Metazoica

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...