Metazoica

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...

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...