Metazoica back-up

Alan Root had a remarkable encounter with what was perhaps the World's rarest carnivore. His films are always quite good, but here, he struck diamonds!! He filmed a highly elusive aquatic genet, or Osbornictis piscivora . It is the rarest carnivore on Earth. In the 80s, it was believed there were no more than 18 individuals in the wild, and no captive animals remain. Nobody knows how many are in the wild now, which is why it is so amazing he was able to capture this footage of a genet on the hunt. Aquatic genets are rather unique. They hate the water, but that is where they get all their prey from. If they can survive longer, it wouldn't be too big of a leap for these animals to develop fully-aquatic lifestyles. Very few feliformes actually like the water. In fact the only feliformes that are to any degree aquatic are in the mongoose and civet family (Viverridae). All others of their kind are land-based. This is the animal that gave me the idea of a fully-aquatic viverrid of t...

Dixon's book After Man actually portends that rats will become predatory giants. I agree with it. Rats are very successful rodents. There is no doubt in my mind that a rat could become a predatory animal. I don't agree with everything about the creatures Dixon created. He still drew rats with long, naked tails, like they have today. I highly doubt they will still have the naked tails. That's how all mammals started out, and today, the only mammals that have that feature are the smallest of their kind. So I don't think rats will always have the naked tails. I place these rats in my checklist under the family Caromuridae. I myself have not yet worked on this family, but there is a place for it on my Metazoic site once I decide to work on it. Anyway, Dixon's idea is that these rats will evolve modified incisors to resemble the canines of modern predators. It could very well happen. One thing that has people today stumped is that rodents have incisors that continue to ...

These are close relatives of the therapeds. They very closely resemble antelope of today only with the long, thick tails of the therapeds. Like modern antelope, they have long, slender legs for running. Fully-hooved feet for streamlining. The body is long and flexible. The neck is long and slender. The ears are large and diamond-shaped and can swivel independantly in any direction. The eyes are large with long eyelashes as protection against the sun, sand and flying dirt. The eyes themselves are placed on each side of the head, and gives the animal a wide field of vision to spot any predators coming from any direction. The eyesight is very good, and so is the hearing. The sense of smell is better than it is in the therapeds, but is not useful in detecting predators, as all predatory mammals of the Metazoic are odorless. The sense of smell in these antelope are more useful for sniffing out food items. Most of these antelope are small animals that live most of their lives in the brush, t...

Probably the largest single-celled creature the World has ever known actually upturns everything we thought about early evolution. This is a big dude!! And it was around during the Precambrian period. Probably the largest creature around at that time. According to this article from Discovery News, it left trails that until now, stumped palaeontologists as to what made tracks in the mud some 600 million years ago. It basically bridged an evolutionary gap. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/11/20/gromia-cambrian.html Single-Celled Giant Upends Early Evolution Michael Reilly, Discovery News Nov. 20, 2008 -- Slowly rolling across the ocean floor, a humble single-celled creature is poised to revolutionize our understanding of how complex life evolved on Earth. A distant relative of microscopic amoebas, the grape-sized Gromia sphaerica was discovered once before, lying motionless at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. But when Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and a group of re...

This is a group that I have extensively worked on. The family Therapedidae is a group of mammals, some are biped and some are quadruped, and occupy a wide number of niches during the Metazoic. Their base ancestor is today's elephant shrews, but these animals spread fast! Their range does not stop in Africa. When Africa collides with Europe it gives these animals an advantage in spreading. Though they are very good swimmers as well, and can cross some parts of the future Mediterranean sea. So it would not be too hard for these animals to reach Europe and Asia. They reach their greatest diversification when North America collides with Asia and the Therapeds are able to reach the Americas. The therapeds range in size from the dainty Dendromillops to Vehemens . Most are vegetarians. Although some species, like Tachypus are known to be somewhat omnivorous. The widest-spread genus is that of Tachypus . This is also the Metazoic's fastest runner. They can out-run a cheetah! Some spe...

Usually alternate speculative biology isn't my thing. But after typing up last night's article, I thought about our aquatic lineage. I found myself doodling a bit last night and I came up with a creature as never before seen, but would have been what we'd look like today. There are some features I left out, and some I did to extremes. Most aquatic mammals are more intelligent, that could be what shaped our own intelligence. Probably how we got these big brains that science says we should never have evolved. It's true! However, I decided to keep the ape-like head features. I thought through a process of alternate evolution based on the presence of the semi-aquatic species Oreopithecus in our background. What if we had continued down that evolutionary road? Or if Oreopithecus had survived all this time, and certain individuals had continued down that road, leaving us, Homo sapiens , to inhabit the land. It could have happened. It happened in the evolution of whales. Not...

Perhaps the most successful animal ever to live is humans. Why are we successful? Believe it or not, we should not even be here. If we hadn't learned to build big civilizations and control fire, we would have become extinct long ago. It is actually our brain-power that made us so successful. Now me personally, I only have the smarts of a caveman! LOL! But people in general are the smartest of all living things. Other than our brain power, we are not equipped to survive at all in this world. If humans still had to live like their earliest ancestors, we would not survive at all. We, unlike all other wild animals, do not have teeth or claws as defenses or weapons, we cannot run very fast, we are not as strong as other animals our size, our jaws are weak so we cannot kill or eat our food without specially-made weapons. And we are relatively delicate creatures, much more so than any other mammal our size, our bones are easily broken and our flesh is very easily torn and easy for a preda...

It's true, minerals evolved along with all life forms. They even went through cycles where they became extinct. I found this very interesting article today on my homepage. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/11/13/minerals-evolution.html Life and Minerals Evolve Together Michael Reilly, Discovery News Nov. 13, 2008 -- Etched in the shockwaves of exploding stars , in the gas and dust of fledgling stellar nebulae -- and in Earth's ample oceans, winds and fiery volcanoes -- the multi-billion-year history of minerals appears ageless to us mere mortals. But an ambitious new study describes how these seemingly static forms have evolved through the ages, just like biological life. From the 12 "primordial" minerals forged inside supernovae to the 4,300 or so mineral species known today, minerals have diversified, grown in complexity, and even been driven into extinction. "The most basic definition of evolution is change over time," said Robert Hazen of the Carnegie...

Personally, I love whales. They are one of my most favorite mammal families. So, I thought I would discuss the evolution of these very fascinating creatures. Whales once roamed the land, in fact their earliest relatives are very closely related to deer and pigs. I guess that explains why such animals as hippos closely resemble whales. The first whale was a raccoon-sized creature recently discovered in India, that somewhat resembled a cross between a dog and a deer, called Indohyus . It was also one of the earliest relatives of even-toed ungulates. As you can see, it had hooves, like deer. But the rest of it's anatomy is much like that of a small dog. That was the earliest whale. Though we do not necessarily think of this when we hear the word whale. The skeletal structure was actually heavier than the structure of most mammals it's size, which allowed these animals to lead a somewhat semi-aquatic lifestyle. The heavy bones allowed these animals to remain submerged without float...

I always knew this, but it makes for such fascinating reading! http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/11/11/hair-claw-protein.html The origins of hair date back 310-330 million years ago to the last common ancestor of mammals, birds and lizards , according to a new study that discovered genes associated with hair production in living green anole lizards and chickens. While lizards and chickens are not hairy, their claws contain proteins nearly identical to those found in the human hair shaft, fingernails and toenails, on the surface of the tongue and within the thymus gland. Since the last common ancestor of mammals, birds and lizards lived before the first true dinosaurs emerged, both dinosaurs and humans appear to have inherited the genes responsible for human hair and animal claws. In short, the structure of our hair and nails may add to the evidence that we are distantly related to dinosaurs and many other creatures, both extinct and living. "Our hypothesis is that the common an...

The family Heitostiidae consists of one genus and species. It is a huge rodent that lives in the water, taking the place of modern hippos, only found in the Amazon River system. They are rather long in body, short legs, large head, and a mouth that can open a full 90 degrees. The ears are small and round, and the eyes are medium-sized. The males also have a fleshy horn structure on the end of the nose. The males use this horn for sparring. The females completely lack this structure. Like modern hippos, these large rodents stay submerged in the water, only coming on shore occasionally to feed on plants and flowers. The nostrils are placed on top of the muzzle, as are the eyes and ears. This way, these animals can hide under the water with nothing more than their eyes, ears and nostrils above the surface. They are rather large rodents, about 10 feet long, and have no tail. The feet are fully webbed. These animals are strict vegetarians, feeding on any green vegetation they can find under...

If I could bring any animal(s) back from extinction, which one(s) would I bring? Well, I'd love to have all the Hawaiian Honeycreepers come back. I'd love to see them. They evolved from finches millions of years ago that somehow wandered to the Hawaiian Islands. Even today, many of them are beautiful!! Some look a little like hummingbirds or sunbirds, most look like finches. Many species of honeycreepers went extinct over the past 2000 years, since the Polynesians introduced the polynesian rat. Rats often eat bird eggs for protein, and this species found it easy to prey on the eggs and nestlings of these birds. But that isn't all, mongooses, cats, sheep, goats, and several other introduced species have been actively wiping the native birds of Hawaii out. The most recent extinction within this family came in 1998, that year, at least 3 species were pronounced or assumed extinct. I think I still have a picture of one of them somewhere, the O-u ( Psittirostra psittacea ), it w...

This is a group of animals I call the Choerocaballids, or "Pig-horses". It is in fact no relation to either pigs or horses, but descendants of elephant shrews. Elephant shrews start off in Africa, as we know today. This family is actually the earliest step to elephant shrews evolving into the therapeds. Most are semi-carnivorous and quadrupeds. The earliest species is Ropalacodas , which resembles a pig with dog-like feet and a long thick tail tipped with a blunt club. The tail is the main method of defense against the harsh African predators of the Metazoic. They use this tail to swat at predators. When that does not work, Ropalacodas has sharp tusks to gore predators with, and a bad attitude, and it usually scares the attackers off. The branch-off family of Therapeds began in Asia actually, but the Choerocaballids make it to the New World before that happens once Africa collides with Europe and Asia collides with North America. It is Terazodus that migrates to Europe and ...