#palaeogene

Hello World. I never thought I'd be on this site, but here I am. This blog was created for the purpose of participating in a-dinosaur-a-day's Fossil Novembirb. Fossil Novembirb is a yearly art event founded by Meig Dickson, a vertebrate palaeontologist who, as far as I can tell, studies dinosaurs, especially theropods. Don't fight me or em over birds being theropod dinosaurs. Neither ey nor I want to have this conversation, so enjoy the art!

I started off my Fossil Novembirb with Vegavis iaai. What makes this fluffy anseriform special is that we found a fossilised syrinx (avian voice-maker) belonging to one of these, so we can reconstruct their sounds. This Vegavis was coloured based on a bunch of anseriforms that are alive today, like ruddy shelducks and cotton pygmy geese.

For Day 2, I did a bit of spec evo and pulled out a scientific name I told myself I'd assign to a newly-discovered fossil genus. This sketch has a Serina-like text description for Phantasmavis.

Tropicbirds! I chose to draw Clymenoptilon because I was hoping "tropicbird" meant "brightly coloured bird". Even though they aren't that brightly coloured, they're still cool. And Kumimanu (approximately to scale in this drawing) didn't really have the obligation to be black-and-white like most extant penguins (because Inkayacu), so I went... mild-wild with the colours.

No... one's... tall like Gastornis, no one calls like Gastornis! In the bottom right, no one feeds small like Gastornis!

I've seen the "Andy's Prehistoric Adventures" episode featuring these megafowl, realised it was Walking With Dinosaurs with a human inserted, and drawn a mildly speculative colouration for these Gastornis. To the left, two adults have their necks out towards each other and are calling into the sky. Whether this is courtship or a challenge, nobody knows. But a calmer scene happens in the bottom right, where a mother shows her chick red berries on a branch to show them that it is food.

"Don't make me fly up there, you punk!" is one way to interpret the screamerduck Anachronornis' call in the direction of the Primoptynx owl. This scene unfolds in the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum ecosystem of the Willwood Formation before it was rock.

It's a twilight hummingswift! We know the colour of this iridescent little birb from the Danish Fur Formation. I watched a tutorial on painting iridescence, but I'm not really satisfied with the parent feeding their chick to the left of the flying Eocypselus rowei. It's hard to see, but there's a baby hummingswift being fed a Cimbrophlebia scorpionfly.

London Clay has a lot of plant fossils. Not all of them are listed on Wikipedia, but there's a photo of a pencil-root mangrove seed listed. Featuring a speculatively-coloured Eotrogon, a Dasornis carrying away a mackerel, and a Prophaeton just gliding, and repeat telecasts Gastornis parisiensis and Eocypelus rowei, Eocene London was a birder's dream (believe me, I'm a kinda-birder).

This Tynskya art was somewhat late, rather dissatisfactory, and mildly rushed. I had an exam the next day. Don't judge me.

And here's a better Primozygodactylus! I couldn't tell the specific species because it wasn't listed for the Wikipedia image. But here we are: a bird that gives off ashy prinia/sparrow/orange-headed thrush vibes.

This concludes the first nine days! I don't know if I'll be doing the tenth because nobody's giving me straight answers about the palaeobotany of the Green River formation.

Daeodon – Late Oligocene-Early Miocene (29-19 Ma)

As I said last time we went to Mammal Junction, a lot of mammals from the prehistoric Cenozoic are similar to mammals we have now, or look kind of like a generic mammal. Some of them, though, weren’t. Some were absolutely positively bizarre. Let’s talk about one.

This ugly motherfucker is named Daeodon, and lived in North America during the Paleogene-Neogene divide.  Daeodon—and other entelodonts, by extension—is essentially what it looks like. It’s a carnivorous ungulate, or, hoofed mammal. No surprises here, other than the fact it existed. Today, the only ungulates who eat meat are whales1. Ungulates make up most of the large land mammals today, and they’re all big grazers. Daeodon and its cousins, however, were apex predators.

If you’ve seen Walking with Beasts, Daeodon might look familiar to you. A similar animal appears in the third episode, “Land of Giants,” called an “entelodont.” That one lived in central Asia and probably belonged the genus Entelodon. If you’ve seen the documentary, you certainly remember maybe the most gruesome scene in the entire franchise, where a territorial fight between two of them leads to one’s face being fucked right up. Even as a violence-loving kid that one kind of made me shudder.

But even though Walking with tends to sensationalize its animals, that wasn’t really the case this time. They were probably a lot like that. Aggressive, terrifying, and ugly as hell. I wanted to give them a little more fur, though, since I personally don’t believe they were naked like a domestic pig. They’ve been nicknamed “Hell pigs” or “Terminator pigs” and I find it hard to disagree. 

They had big-ass heads and powerful jaws with pairs of huge canines and incisors, along with batteries of tough, blunt molars. This mixture of teeth is, weird as it probably sounds, sorta convergent with ours. Sharp front teeth and dull, rounded teeth in the back? These were the teeth of an omnivore. They fed themselves with a mix of scavenging and active hunting, and probably rounded out their diet with roots and tubers, an echo of their relationship with other hooved animals. They’re like a concept for a horror movie character. It’s like Kujo for pigs, I think. I don’t know much about Kujo other than the fact that Stephen King was inebriated when he wrote it and doesn’t even remember doing so.

It’s important to mention that they weren’t actually pigs, although we used to think some of them were. They’re the weird cousin pigs don’t talk about. Paleontologists like to disagree on how closely they were related to pigs and other artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates). I did a lot of digging to see where they might fall, and the general consensus looks like “somewhere around hippos and whales2.”

More about this genus specifically, Daeodon was the largest member of the entelodont family, being a bit taller than the average grown man. I am really glad I don’t live alongside these things. One specimen was originally named Dinohyus, which means “terrible pig.” It’s thought that Daeodon, more than other entelodonts, was mostly a scavenger. It followed other carnivores around and waited for them to kill something, then got in there and screamed at them until they ran away. These were huge animals with mouths full of sharp teeth; it probably wasn’t too hard for them to terrify their fellow meatboys.

Daeodon is also interesting because it’s kind of a tangle in the entelodont family tree. First of all: entelodonts are found pretty evenly in Eurasia and North America. So, there’s a cousin of Daeodon who lived in the same region of North America, a few million years earlier, called Archaeotherium. I actually almost talked about that one today instead. The obvious conclusion there is that Daeodon is descended from Archaeotherium, right? And that was the idea for a long time. But, looking closer, we found that it looks more like its cousins on the other side of the Pacific. It might be descended from an immigrant population of entelodonts who crossed over from Asia. Wack.

This leads to some questions, like, were the entelodonts in America just worse at being entelodonts? Did these guys come over the land bridge and just outcompete them? It’s really hard to say, since most animals aren’t fossilized and it’s totally possible they coexisted with native entelodonts and we just haven’t found them. Of course, they might also just be descended from American entelodonts and happened to develop convergent traits with their cousins across the pond. Listen, this science is a total disaster sometimes. We’re doing the best we can with piles of bones we find in the dirt.

So, yeah, that’s Daeodon, the murder “pig.” The Cenozoic is still full of surprises for us. A lot of the animals that didn’t survive to modern times are absolutely buckwild, and if this one doesn’t prove that, I’ll need to try harder. I mean, even if it does convince you, there’s still some weird shit out there that I’d love to cover. And that’s why I’m here!

P.S. If you haven’t seen Walking with Beasts, I highly recommend it. It’s the passion project of the Walking with team, and probably the most accurate installment of the three.

1Whales evolved from ungulates, and so are considered members of that group even though they have no gotdamn legs

OMG I AM HAVING A HALLOWEEN PARTY DON’T SPEND MONEY ON GOING OUT JUST FUCKIN COME DRINK GOON WITH ME

Ok, so I've been doing some research into human evolution and Earth's prehistory. Mainly because I wanted to formally identify what era and evolutionary class the Croods were a part of, and my little sister has learned about it and is so proud of herself. This is what I've found, enjoy the obsessiveness of my mind: Homo Habilis lived between 2.33 to 1.44 million years ago. Living between the Pilocene and Pleistocene eras. Here there's some obvious overlap with Homo Erectus. Homo Erectus lived between 1.8 million to 100 000 years ago. Living in the Pleistocene era. Here there's an overlap, probably when Homo Sapiens came to be and then further subdivided into Homo Sapien Sapiens. Early Homo Sapien Sapiens or Cro-Magnons existed from 200 000 years ago to an undefined date, thought to be around approximately 15 000 years before we came about.

My sister believes the Croods to be Homo Habilis and Guy to be Homo Erectus, primarily because it was Homo Erectus that was known to have controlled use of fire. They also overlap in time period by approximately 400 000 years.

My dad thought that perhaps Guy was Cro-Magnon and the Croods were Homo Erectus, making Guy's knowledge of fire the reason why Homo Erectus had controlled use of fire. They also overlapped in time period by approximately 100 000 years.

For Earth, apparently Pangaea's third and final great shift to become the continents we have today was during the early Cenozoic era. Keep in mind that the Cenozoic era still continues today. This early section of the Cenozoic era when the shift happened is called the Palaeogene Period, and it ranges from the Paleocene to Oligocene, 23-66 million years ago. After the Oligocene era came the Neogene Period, consisting of the Miocene and Pilocene epochs. After the Pilocene, and by after I mean coming closer to our time not farther back in time, comes the Pleistocene epoch.

The range from the Neogene Period to the Pleistocene epoch is roughly 23 million to 12 000 years ago. Smaller shifts are still happened to this day, but not big enough to spew fire and crack land like in The Croods. This lead me to believe that the film took place in the Paleocene era, or more broadly in the Palaeogene Period..

Remember that big walking whale in the movie? Well apparently, in the evolution of whales they would walk, some both walk and swim. Interestingly enough they all existed in the Palaeogene Period. Which matches up with the continents shifting massively in the film.

What doesn't match up however is HUMANS!!! You've no idea how much this bugs me.

So I've come up with 2 possible scenarios, either all the other interesting historical match ups were just coincidences and the film takes place during a much more recent tectonic shift somewhere in the last 3 million years, when man existed in those forms (Habilis, Erectus, Sapien, Cro Magnon).

ORRRR

The film is set in the Palaeogene Period, during the final great continental shift and the Croods and Guy (either Habilis and Erectus, or Erectus and Cro Magnon respectively) were placed there out of their time for the plot's sake. And this is a film geared towards children and I'm thinking too much about this...

occ?

we can both rock the teint idole ultra 2nite