#paleoblr

ancientmarinereptiles:

Art by: Joschua Knüppe

Name:Morturneria seymourensis

Name Meaning: In honor of Mort D. Turner and the original proposed name of Turneria

First Described: 1994

Described By: Chatterjee and Creisler

Classification: Chordata, Tetrapoda, Reptilia, Sauropterygia,‭ ‬Plesiosauria, Elasmosauridae

Morturneria lived during the Late Cretaceous, and was discovered in Antarctica. What’s really fascinating is that Morturneria was a filter feeding plesiosaur, using its mouth as a sieve to indulge in marine invertebrates. The filter feeding strategy may have evolved in order to avoid direct competition with its other marine reptiles. Morturneria was once thought to be a juvenile Aristonectes, but paleontologists saw differences in non-ontological characteristics in Morturneria, thus distinguished it from Aristonectes. Fun fact, Morturneria was originally named Turneria, but the name was already taken by a genus of ant.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morturneria

You are a mammal. A very very long time ago, you were a fish. You decided that you shouldn’t stay in the water and should go on land, because land is safer because all of your predators are in the water. Oops! You need lungs for that. Okay so you make some lungs, and then some legs. You still need the water though, so you stay by it and go in and out.

Now you are an amphibian. Welcome to being a salamander. But this seems really inconvenient - you lay eggs but you live on land and in water. It would probably be easier to stick to one. So you decide to make your eggs have a hard protective shell, to keep the water in. Thats a good idea! Now do the same thing to your body. Now you have skin. Skin is actually pretty fragile so lets add some protection. Slap some scales on.

Welcome to being a reptile. Its a land full of giant insects. So you stay small and bide your time until the insects get smaller. And then you get bigger. And bigger. Until you’re the biggest thing on land. You look like a lizard but you act like a mammal. You hunt your prey. Some of your prey hunts plants. Works out nice. But it could be better. You still need the sun to warm you up. So why don’t you start making your own warmth?

Welcome to being warm blooded. You start to grow weird long, thin scales that is called fur, while other reptiles start to get crazy big. You decide its better to stay small for now. You can hide. You can run. Your neighbors keep growing, getting bigger, and their skeletons fill up with air pockets. They also make body coverings, but they’re long and flat. They are called dinosaurs. Some of them stay cold blooded and stay near the water, getting harder scales and needing less food to keep up their metabolism. These are crocodilians.

You stay small until space decides to blow up the planet. All the big reptiles are gone, so you take over and get bigger now. You decide its easier to grow your eggs inside of you and give birth to live babies instead of waiting around a nest for that time. But they cant really eat, so you create a special gland for milk. The little reptiles that are left have learned to fly, and now are called birds. Some of the other side stay small. Turn into lizards, snakes, turtles and the crocodiles are still here somehow.

Blah blah blah you start walking on two legs and losing hair. Now you are a person. You are a human being. You have been a reptile, and you have been an amphibian and a fish. But now you are you! And I think thats pretty cool.

The only animal type you didnt get to be was a bird, and thats because they had a better idea at the same time and got to it first. Bummer.

flamefatalis:

A fossil of a pea crab (pinnixa genus). Miocene, Monterey Bay, CA.

tetrapodomorpha:

i feel like most of my problems would be solved if i could only shake hands with an opabinia

artisticai:

coelacanth

they banned #bone? how quickly they forget

robotics5:

tenoretofruddigore:

tenoretofruddigore:

#Wait what?#Science dad EXPLAIN
  

Ok, I explain.  So the major categories of vertebrates that we all learned as kids (fish, bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian…) were first published around the 1750s by a man named Carl Linneas.  He tried to classify all of life based on shared anatomical traits- things like fur, feathers, or scales, methods of reproduction, number of legs, and so forth.  He created the system of Kingdom/Phylum/Class/Order/Family/Genus/Species, grouping increasingly similar organisms into groups that he put in these 7 levels.

Of course, Actual Nature is a continuum and does not care that one man tried to make all of it fit in seven equal boxes.  And we’ve learned a lot since Linneas was working- dinosaurs weren’t scientifically described until decades after Linne’s death, and Darwin’s theory of evolution was published nearly a century later.  Other technology, such as DNA sequencing, has only really become available in the past couple years (DNA hadn’t even been DISCOVERED yet in Linneas’ time.)

Enter phylogeny.  While traditional taxonomy grouped living species based on anatomical traits, phylogeny groups species based on evolutionary relationships.  As we’ve gotten a more complete fossil record, the old model has needed some updates.  

Here’s a phylogenetic tree that I shamelessly grabbed from Encyclopedia Brittanica, showing relationships between major groups of vertebrates.  

As different adaptations arose, some groups of organisms have changed very little over time, while others have continued to look quite different.  Some of Linneas’ initial categories still hold up-  Modern amphibians never developed the ability to lay eggs away from water, and resemble many of the early land-dwelling vertebrates.  Likewise, all living mammals are more closely related to each other than to any other vertebrates, and therefore can occupy their own branch of the tree.  “Fish” is an extremely messy term as far as phylogeny is concerned, but that may be the topic for another post.

As you can see, lizards and snakes are close relatives on a shared branch point.  Crocodiles and birds, likewise, share the closest branch point to each other (Dinosaurs have been left off this figure, but are on the branch with crocodiles and birds).  Turtles’ evolutionary branchpoint is a bit more debated, because their skulls have some features that are different than other reptiles, but let’s include them for now.

So, if turtles are reptiles everything from the turtle branchpoint onward is also a reptile.  A valid phylogentic group is a common ancestor (branchpoint) and ALL of its descendents.  Excluding birds, therefore, does not make a valid clade.  

Linneas also didn’t know about dinosaurs, which have some traits more similar to other reptiles, but some types of dinosaurs gradually developed more bird-like traits.  Modern birds are descended from a couple of small, feathery dinosaurs that survived the extinction.  But, because those more transitional anatomical features are lost to the fossil record and not represented in modern species, it can be hard to get used to the idea that small, warm-blooded, beaked, feather-covered things are actually close relatives of scaly, cold-blooded things.  

Hope this makes sense!

Wow you weren’t kidding

I think it’s also cladistically valid to say “all vertebrates are fish”.

Most (~95%) modern animals we would colloquially call a “fish” ( fins, scales, and gills) are a monophyletic clade of ray-finned fishes. But since we also refer to coelocanths, lungfish, and other lobe-finned fishes as “fish”, because they also have fins, scales, and gills, we have to include their direct descendants, tetrapods, too, for the same reason we have to include birds as reptiles.

If we include sharks and rays as fish, which many people do, we’re definitely not monophyletic any more- it’s two very diverged branches. Throw in hagfish, lampreys, lancelets, and a bunch of fossil species and now the term “fish” accounts for basically all vertebrates. (Are we counting sea squirts too? Then it’s all chordates!)

If we include EVERTHING that includes “fish” in its common name (starfish, jellyfish, crayfish)…. Forget about it.

Dinos and ocs

lusus–naturae-deactivated20210:

shitposting-for-the-soul:

fecktrecool:

wemblingfool:

heyyitsjayy:

cheeseanonioncrisps:

ironychan:

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anythingabout dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

XKCD

So that people don’t need to go through the notes:

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)

If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

• We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).
• We know they had remarkable vision.
• We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.
• We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.
• We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it’s colors, and it’s tail rings (which one would argue would be it’s “iconic feature.”

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We’ve found pigmentation in scales and skin. We’ve completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We’ve figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by “accident” by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it’s life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from “rocks” than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is “We can’t possibly know anything about these animals,” then you don’t understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They’re only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as “proof” that paleontologists don’t know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)

Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of “thanks i hate it” and “stop ruining dinosaurs!”

Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health

@lusus–naturae​