#hynerpeton

🩷🩷🩷The Paleozoic is Pink 🩷🩷🩷

Pikaia gracilens - Parioscorpio - Hynerpeton

Conodont - Pederpes - Walliserops

Rugose Coral - Inostrancevia - Conulariid

In this month:

- after snapping from his viking sona, David, Frida, Hilda, and Twig must save this Achelosaurus from a gang of Troodontids

- Johanna goes for a swim on her own, encountering a curious Hynerpeton

- the Marra cheese it when the black hound and a Giganotosaurus decide to fight, leaving Frida behind

- Twig watches from a distance as a family of Buitreraptor follow the river downstream

DINOVEMBER DAY 4: 365MYA, FAMENNIAN STAGE; PENNSYLVANIA, USA

Since the Silurian, life on land had changed quite a bit. The plants have been evolving and spreading, and now vast forests are beginning to work their way inland, colonising the barren wasteland of the continental interior one tree at a time. The forests of the Devonian are not absent of animals either; while millipedes trundle through the leaf litter, insects crawl on every tree and charge across the forest floor, pursued by arachnids like spiders and scorpions. Some insects have even taken to the air.

One group, however, is relatively new to the land. This Hynerpeton is one of them; he is a new type of lobe-finned fish called a tetrapod which has left the water in search of untapped terrestrial food sources as well as safety from the terrifying predators in the water. To help him on land, the powerful fins of ancestors like Tiktaalik have evolved into arms and legs, and the swim bladder has been adapted into lungs for absorbing oxygen from the air. Hynerpeton is the archetypical early tetrapod, the blueprint for all land animals to come.

He is not fully free from the water however, as he must return to keep his sift skin from drying out, and to mate also, as the female’s eggs must be lain in the water and fertilised outsider her body. This is to his disadvantage; there are monsters in the water. Even though he is far from the seagoing sharks and placoderms, having made his home in a river valley that runs down from the Appalachio-Caledonidian mountains, the waters in these part are ruled by a lobe-finned fish called Hyneria. At 3 metres long, it dwarfs the 70cm Hynerpeton, but can easily hide in the murk of the riverbed despite its large size.

The observer. by Plioart

The Fish-o-Pods!

Thanks to these guys you get to vote and pay taxes. What a world! It may not a direct lineage of fish -> fish-o-pod -> not a fish like we see in some diagrams; some of these guys may have lived too close in time to one another to be direct relatives. They do show the progression of lobe finned fishes (like Eusthenopteron) to more land oriented creatures (like Ichthyostega) Stickers here!

The Paleo Party Guest of the day is Hynerpeton!

Of the stem tetrapodomorphs, this may be the first one to have lost their fish-like gills. They were the first Devonian tetrapod discovered in the USA– the first of many!

Age: 365-363 mya!

Location: Hyner, Pennsylvania, USA