Metazoica back-up

Sorry I haven't been posting much. Something's in the wind....

Well, this was a cool article I found, it talks about a fossil found that may be one of the earliest direct links to the evolution of monkeys. Well, everyone by now should know how fascinated I am by primates, so this article really hits home with me. It caught my attention right away, anyway. My apologies to my readers for not being on here much, I'm planning something with my supervisor that should be very big in getting the word out for UMG Productions! So, I've had a busy week planning and plotting with her. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/05/19/skeleton-primates.html Skeleton Sheds Light on Primate Evolution Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press May 19, 2009 -- The nearly complete skeleton of a small 47 million-year-old creature found in Germany was displayed Tuesday by scientists who said it would help illuminate the early evolution of monkeys, apes and humans . About the size of a small cat, the animal has four legs and a long tail. It's not a direct ancestor of monk...

The Ungulascelididae is the first family to evolve off the elephant shrews in the Metazoic. They basically resemble giant versions of these animals, and they are every bit as flexible. They are basically quadrupedal animals, though they occasionally rear up on their hind legs to reach for any food items that are out of reach to quadrupeds. The nose is long and flexible, the ears are large and pointed. The eyes are large, some species even have tusks. They are slenderly built animals, the legs are long and the feet are soft, like those of camels, with blunt hooves. They are very agile animals, and leap and bound much like we see in modern deer and antelope. The tail is long and thick, and used to balance the animals as they rear up on their hind legs. There are 4 toes on each foot, and in the genus Scopulus , one of the toes on each forefoot is flexible, giving them an added advantage in grasping branches they want to feed on. These animals travel together in rather large herds, usually...

Otherwise known as attack of your great, great, great, great, great grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Anyway, its here...Will Baird and Zach Miller (and also Scott Elyard, apparently) have posted some stuff on their project, appropriately titled the XenoPermian. Zach has his picture of the "Triassic" seaside coast both on Will's blog and on Art Evolved, and Will has posted an overview of the first chunk of the project on his blog, The Dragon's Tales. The reason I put the "Triassic" of this timeline in quotes is, quite simply, because there isn't one in this time period. In the XenoPermian, the volcanic eruptions that caused the P-T extinction never happened, or were at least spread out over many millions of years. As a result of this, the Permian bleeds smoothly into the Triassic. Actually, the Triassic being consumed by the Permian would be a better word, since a lot of the fauna that characterize the Permian never goes extinct (gorgonopsids, for one) an...

The Late Triassic of the American Southwest was home to a bewildering array of fascinating creatures, completely unlike anything we know of today. Patrolling the forests and riverbanks of the Triassic were fierce rauisuchians, and swift herrerasaurids and coelophysoids. Lounging in the lazy waters were huge crocodile-like phytosaurs and the archaic metoposaurs. Browsing from the thickets of vegetation were armored aetosaurs, the strange tusked dicynodonts, silesaurids, prosauropods, and even a couple of ornithischians. At the same time, all of this was being played out on a smaller scale on the forest floor and canopy, with dog-like crocodilians running around after proconlophids and trilophosaurs. However, the strange creatures of this alien world paled in comparison to two bizarre oddities, Shuvosaurus and Protavis . So yeah, once again I find myself blogging about the archosaurs of Texas. Shuvosaurus was first described by Dr. Sankhar Chatterjee in 1993. When first discovered, Chat...

Ah great, just what we need. I was doing some digging on Protohadros and the Arlington Archosaur Site recently, and it turns out there is some bad news. The site itself is only going to be opened for five more months. Unfortunately, after that, the site will be bulldozed to make way for a housing complex. I have heard some rumors that the deadline will be extended, but I have not heard anything finalized yet. This is a sad turn of events, seeing as this one of the few sites of this time period in the U.S., and probably the only site that has post cranial material of Protohadros (if the creature found here is indeed Protohadros at all!).

Until recently, most paleontology books would have one believe that sauropods all across the Northern Hemisphere (especially North America) went extinct in the Late Jurassic. The small-brained herbivores found themselves unable to adapt to a changing world and thus gave way to the (moderately) smarter ornithopods and ankylosaurs of the Cretaceous. In truth, sauropods are a much tougher breed than people give them credit for. While they did take a hit in diversity in the Cretaceous, the group as a whole survived and kept going on, surviving and adapting to the changing conditions of the Cretaceous. In fact, over the Cretaceous some titanosaurs were becoming more efficient and gracile, a topic which I may blog about someday. Neither did sauropods just leave North America in the hands of the iguanodonts and nodosaurs. While the diplodocids did go extinct in North America after the Late Jurassic, the continent was still overrun by titanosaurs and their kin, the little buggers. There was Sa...