#pantodonts

Titanoides – Late Paleocene (59-56 Ma)

Our record of the Cenozoic era is very rich. Super rich. With a few exceptions, we understand the ancestry of not only most living mammals, but most living vertebrates. A lot of this knowledge goes unnoticed, though. Maybe because so many of these animals are so similar to the stuff we have now. I will admit that the Cenozoic is the era I know the least about. Part of the idea behind this blog is to educate myself, so we’re going to talk about mammals I had no idea existed until about a week ago.

Titanoidesis an old mammal from North Dakota. It lived just in the wake of the K-Pg extinction event, which, if you don’t know, was the one that hit the earth so hard that non-avian dinosaurs died out and the Mesozoic era was cancelled. Life is super tenacious, though. Barely 5 million years after the extinction event, mammals and birds had already filled the niches left by larger animals.

Let’s take a quick look at its anatomy. It’s a squat and stocky animal, about 10 ft (3.5 m) long. It probably weighed over 300 lbs (136 kg).* Titanoides was the largest mammal in its habitat, and one of the largest animals of its day. Mammals are set apart from their kin by their diverse teeth, and this one is no exception. It had two enlarged canine tusks. It was a quadruped with big, clawed paws. You might think this animal was a predator, but it was actually an herbivore. Titanoides’ home state of North Dakota was, believe it or not, a dense tropical swamp during the Paleocene, and our friend Titanoides used its tusks to uproot plants and tubers, or to strip bark from trees. It was definitely no pushover, though. The tusks, combined with its claws and beefy body, meant it was absolutely capable of squaring up with anything trying to eat it. It seems a bit like the Paleocene equivalent of a hippo, although we don’t have anything to suggest it was aquatic. It’s similar in that it falls into the “big plant munchers that will fuck you up” category.

Here, follow me to the Taxonomy Zone real quick. Titanoides is what’s called a pantodont.

“Hey, Dylan, what the hell is a Pantodont?”

Thank you for asking! I didn’t really know either. Pantodonts are an extinct suborder (or order, who knows?) of mammals that had a short burst of existence during the beginning of the Paleogene period. They were some of the first large mammals, and to find how they relate to animals alive today, we have to dig a little. They have no living descendants. They fall under the order Cimolesta, which is also extinct. Buuuut, certain members of Cimolesta may have been ancestors to the currently-living order Carnivora (pretty much every carnivorous mammal except whales). So, to put it in terms that make sense, pantodonts are distant great-great-great-great cousins of our modern meat-eating mammals. Here’s a (really simplified) chart:

So, yeah, Titanoides has deep roots. It is deep roots, really. But it’s important, because it’s one of the first big grazing animals in the asteroid’s wake. It’s a sign of things to come for mammals, really, if you’re looking back on the history of life on earth like most of us are. But in the Paleocene, it was just an animal. It’s like looking back at today from 30 million years in the future. Elephants and giraffes, and maybe even humans, would seem like halfway points in a timeline of our descendants’ evolution.

*Weight is really hard to guess for prehistoric animals, especially those we only know from skeletons. We don’t know how much meat was on those bones.