#juxia

here's what we sketched during this week's #Paleostream flocking

this week we sketched Dynamognathus, Juxia, Presbyornis, and Nimbacinus

Flocking Together #115

Dynamognathus/Juxia

Juxia - early relative of Paraceratherium, lived in Asia around 35 million years ago. Standing nearly 2 meters tall and weighing about 1 tonne, it resembled a hybrid between a tapir and a horse. Juxia fed on soft vegetation in forests and could briefly sprint to escape threats.

Juxia’s fossils reveal early traits of hornless "rhinos", with its agility allowing brief escapes from predators. Its smaller size and running capability contrast with its massive descendants, offering insights into the evolution leading to Paraceratherium.

Day 1: Juxia sharamurensis
A horse-sized member of the paraceratheriidae is also a extinct species of the same kind that was lived in Asia such as China.

OK, I missed posting a drawing again yesterday, but it’s not because I couldn’t think of a word for I for the Alphabetical Challenge; it’s because I was barely home—I left for work around 6 a.m., went straight from there to a meeting, and didn’t get back till around 11 p.m.  I did have trouble coming up with a word for I, but I’d decided on the word(s) by Wednesday night.

My first impulse was to try to think of a word that began with I and ended with -ius... so it would presumably form its plural in -ii (as with radius, radii... though of course that doesn’t begin with i so it didn’t count).  I couldn’t come up with any English words that fit the bill, though—and using a Latin word (like “imperius”) felt like cheating.

It then occurred to me that taxonomic family names ended in -idae, and often ended in -iidae if their root had an i near the end of it.  Surely there had to be some family name starting with i and ending in -iidae.   I thought I vaguely remembered hearing about an “Ichthyopterygia”; could there by a corresponding “Ichthyopterygiidae”?  Well, no, as it turned out; “Ichthyopterygia” was real, but “Ichthyopterygiidae” was not.  Nor were any of the other possible family names I tried.

In desperation, not liking the idea but not being able to come up with anything else, I thought maybe I’d pluralize a proper name.  “Ignatius.”  So I would draw “Ignatii”, the plural of Ignatius: I would draw Ignatius J. Reilly, protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, meeting Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order.

And then it occurred to me... there had been an extinct mammal called Indricotherium.  Might it have belonged to a family called Indricotheriidae?

Well, as it turned out, yes and no.  But mostly yes.

(Keep in mind, of course, that I am by no means an expert on paleontology, my research for all of this was not thoroughly rigorous, and some of what I say below may not be entirely correct.  But the following is the impression I got from my limited research.)

First of all, Indricotherium may not be a valid genus; it may (or may not) be synonymous with the genus Paraceratherium (which, as an older name, would take priority).  But it was assigned to the family Indricotheriidae... and even if Indricotherium is sunk into Paraceratherium, that doesn’t invalidate the family name.  However, Indricotheriidae may be “demoted” to a subfamily within the family Hyracodontidae.  Or it may not be... while that’s what Wikipedia says (at the time of this writing), Wikipedia is hardly the most reliable source, and Indricotheriidae’s inclusion within Hyracodontidae seems to be only the opinion of one group of researchers.  Others (including the authors of the most recent paper cited on the relevant Fossilworks page) apparently disagree and retain it as a separate family.  In any case, though, even if Indricotheriidae is regarded as a subfamily it’s then called Indricotheriinae, which still meets the criteria for the Alphabetical Challenge, so it’s all good.  (And of course biologists are increasingly discarding the Linnaean taxonomic ranking system for a cladistic classification anyway.)

So.  I had a word that fit the criteria.  Indricotheriidae (or Indricotheriinae; either one works, I guess, though, contra Wikipedia, the former seems more widely accepted).  But then what exactly to draw to represent this?  If my drawing is to represent the (sub)family, then it wouldn’t seem right to draw only one genus.  But there seemed to be considerable question as to just how many genera were in Indricotherii{d/n}ae in the first place.  Paraceratherium was undisputed, but many other genera had been named: Aralotherium, Baluchitherium, Benaratherium, Caucasotherium, Dzungariotherium, Indricotherium, Pristinotherium, Turpanotherium.  But most paleontologists now considered most if not all of these to be invalid junior synonyms of Paraceratherium.  Except in China, where most of these fossils were discovered; many (most?) Chinese paleontologists do regard at least some of these as valid genera.

I did find, however, at least one genus aside from Paraceratherium that everyone seemed to more or less agree on: the much smaller Juxia.  So that’s supposed to be a Paraceratherium on the left and a Juxia on the right.  Juxia predated Paraceratherium by about five million years, so they never would have actually met, but... oh well.

And now doing a bit more reading I see that—again contra Wikipedia—Juxia apparently isn’t as uncontroversial an indricotheriid genus as I’d thought.  There doesn’t seem to be much dispute about its being a valid genus, but whether it actually belongs to Indricotherii{d/n}ae is another question.  Well, whatever; I’ve already finished the drawing; it’s too late now.

Anyway, after finally hitting upon Indricotherii{d/n}ae as a suitable I word for the Alphabetical Challenge, I decided out of curiosity to do a web search for “Ignatii”, my previous desperate choice, to see whether anyone had in fact pluralized “Ignatius” before.  Maybe not, but it turned out “ignatii” (which happens to be the genitive of “Ignatius” as well as the plural) was also in use as a biological scientific name—the species name of the “St. Ignatius bean”, Strychnos ignatii.

So, what the hey, I decided to toss that in too, and have my two indricotheres browsing from a St. Ignatius bean tree.  Sure, it’s unlikely the species Strychnos ignatii existed back when they did, but, as I mentioned, Juxia and Paraceratherium weren’t contemporaries either, so the drawing was already going to be anachronistic.

Problem was, it was surprisingly difficult to get any information on just what a St. Ignatius bean tree actually looked like.  Close-ups of its fruit and leaves were plentiful; pictures of the tree as a whole seemed nonexistent.  Other information about the plant was equally elusive, including its size and the simple question of whether its fruit was even edible.  (It seeds are poisonous, containing the deadly toxin strychnine, but then apple seeds and apricot and peach pits contain dangerous cyanide compounds, and that doesn’t mean that apples, apricots, and peaches aren’t edible.)

So I have no idea if the tree here looks anything like an actual St. Ignatius bean tree, but that’s what it’s supposed to be, anyway.