Below the poll is a series of animal images labeled A through J. A is the least close to the birds we have today; J is the closest. If you encountered these animals in the wild, which would you call birds? If you pick a higher up option, then that means you consider all the below ones birds as well - so if you pick A, then BCDEFGHIJ are all birds. If you pick J, only J is a bird.

A:

B:

C:

D:

E:

F:

G:

H:

I:

J:

PLEASE REBLOG THIS SO IT CAN LEAVE PALAEOBLR. I NEED PEOPLE WHO DON'T RECOGNIZE THESE ANIMALS ON SIGHT TO VOTE.

I apologize to all of y'all with vision impairments for whom this poll is inaccessible. Alas, this is an experiment, and I cannot name the taxa. Thank you.

All alt text includes artist attribution; I did not make these pictures myself.

Another sketch brought to you by #paleostream

"DON'T BE AFRAID, the swarm said as it hovered closer. Barely as fish recognizable bodies moving up and down in the current.

Maraldichthys, a pycnodontiform fish and one of the strangest vertebrates the world has ever seen.

When I search the web for 'maraldicthys', I get only a handful of Tumblr posts like this one. Is this a real animal?

Maybe you have a typo in there? But oh yes it's real, there are just few people who dare to reconstruct it. Also look up it's sister taxon Gebrayelichthys (here my restoration)

Fish really have gone through a whole bunch of iterations of “well, what happens if I’m THIS shape”, haven’t they. 

HEY I KNOW THIS STATUE! I got to see it at the CA Academy of Sciences, and it's INCREDIBLE because it's right next to a statue of the largest land mammal ever:

You can *kind of* see the twig it's on on top of the box labeled "Smallest" in the bottom right.

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400884452-011/pdf

Awesome Megafauna Skulls!

My last weird and awesome skull post was really popular, so I decided to do one about something else I’m excessively interested in: Megafauna! This isn’t at all a comprehensive list of the coolest ones, not by a long shot, so you should definitely look up some of the BBC docs on Youtube or google ones from your continent!

The cave bear! (N. America)

‘Hell Pigs’ (N. America) Actually entelodonts, unrelated to pigs at all and more closely tied to hippos and cetaceans! Dat sagittal crest amirite

The Stag Moose  @allosauroid brought to my attention that this is the skull of the Irish elk, Megaloceros, not a stag moose! (Eurasia) Which stood 6 foot at the shoulder/withers

Platybelodon (widespread) Google artist renditions of these guys, you won’t be disappointed

Barbourofelis! (N. America) Like a smaller smilodon, with much cooler teeth. Look at those incisors!

Megatherium (S. America) Primitive sloths the size of elephants!

Titanus Walleri (N. America) Other continents had equally large if not larger ‘terror birds’

Paraceratherium (Eurasia) One of the largest terrestrial mammals we’ve ever discovered. It was actually a species of hornless rhino! Google artist recs of these guys, too

Diprotodon (Australia) The largest known marsupial, which was the size of a hippopotamus and stood 6 feet tall

I saved Glyptodon (S. America) for last, because these things have some of the weirdest skulls I’ve ever seen. They were technically armadillos, but reached the size of a Volkswagen Beetle!

Why is the Glyptodon skull like that? To anchor more muscle than it already had attached to its face? 

i have a lot of feelings and thoughts about coelacanths today

like… they’re blue

you have this mysterious fish that  no one really cared about, because everyone assumed they’d gone extinct with the dinosaurs. an interesting footnote, but one of many, many fossil species. 

and later the coelacanth gets some fame as a so-called “missing link” species, a theory which is now outdated (and not accurate for coelacanths) but was really influential at the time. because they have some weird biological quirks – bones in fins! – people were like “oh, they must be a missing link.” so the coelacanth was launched into some fame with the theory of evolution. it got brought up a lot. drawn in old textbooks as proof.

and then a fisherman finds a weird fish off the coast of south africa and calls a local fish expert who had let it be known she was interested in weird finds, and he brings her the (unfortunately badly rotted) corpse and she’s like “well, this is sure weird,” and sends off the bones to other experts, who start to quietly freak out, and rush to south africa, and rewards are offered for another one, any other one, and a few years later one is caught and frozen before rotting.

and it’s this incredible discovery, this extinct creature come to life (the prehistoric coelacanth lived in swamps and marshes in south america; these now are deep ocean fish in and around the indian ocean, but it’s still recognizably the same species)!

but it’s also blue.

not like, muddy blue, or tumblr-default-background blue.

proper shimmering sapphire blue and white. almost turquoise in some lights. this like… muddy, fossil creature. always drawn in dinosaur browns and grays. and it’s alive and it’s blue. just imagine being the scientist who opened that crate to this creature for the first time. you’re already excited, you’ve known about this fish for decades, you thought it was a story, you know it’s in this box. you expect  to see the weird fins and the strange tail. you know it’s large and odd looking. and you open it up and it’s this beautiful, shining blue, you know?

[img described: a coelacanth. it is blue.]

We are SO sleeping on how weird prehistoric fishes are. Like our legged fish ancestors or armored placoderms like Dunkleosteus are weird in their own way but they have nothing on them

Pycnodonts: literally any body shape they want that uncanny valley except some genera that look like normal trevallies

(Rostropycnodus, Stenoprotome, Gladiopycnodus, Maraldichthys by Joshua Knüppe)

Holocephali: cartiliginous fish closely related to chimaeras, which means they are relatives to sharks.

(Traquairius agkistrocephalus, Belantsea, and Squaloraja by Stanton F. Fink, Iniopterygidae by Ray Troll)

I ve been tellin ya but ya didnt LISTEN!

Weird Heads Month #19: Sword-Snouted Whales

Cetaceans are just weird animals in general. Fully aquatic mammals best described as “fat screaming torpedoes”, with bizarre head anatomy and their nostrils pulled up to the top of their heads behind their eyes. Some of them are among the largest animals to ever exist, some of them can live to over 200 years old, and some can dive to incredible depths below the ocean surface.

And they’re all descended from tiny deer-like creatures, with their closest living relatives being hippos and other even-toed ungulates.

Some ancient cetaceans were particularly odd-looking, evolving walrus-like tusks or elongated chins – or in the case of Eurhinodelphis longirostris here, an incredibly long swordfish-like snout.

Living during the mid to late Miocene, about 14-7 million years ago, Eurhinodelphis ranged across the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic, with fossil remains known from Western Europe, Turkey, and the East Coast of the United States. It was a fairly small dolphin-like cetacean about 2m long (6'6"), and was part of a lineage of early toothed whales called eurhinodelphinids.

Its upper jaw was around five times longer than the rest of its skull, and toothless past the point where the lower jaw ended. Much like the modern billfish it resembled, it probably used its snout to slash at fast-moving fish, stunning them and making them easier to catch.

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Nix Illustration | Tumblr | Pillowfort | Twitter | Patreon

The Titanoboa, is a 48ft long snake dating from around 60-58million years ago. It had a rib cage 2ft wide, allowing it to eat whole crocodiles, and surrounding the ribcage were muscles so powerful that it could crush a rhino. Titanoboa was so big it couldn’t even spend long amounts of time on land, because the force of gravity acting on it would cause it to suffocate under its own weight.

I’m so glad they aren’t around

omg me too. I’m scared enough of 26 ft long anacondas. I’m so happy Megalodons, those giant sharks, aren’t alive either

Praise natural selection

I remember watching Walking with Beasts or something similar, or some British tv show about evolution

The subject was something like a 12 foot long water scorpion

I was so startled by its sudden appearance and narration that I yelped: “12 fucking feet?!?!  I’m fucking glad it’s extinct!” 

Dude, prehistory was home to some fucking TERRIFYING creatures. For some reason, everything back then was enormous and scary. Extinction doesn’t always have to be a bad thing!

And Poppy, what you saw was an arthropod known as Pterygotus (it was actually featured in Walking With Monsters). Not only was it as big (or maybe even bigger) than your average human, it had a stinger the size of a lightbulb. REALLY glad that bugger isn’t around anymore.

Also, Megalodon deserves to be mention again, because just hearing its name makes me want to never be submerged in water ever again.

GOD, I HATE THIS POST. HOW DO WE EVEN KNOW THAT SHIT ISN’T STILL AROUND? LURKING? EVOLVING? WE DON’T. WE DON’T KNOW SHIT ABOUT SHIT DOWN THERE. THE OCEAN IS A PRIMEVAL HELLSCAPE NIGHTMARE AND WE ALL JUST DIP OUR STUPID FRAGILE UNPROTECTED FETUS BODIES AROUND THE EDGES OF IT LIKE THAT’S NORMAL. FUCK THE OCEAN.

this is so relevant to my interests 

It wasn’t just the predators. North Carolina was once home to giant ground sloths…

THAT IS A GODDAMNED LEAF-EATING SLOTH.

We’ve got a skeleton of one of these fuckers at the museum downtown, and man, just being NEAR it is unsettling.

DON’T FORGET PREHISTORIC WHALES, SOME OF THOSE FUCKERS WERE TERRIFYING

AMBULOCETUS WAS AMPHIBIOUS AND PRETTY BADASS

BASILOSAURUS WAS THIS GIANT REPTILIAN CETACEAN THAT PROBABLY SWAM LIKE A DUMB EEL BECAUSE OF ITS TINY FLUKES BUT THIS FUCKER WAS 60 FEET LONG AND AT THE TOP OF THE MARINE FOOD CHAIN

AND THEN THERE’S MY FAVORITE, ZYGOPHYSETER, WHICH WAS THIS HUGE EARLY SPERM WHALE THAT ATE SHARKS AND OTHER WHALES

IT WAS NOTHING BUT TEETH

The reason why the animals in the prehistoric times were so big was because there was much more oxygen in the atmosphere if I recall correctly. Because there was so much oxygen and so few carbon gasses, life on earth was able to grow to terrifying lengths and heights, don’t forget how giant the bugs were.

I have never seen so much prime nope in a single post

Also important to note that megalodon is theorized to still be alive,possibly living in the darkest depths of the ocean. They haven’t found signs of its extinction

scientists: “we haven’t seen a megalodon in quite some time now, let’s just hope it’s exstinct”

This whole post is my JAM not gonna lie I am fascinated by massive prehistoric animals

Megalodon is NOT theorized to be alive by anyone reputable. You don’t find “signs of something’s extinction”, you just stop seeing it in the fossil record. Megalodon, like all sharks, left behind a lot of shed teeth during its life. We stopped finding those teeth in the fossil record. We have not found non-fossilized Megalodon teeth, like we would have if they still existed.

They couldn’t live at the bottom of the ocean because there’s not enough food. If they still existed, they would be out in the open ocean, eating whales. In fact, it’s theorized (this one by reputable people) that whales got large specifically BECAUSE Megalodon went extinct. While it was still around, whales were small and fast because they had to dodge it. If it still existed, we’d find things like blue whales with massive bites missing out of them. 

Megalodon is NOT still alive, and anyone telling you otherwise is probably trying to sell you a mockumentary. 

Bugs in particular used to be large because of the excess oxygen, yes. Bugs don’t have lungs or blood vessels, their blood more or less  just swooshes around inside them and past holes in their sides where it can absorb oxygen from the air, so they need a lot of oxygen to get that big. That beetle, however, is not a real prehistoric bug- that’s a modern-day beetle, just sculpted big for a museum exhibit. The dragonfly and arthropleura (centipede-thing) were real, though. 

As for the rest, we still have vertebrate animals in those sizes. Mostly whales. We just don’t have those particular vertebrate animals.