of a display or defensive function.

The saber teeth may even have been a sexually dimorphic feature like in modern musk deer. Another anomodont from South Africa, Anomocephalus africanus, is incredibly similar to Tiarajudens except for a lack of fangs – and since South America and Africa were connected as part of Pangaea at the time, it’s possible that these two actually represent males and females of the same species.

Without finding a larger number of fossils we can’t know for certain, but it’s an interesting possibility at least.

Almost-Living Fossils Month #24 – Sabertoothed Sparassodonts

Along with the marsupials and the polydolopimorphs, the sparassodonts were one of the lineages of metatherian mammals that inhabited South America during its “great isolation” for most of the Cenozoic. And despite having to share the large carnivore niches with both the terror birds and the sebecosuchian crocs, they still managed to become the main mammalian predators of the region.

Their first definite fossils come from the start of the Paleocene (~65 mya), but they probably actually originated sometime in the Late Cretaceous before the mass extinction. A currently-unnamed skull from Mongolia (~70 mya) appears to be either an early sparassodont or a very close relative, and a North American metatherian called Varalphadon (~90 mya) may also be linked to the group. It’s possible that, like the marsupials, they may have first evolved in North America and later spread into South America before it became isolated.

Like their marsupial relatives they would have given birth to tiny undeveloped young, although we don’t know for certain if they actually had pouches or not. Their epipubic bones were highly reduced, so it’s possible they didn’t have pouches – but they also might have had mostly cartilaginous epipubics (like thylacines) that just didn’t fossilize.

Over the course of the Cenozoic the sparassodonts convergently evolved many similar features to placental carnivorans, with carnassial teeth for shearing through flesh and a wide variety of body shapes ranging from small weasel-like forms to long-snouted ambush hunters to large hyaena-like bone-crushers.

But by far the most famous members of the group were the thylacosmilids. First appearing in the Early Miocene, about 20-15 million years ago, these sparassodonts developed huge elongated canine teeth that resembled those of sabertoothed cats. Unlike the felid sabertooths, however, thylacosmilids’ fangs grew continuously and their lower jaws had long bony flanges that supported and protected their teeth when theirs jaws were closed.

Thylacosmilus atrox was the last and most highly specialized of the thylacosmilids, living from the Late Miocene to the Late Pliocene, around 9-3 million years ago. About 1.2-1.5m long (~4-5′) and standing 60cm tall at the shoulder (2′) it was similar in size to a modern jaguar – not huge compared to some placental predators, but still one of the largest of all known carnivorous metatherians.

Despite its huge fangs it actually had a fairly weak bite force, instead relying on its strong forelimbs to immobilize its prey before delivering precise deep stabs into soft body parts using powerful neck muscles. The structure of its limbs also suggests it wasn’t a fast runner, and it probably had to stalk or ambush its targets.

Although the extinction of Thylacosmilus and the other last sparassodonts is often blamed on being out-competed by similar placental carnivores arriving during the Great American Interchange, it seems like that wasn’t actually the case. Many of their northern placental equivalents such as Smilodon didn’t enter South America until the mid-Pleistocene (~1-0.7 mya), over 1.5 million years after the last record of any living sparassodonts. So it’s likely they never actually met each other, and the disappearance of the sparassodonts may be more linked to cooling climates in the Pliocene and early Pleistocene.

Month of Mesozoic Mammals #25: Sabertooths

Lotheridium

In modern times the therian mammals are represented by just two surviving groups – placentals and marsupials. But both of these lineages contained many other extinct close relatives, and this final week of the month will focus on a few of them.

Modern marsupials are part of a larger grouping known as metatherians which split off from their common ancestor with placentals during the Jurassic period, at least 160 million years ago. Probably originating in Asia, they spread to Europe and the Americas during the Cretaceous, and diversified into several different groups – including some which would go on to become the dominant mammalian predators in South America during its long period of isolation in the Cenozoic.

One of the earliest branches of the metatherians were the deltatheroideans. These mammals are known from Asia and North America, evolving to fill vacant small carnivore niches after the disappearance of most of the eutriconodonts. Most of them went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, but a few did survive for at least 10 million years afterwards.

Lotheridium was a deltatheroidean living during the Late Cretaceous of China (72-66 mya), and is known from a nearly complete skull. It’s likely to have had a head-and-body length of about 20cm (8″), and may have had a full length including the tail of up to 30-40cm (1′-1′4″).

It had elongated canine teeth, convergently similar to the saberteeth of many later mammal groups. It was probably a highly specialized predator, and may even have been capable of preying on small dinosaurs – its close relative Deltatheridium is known to have eaten theropods like Archaeornithoides.

Month of Mesozoic Mammals #23: Toothy Jaws

Cronopio

Cronopio was one of the earliest South American dryolestoids, living during the start of the Late Cretaceous of Argentina (100-94 mya). Known only from partial skull material, it had a long snout and enlarged canine teeth which gave it a superficial resemblance to the fictional “sabertoothed squirrel” Scrat from the Ice Age film series.

Skull of Cronopio || from fig 4 in Rougier GW, Apesteguía S, Gaetano LC (2011) Highly specialized mammalian skulls from the Late Cretaceous of South America. Nature 479(7371):98–102 doi: 10.1038/nature10591

Although its full size and appearance is unknown, it’s estimated to have measured about 15cm long (6″). It was probably an insectivore or an omnivore, but the rather delicate nature of its snout and fangs suggest it had a weak bite and relied on strong jaw muscles to chew up its food with a specialized rotating motion. It’s also not clear whether its saberteeth had a function for feeding, or if they were used for display and fighting like in some modern deer.

And while I’ve reconstructed Cronopio here with ankle spurs, it’s actually unknown whether dryolestoids had this feature. They occupied an evolutionary position between mammals that definitely had spurs (symmetrodonts) and ones that definitely didn’t (therians), but fossil remains of dryolestoid ankles are poorly-preserved and incomplete.

(I also wanted to do a depiction that wasn’t so blatantly Scrat-like, because that’s become sort of a paleoart meme. Soft-tissue and long fur can really change the outward appearance of mammals, so enjoy this weird tiny pig-rat version of Cronopio.)

Anteosaurus

Anteosaurus magnificus, a dinocephalian from the Middle Permian of South Africa (~266-260 mya). Known from several skulls and fragments of the rest of the skeleton, it was one of the largest carnivorous non-mammalian synapsids with an estimated body length of at least 5m (16′4″).

The skull of Anteosaurus [image source]

It had patches of thickened bone above its eyes forming a pair of short “horns”, as well as heavily reinforced areas around its skull roof and the sides of its lower jaw. These were probably used for head-butting behaviors, and similar adaptations are seen in other groups of dinocephalians.

The front part of its mouth was also prominently upturned, and it had enlarged “sabretooth” fangs – although these features are covered by lips in my reconstruction.

Balbaroo fangaroo

An early relative of kangaroos, Balbaroo fangaroo. Known from a couple of partial skulls discovered at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area in Queensland, Australia, it lived during the Early Miocene (~23-16 mya) and was probably about the size of a cat, around 45-60cm long (18-24″) not including the tail.

It had unusually enlarged canine teeth forming prominent “fangs” – hence its species name – which may have been used for display and fighting in a similar manner to some ungulates such as water deer and camelids.

Based on the skeletons of other closely related species, it probably wasn’t able to hop. Instead it would have moved around quadrupedally, and the shape of its feet suggest it was also capable of climbing like a modern tree kangaroo.