Metazoica

Not to take away from Metazoica, but this is something that has been annoying me for a while. Since the beginning of the 21st century (give or take a few months or years), we have known that all maniraptoran dinosaurs were covered in feathers, whether it be the fluffy down of Sinosauropteryx or the surprisingly bird-like plumage of the dromaeosaurs. So, everyone started to draw their dinos with feathers, feathered theriznosaurs, feathered tyrannosaurs (though there is a whole other pet peeve associated with this), feathered raptors, etc. Except one group. Ornithomimids. Despite the fact that every other member of their clade was fluffy, paleontologists insist on drawing their ornithomimids smooth-skinned and naked. I can understand because at first Pelicanimimus , the only member of the clade with skin impressions, was thought to be smooth skinned, but when dinosaurs like Shenzousaurus were discovered, it was now known that these dinosaurs too were fluffy. So why hasn't paleoart c...

Now that I am back, I can continue this. Also known as Lagomerycines, at first, this family was inspired by Dixon’s rabbucks. But myself and a friend have been working on these animals and we’ve made them our own now. Though we have kept the basic idea going that they are derived from modern hares. Most species have the longer ears of hares and superb hearing. The eyesight is also very good in these animals. But the sense of smell is no better than ours. The ears are highly mobile, and capable of swiveling in different directions. The legs are long, and the feet are soft, with small hooves, rather than the fully-hooved feet of the animals presented in Dixon’s book. The incisors are elongate and grow out of the roof of the mouth. The tail is rather longer than those of hares, and usually held high when running and carried low when at rest. They live in rather large herds, up to 30 individuals. In many places, at their time of the era, these animals take the place of antelopes. Unlike mo...

Has anyone seen this story yet, about the baby tuataras found at the Kaori Wildlife Sanctuary in New Zealand? I think this is fantastic news, it means that tuataras might, just might, rebound from their past losses and be around in our future for our children and grandchildren to see. And they should be around for our children because tuataras are, quite frankly, fascinating creatures. They evolve faster than any other creature at the molecular level. They can live for over a century, and still be sexually potent . Not to mention they are the last of the sphenodontians, an ancient group of reptiles that look the place of lizards through much of the Mesozoic. Tuataras have another features that makes them even stranger; a third, or parietal, eye in the center of their forehead. If one was to look at the head of a baby tuatara, there would be a third black eye centered in between the other two in the middle of their head. Really. And this eye isn't just a freak mutation or a non-fun...

(An interpretation of the site by UTA artist Clinton Crowley) As long as we are talking about new/unknown and fascinating dinosaur sites in the U.S., I might as well bring up the new Arlington Archosaur Site in Arlington, Texas. This site has garnered a bit of attention in the last few days, and is rather interesting to quite a few people, myself included. One reason the Arlington Archosaur Site has been given so much attention is because it is in Arlington, Texas. Arlinton is smack dab in the middle of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, a huge urban area. Most of the time, cities tend to be built on sites that do not contain dinosaur fossils, but Dallas and Fort Worth are exceptions. Like twin magnets, these cities seem to just draw dinosaur fossils to them, resulting in many fantastic dinosaur finds. There have even been dinosaurs found in the DFW airport! The Arlington Archosaur Site itself is situated in the Woodbine Formation, a strata of rocks dating back to aproximately the Early ...

I wanted to post this, as so many are fascinated by my site. Sure, I know I have probably the first spec evo project on the internet. It's been my dream to make a site devoted to my creatures of the future world, which I had been working on since the early 90s. I started off with a bunch of lemur families and projected outward to include more. Including predators and prey and those in between. I'm still creating. A lot with the help of my newest buddy, Metalraptor. He was the first (and ONLY) one to convince me that I need to add felines (cats) to my Metazoic World. I sure as Hell was not going to listen to JohnFaa and the other losers on the SE forum cussing me out! NOOOO Way!! Thus came the birth of the 2 latest post-feline families, Barofelidae and Ailurocyonidae. Barofelids are basically very large felines (larger than they are today) with stubby tails, manes and basically built like a tank. Ailurocyonids evolved off the Barofelids, and are knuckle-walkers. They walk the Ea...

With all the interesting dinosaurs coming out of China, the western U.S., South America, the Sahara, and other such areas lately, some other interesting finds have been rather overlooked. However, I find this one site quite fascinating, for a variety of reasons. The site is the Chronister site in Bollinger County, Missouri. Since 1999, the site has produced many fossils of animals from the Late Cretaceous, including fish, turtles, and the dinosaur Hypsibema missouriensis . What exactly is Hypsibema missouriensis ? Well, in short it is a hadrosaur trying very hard to be a sauropod. I have read in some texts (though I cannot, for the life of me, remember what they were) that Hypsibema was one of the largest hadrosaurs, while probably not as big as Shantungosaurus , certainly big enough to rival many of the other largest hadrosaurs of all time. In fact, it was so large that on its discovery it was mistaken to be a small sauropod. It was probably one of the largest dinosaurs of Eastern Nor...

(The cover of said book) I am sick in bed today, and so I thought I would dust off a few of my speculative zoology tomes and read them. One of the books I picked out was Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons . Yes, despite what one might think, speculative biology isn't just about aliens, alternate timelines, and future beasts. Essentially, speculative biology encompasses a wide variety of topics, but all share one common thread; they attempt to document and explain the natural history of fantastic creatures through science (for the sake of this discussion, I lump in heavily defined magic in with science). However, this was not the case with Dragonology . It is so irritating how much it screwed up. I only had to turn to the first page to see them screw it up. On the very first page, the book attempts to describe the evolution of dragons. Unfortunately, it does it incredibly poorly. For example, they claim that a "four-legged dragon with wings" can evolve through Darwi...