#Pleistocene Predator

[familythings]

Unearthing the Past: The 44,000-Year-Old Frozen Wolf and Its Secrets

Imagine stumbling upon a creature that roamed the earth 44,000 years ago, perfectly preserved as if it had just taken a nap in the snow. That’s exactly what happened in Yakutia, eastern Russia, when residents found a remarkably intact wolf frozen in thick permafrost. This isn’t just any wolf—it’s a time capsule from the Pleistocene era, and scientists are buzzing with excitement over what they…

[artemholubievgolubev]

Do you want to surprise others with the modern interior of your home?

You will definitely surprise them, because these are reconstructions of animals that disappeared tens of thousands of years ago.

Also, you will definitely surprise your colleagues in the office with one of these pictures.

This exclusive and unrepeatable painting can be purchased here:

[penig]

I'm hardly an expert, and have not kept up with the field, but as I understand it, the huge incisors aren't used to stab, but to slash. You pounce a baby mammoth from cover, sever an artery, bounce back into cover while the adult mammoths try to stomp you, wait for the baby to bleed out and the adult mammoths to stop mourning, then go drag the baby mammoth back to your lair to eat at leisure.

(I am thinking of scimitar cats, not smilodons; a scimitar cat lair has been excavated in Texas, at a site called the Friesenhahn Cave, that was full of baby mammoth teeth, but I don't think we have much to show what smilodons ate. But the overall anatomy is similar.)

Stabbing is not a very efficient way to kill and is dangerous to the tooth. Animals that kill by biting generally rend, or grip and shake to sever the spine, which with a sabretooth construction are great ways to break a tooth. Another big cat strategy is to clamp onto the muzzle and suffocate the prey, with is right out with probiscidians. But there's a number of places to slash a body and release a critical amount of blood in a way the prey can't do a thing about, and even if a bleeding animal escapes it leaves an easily followed trail.

You may notice that, in addition to the saber teeth, this family of "cat" has a full set of upper and lower incisors, positioned further forward than the canines. These are the gripping, ripping teeth, which can tear off bite-sized chunks of baby mammoth without endangering the big teeth too much. The tongue then conveys the meat back to the molars that chew it up small enough to go down the gullet and digest properly. Any facial reconstruction of a saber-tooth needs to take these teeth into account, as well as the attention-grabbing canines.

We are handicapped in understanding how saber-toothed predators used their teeth, as the only giant-canined species we have today (elephants and walruses) use them for sexual display and digging rather than killing, but we know it has to be an effective strategy in certain circumstances, as the adaptation has arisen more than once. A quick net search reveals a fairly recent article describing eight types, with different subtypes, which probably indicate different prey strategies.

That the most recent examples of saber-toothed predators died out with the megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene may indicate a specialization in particularly large prey such as mammoths, ground sloths, giant beavers, etc., with the canines adapted to penetrating the thick pelts and hides (and occasional bony armor) of such big herbivores; and this speculation is supported by the presence of all those juvenile mammoth teeth in Friesenhahn Cave.

My period of intensest focus on Pleistocene megafauna was 20 years ago when researching 11,000 Years Lost, so there may have been some breakthrough that I missed, and if so I hope to be enlightened.

[amnhnyc]

Smile like Smilodon, because it’s Fossil Friday! This saber-tooth cat roamed the Americas during the Pleistocene, and went extinct some 10,000 years ago. Scientists estimate that its signature teeth, which could reach lengths of 7 in (18 cm), grew at the rapid speed of .24 in (6 mm) per month—double the growth rate of an African lion’s teeth. To unsheathe these knife-like canines, Smilodon could open its jaws twice as wide as today’s big cats.

You can spot this fearsome predator in the Museum’s Hall of Primitive Mammals. We're open daily from 10 am–5:30 pm! Plan your visit.

Photo: D. Finnin / © AMNH

[headspace-hotel]

not to be all "overkill hypothesis is sketchy as hell and fuel for eco-fascist 'humans are the real virus' wank" AGAIN

but in the art lecture last week on prehistoric American artifacts the prof was flat-out like "yeah current academic consensus is that humans came to the Americas between 30,000 and 33,000 years ago" and showed a map with all the archaeological sites that didn't even include the recent 25k year old site in Brazil

And???? the whole "humans destroyed the megafauna in the americas because we're SUPER-PREDATORS that KILL EVERYTHING" idea hinges on a "Clovis first" timeline which at this point is almost totally dead in the water.

30-33,000 years of human presence in the Americas means humans coexisted with the Pleistocene megafauna for almost twice as long as the megafauna have been extinct

[blueiscoool]

A Mummified 44,000-Year-Old Wolf Found in Siberian Permafrost

Scientists perform necropsy on an ancient wolf pulled from Russian permafrost that may still have prey in its stomach.

In a first-of-its-kind discovery, a complete mummified wolf was pulled from the permafrost in Siberia, after being locked away for more than 44,000 years. Scientists have now completed a necropsy (an animal autopsy) on the ancient predator, which was discovered by a river in the Republic of Sakha — also known as Yakutia — in 2021.

This is the first complete adult wolf dating to the late Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) ever discovered, according to a translated statement from the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, where the necropsy was performed. The discovery, scientists say, will help us better understand life in the region during the last ice age.

Photos from the necropsy show the wolf's mummified body in exquisite detail. Animals are preserved in permafrost through a type of mummification involving cold and dry conditions. Soft tissues are dehydrated, allowing the body to be preserved in a frozen time capsule.

Researchers took samples of the wolf's internal organs and gastrointestinal tract to detect ancient viruses and microbiota, and to understand its diet when it died.

"His stomach has been preserved in an isolated form, there are no contaminants, so the task is not trivial," Albert Protopopov, head of the department for the study of mammoth fauna of the Academy of Sciences of Yakutia, said in the statement. "We hope to obtain a snapshot of the biota of the ancient Pleistocene."

He added the wolf, which tooth analysis revealed was male, would've been an "active and large predator," so they will be able to find out what it was eating, along with the diet of its victims, which "also ended up in his stomach."

Another key aspect of the necropsy is looking at the ancient viruses the wolf may have harbored. "We see that in the finds of fossil animals, living bacteria can survive for thousands of years, which are a kind of witnesses of those ancient times," Artemy Goncharov, who studies ancient viruses at the North-Western State Medical University in Russia, and is part of the team analyzing the wolf, said in the statement.

He said the research project will aid their understanding of ancient microbial communities and the role of harmful bacteria during this period. "It is possible that microorganisms will be discovered that can be used in medicine and biotechnology as promising producers of biologically active substances," he added.

The wolf necropsy is part of an ongoing project to study the wildlife that lived in the region during the Pleistocene. Other species examined include ancient hares, horses and a bear from the Holocene. The team plans to study the wolf's genome to understand how it relates to other ancient wolves from the region, and how it compares to its living relatives. The team now plans to start studying another ancient wolf discovered in the Nizhnekolymsk region of northeast Siberia in 2023.

By Hannah Osborne.

[alex-fictus]

Pleistocene Predators!

Arctodus - American Cheetah - Teratornis

Dire Wolf - Megalania - American Lion

Homotherium - Thylacoleo - Smilodon

Stickers || Phone Wallpapers Masterlist

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Wild vs. Feral, Domesticated vs. Tame, Native vs. Invasive, and Why Words Matter

Originally posted on my website at https://rebeccalexa.com/wild-vs-feral/

Recently a post crossed my dash on Facebook featuring a small group of llamas in the forests of the Olympic Peninsula. The caption described them as “wild” llamas (Lama glama). That may seem pretty innocuous to the average person, but to a naturalist it’s a gross mischaracterization. For one thing, llamas are completely domestic animals, no more wild than a cow or dog; they are descended from the guanaco (Lama guanacoe), which is a truly wild camelid. So this means that the llamas on the peninsula are feral, not wild. But why does the distinction of wild vs. feral matter so much?

The terms we use to describe various species help us to understand their origin and, perhaps more importantly, their current ecological status. These concepts aren’t just relevant to scientists, however. Everyday people are constantly making decisions that can affect the ecosystems around them, and often these decisions are made without having a full understanding of their impact.

For example, look at how many people release unwanted pets into the wild, whether domesticated rabbits, goldfish, snakes, or other, more exotic animals. Some of these unfortunate animals end up dying pretty awful deaths due to starvation, exposure, or predation. But others manage to survive and reproduce, becoming the latest population of non-native–and potentially invasive–species in their ecosystem. This wouldn’t happen if more people understood the impact of non-native species, and how releasing captive animals puts native species at risk.

But it all starts with knowing that there’s a difference, and understanding the terms that explain why that difference exists. So let’s explore some vocabulary that can be used to describe species, whether animal, plant, or otherwise.

Let’s start with domestication, because there often seems to be confusion as to what makes a species domesticated. Domestication is a process that takes many years, often measured in centuries. Humans breed chosen animals for particular traits over a number of generations. As time passes, each subsequent generation becomes more different from the wild species it originated from, and eventually a new, fully domesticated species emerges from this process of artificial selection by humans.

Dogs (Canis familiaris or Canis lupus familiaris) are the first animal humans domesticated in a process that started about 30,000 years ago. They evolved from the now-extinct Pleistocene wolf, a particular lineage of the gray wolf (Canis lupus), and it’s likely that the partnership began as some wolves showed less fear of humans while scavenging from our kills. By 14,000 years ago dogs were a distinct species (or subspecies) from wolves.

Dogs display very different characteristics from wolves. Their faces tend to be shorter with a more pronounced stop (the bump in the forehead where the muzzle meets the rest of the skull.) Floppy ears and curled tails are common, as are patchy-colored coats. Dogs tend to have weaker muscles than wolves of a similar size, shorter legs and smaller feet, smaller teeth, and a smaller size overall. This is a phenomenon known as neoteny, in which domesticated animals have a tendency to retain more juvenile physical traits of their parent wild species, and you can see it in domesticated animals across the board.

But it’s not just physical appearances that matter. Behaviorally dogs are generally more friendly toward humans; in fact, they’ve even developed some human-friendly body language that wolves don’t have, like “puppy dog eyes.” They can be easily trained and, unless poorly socialized, dogs generally enjoy the company of humans.

In many ways, physically and behaviorally, a dog is a wolf that never grew out of its puppy stage. While a young wolf pup may be able to live in someone’s house for a short time, as they grow older they become more destructive and less tolerant of human company. Your dog may love watching out the window during a car ride, but a wolf is going to be much more stressed out by the experience. Even wolf-dog hybrids have to be treated differently than your average domesticated dog because the wolf content has a significant effect on behavior.

This is just one example of how domestication isn’t just a matter of a few generations of selective breeding. You can also compare domesticated horses (Equus ferus caballus) with Przewalski’s horses (Equus ferus przewalskii or Equus przewalskii) or zebras (subgenus Hippotigris), domesticated cows (Bos taurus) with stories of fierce wild aurochs (Bos primigenius), and so forth. In every case the wild and domesticated counterparts are very different in both appearance and behavior.

Now, what about the term “tame”? Many wild animal species have been tamed over the years, either wild-caught individuals or those born in captivity. These tame animals may be more docile in comparison to their fully wild counterparts, but this generally takes a lot of handling and socialization from a young age. Moreover, tame animals retain a lot more wild behaviors than domesticated ones.

Take those supposed “domesticated” foxes that people want to have as pets. Most of the foxes available as pets have no relation to those in the famous Russian fox domestication experiment, but are from modern fur farm lines. And in fact the study foxes came from Russian fur farms, so the researchers were beginning with pre-tamed animals rather than truly wild ones. While some tame foxes may be more amenable to human handling than wild foxes, they are by no means domesticated. They are more prone to wild behaviors like urinating everywhere to mark territory, chewing on anything they can get their jaws on, nipping, and making a LOT of noise. Moreover, whereas dogs adapted to eating an omnivorous diet after millennia of eating alongside us, foxes need a more specialized diet than what you can get at a pet store.

Unfortunately there are unscrupulous people within the exotic pet trade who will advertise their tame (at best) stock as “domesticated.” This often leads consumers to thinking that they’re getting a much more tractable animal that will be as easy to care for as a cat or dog, and sets up everyone involved for disaster (except, of course, the seller with a fatter wallet.)

Next, let's compare wild vs. feral. A wild species is one that has never been domesticated, nor have its ancestors. Generally it will be a native species to its ecosystem, though non-native species can also be introduced to an ecosystem without ever having been domesticated. A feral animal, on the other hand, is a member of a domesticated species that has escaped or been released back into the wild and has survived to reproduce new generations that have never been handled by humans.

I’ve often heard people refer to the feral swine (Sus domesticus) that have ravaged ecosystems worldwide as “wild pigs”. They may behave in a wild manner, and they certainly look rougher and hairier than your average well-fed domesticated pig on a farm. It’s not uncommon for feral animals to regain some traits of their wild ancestors. However, that does not make them truly wild.

If you manage to wrest away a litter of newborn piglets from a feral sow and bottle-feed them, they are likely to be able to be socialized and kept in captivity, though they may still physically resemble feral pigs. They haven’t lost the deeply-ingrained genes that carry domesticated traits. However, if you try to raise a newborn Eurasian wild boar (Sus scrofa) or red river hog (Potamochoerus porcus), it will lack the domesticated traits of its farm cousins and show more wild traits as it ages, making it a rather unsuitable pet or farm animal. We also see this return to domestic traits in mustangs and other feral horses captured at a young age. While a mustang born in the wild may be tougher to work with at first than a foal born in captivity and handled from birth, the mustang will be much more calm and easier to train than, say, a zebra.

The problem with referring to feral animals as “wild” is that this suggests they are a natural part of the ecosystem they are in. Because a truly domesticated species (or subspecies) is not the same as the parent species, it has no place to which it is native as a wild animal.

A native species is one that has evolved in a given ecosystem for thousands or even millions of years. In the process it has developed numerous intricate interrelationships with many other species in that ecosystem, creating a careful system of checks and balances. A non-native species is any species that has been taken out of the ecosystem in which it evolved and placed in a different ecosystem where it is not normally found.

For example, here in North America the mourning dove (Zenaida macroura) is a wild native species. While it may resemble domesticated pigeons, it has never been domesticated even when kept in captivity. The Eurasian collared dove (Streptopelia decaocto), on the other hand, was introduced to the Americas after a few dozen individuals were released in the Bahamas in 1974. The feral pigeon (Columba livia domestica) is a domesticated species derived from the rock dove (Columba livia), which is native to Europe, west Asia, and northern Africa. Both the collared dove and pigeon are examples of non-native species. Most non-native species do not offer any benefits to the ecosystems they are introduced to because they do not have established relationships with native species. When they compete with native species for resources, they weaken the ecosystem overall.

Non-native species can be further categorized as naturalized or invasive, or even both. A naturalized species is a non-native one that has managed to establish reproducing populations, rather than going extinct without becoming established. Unfortunately, some people take this to mean that the species has become fully integrated into the new ecosystem. However, this is a process that again takes thousands to millions of years as other species adapt to the newcomer, which itself often also changes as it adapts to its new environment.

Ring-necked pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) are an example of a naturalized species in North America. Native to Asia and parts of Europe, they were introduced here as a game bird 250 years ago. While captive pheasants are regularly released into the wild to offer more hunting opportunities to humans, this species has likely been naturalized from its first introduction.

Again, “naturalized” doesn’t mean “natural”. Pheasants compete with native birds like northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) and prairie chickens (Tympanuchus spp.) Not only do they compete for food, nesting sites, and other resources, but they also spread diseases to native birds. Pheasants even engage in brood parasitism, laying their eggs in native birds’ nests and sometimes causing the native birds to abandon the nest and their own young entirely.

This means that the pheasants are also invasive as well as naturalized. Invasive species are non-natives that aggressively compete with, and sometimes displace or extirpate, native species. There are several hundred species that have become seriously invasive here, including both vertebrate and invertebrate animals, and numerous plants. But even the rest of the over 6000 non-native species that have become naturalized here still put pressure on native species, and have the potential to become invasive if their impact increases to a more damaging point.

Hopefully this gives you a clearer understanding of what these terms mean and why it’s important to know the difference. By knowing a little more about how your local ecosystem works and how different species may be contributing to or detracting from its overall health, you have more power to be able to make decisions that can preserve native species and help ecosystems be more resilient. Given that the removal of invasive species is one of the most important ways we can help ecosystems thrive in spite of climate change, it’s more important than ever that we increase nature literacy among the general populace. Consider this article just one small way to move that effort along.

Did you enjoy this post? Consider taking one of my online foraging and natural history classes or hiring me for a guided nature tour, checking out my other articles, or picking up a paperback or ebook I’ve written! You can even buy me a coffee here!

[chimaerakitten]

So the Temeraire series doesn’t do the Pern-derived magic/telepathic bond thing, and it’s nice to have some variety on that count since the telepathy thing is pretty widespread. But there’s this passage in crucible of gold that’s like—

Wait, my thriftbooks order arrived, let me go grab the quote

Or, Temeraire thought, he might as easily have gone alone--more easily, in fact; he had to carry Forthing cupped in his talons, and it was not at all convenient to always be looking to make sure he had not dropped out; Temeraire was not aware of him in quite the same way as of Laurence.

(Emphasis mine)

And this combined with the number of times it’s mentioned that (Russians aside) aviators just don’t seem to be capable of fearing their own dragons (and not just aviators who raised the dragons from the egg—it’s the same with inherited dragons) indicates to me that there’s something really interesting psychologically/biologically going on “under the hood,” there, so to speak.

And maybe this is just me and all those anthropology classes I took in college but that actually makes a lot of sense?

The historical record in the series dates the intentional breeding of dragons to a couple thousand years in the past, in china, but there’s a lot of evidence that there’s been a looser symbiotic relationship between humans and dragons a lot longer than that. Namely the domesticated elephants and the dragons in the Americas being the same species and of the same attitudes towards humans as dragons in Eurasia. So that’s likely at least 20 thousand years of symbiosis/mutual domestication, (if we assume they migrated together, which I do because it’s the simplest explanation) and it could well be much longer than that. That’s a long ass time. Like. The spread of IRL lactase persistence took less time than this.

And much like the benefits of being able to drink milk as an adult, the benefits of mutualism with an intelligent dinosaur-sized flying predator would absolutely have selective pressure on human populations. That’s just a given. I would talk about early hominins being third-tier scavengers here and Pleistocene megafauna and the canonical prevention of malaria via dragon proximity as compared to sickle cell anemia, but nobody wants me to regurgitate my entire biological anthropology 215 class in a tumblr post. Just trust me on this one.

Basically, the entire human species in the Temeraire universe will have been under a lot of positive selective pressure to be good symbiosis buddies to the dragons, so it’s no wonder aviator attachment is so intense.

This is likewise true for the dragons. A lot can be put down to intentional breeding in the last couple thousand years, but the foundation of dragons being prosocial with humans would have to be laid before then. Humans have domesticated predators IRL, but dragons are like 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than wolves and it took a long time to get dogs. The romans wouldn’t have had any luck if the dragons weren’t already partially on board. My theory is that this would have started way back. Australopithecus times, way back, because— [Anth 215 sneaks up behind me whilst the jaws theme plays] ANYWAY there’s a few benefits I can guess at for dragons having assistance hunting from small bands of persistence predators on occasion. I also think this would have intensified post-Pleistocene as the megafauna that would have been the dragons’ main prey went extinct and eventually agriculture would be the only way to replace— [Jaws theme intensifies] JUST TRUST ME BRO.

All this to say that humans being able to very quickly lose all instinctive fear of the dinosaur-sized flying predators they spend their time around and said predators developing not only attachment to humans but particular awareness of their humans specifically so as to prevent any possible accidental harm makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary biology perspective. It’s evidence of the same mutualistic relationship biologically shaping both species across the broader time spans that the series hints at.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Fossil Novembirb 4: The Megafowl

By @thewoodparable

One of the *most* iconic dinosaurs of the Cenozoic has got to be Gastornis, often referred to as "Diatryma", the giant fowl of the Early Paleogene. This animal first appeared between 60 and 56 million years ago in Europe, and spread to Asia and North America during the earliest Eocene. In the hot temperatures of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, it even lived up in the Arctic Circle, in the Tropical Polar Forests of the period. This single genus lasted a while, living until the middle Eocene, around 45 million years ago.

Gastornis is most famous due to its size, growing as tall as 2 meters height and up to 175 kilograms in mass. This made it one of the largest birds known, with a giant head and extremely tall beak. The skull itself was very powerfully built, with the beak compressed and lacking the raptorial hook of the later appearing terror birds.

By Ashley Patch

This is important to note, because for a long time - until 2014, really - we thought Gastornis was a predator. Turns out, however, it was an herbivore, probably feeding on a generalistic diet of plants similar to other macroherbivorous dinosaurs. In fact, not only did it not have a predatory beak, but footprints that are probably from Gastornis suggest it did not have talons or raptorial feet adapted for hunting, either.

Feathers of Gastornis are not definitively known, however, a feather impression from the Green River Formation may be that of Gastornis due to its large size, and resembled feathers found on flighted birds, rather than the shaggy feathers of ratites. This is notable, as it seems that Gastornis was closely related to the "Fowl", aka Galloanserae, rather than the modern flightless ratites of today. Whether it's closer to ducks or to chickens is a question, hence the generic moniker of "Megafowl".

By @quetzalpali-art

Why did Gastornis go extinct? The answer is unclear. It seemed to have disappeared from North America and Asia at the end of the early Eocene, possibly due to the dropping temperatures. It persisted in Europe for longer, which was isolated at the time and may have thus been more habitable for Gastornis. That said, there is some evidence that the Mihirungs of Australia - who we'll get to know later - are related to Gastornis, and they are found in the Oligocene to Pleistocene of Australia - so maybe Gastornis didn't go away quite as soon as we thought!

Unfortunately, the behavior of this dinosaur is not particularly well known - it's uncertain if it lived in groups, how it nested, or what its foraging method would have been, as there are no living animals similar to it. Hopefully, more fossils of Gastornis will paint a clearer picture of the Megafowl of the Paleogene.

Sources:

Mayr, 2022. Paleogene Fossil Birds, 2nd Edition. Springer Cham.

Mayr, 2017. Avian Evolution: The Fossil Record of Birds and its Paleobiological Significance (TOPA Topics in Paleobiology). Wiley Blackwell.

[proflambeovt]

Paleovember 2023, Megalania!

Once again we dip back into Australia in the Pleistocene, a time when there were even MORE wild and dangerous animals than exist today. Last year we highlighted the marsupial lion, and while it had deadly killing tools, it was far from the biggest, or the only major predator in Prehistoric Australia; just one of them was Megalania. Scientifically known as Varanus priscus, is estimated to measure over 20 feet long, making it the largest lizard to ever exist, larger than it's modern surviving relative, the Komodo dragon, which also evolved in Australia before being limited to islands in Indonesia.

[cypherdecypher]

Animal of the Day!

Titanis (Titanis walleri)

(Photo from Florida Museum of Natural History)

Conservation Status- Extinct

Habitat- North America

Estimated Size (Weight/Length)- 150 kg; 2 m tall

Diet- Mammals

Time Period- Pliocene; Early Pleistocene

Cool Facts- Titanis was one of the larger terror birds that stalked the plains of North America for thousands of years. Incapable of flight, Titanis most likely relied on its long legs to outrun its prey. While a skull has never been found, it is assumed that Titanis had the massive, ax-like beak other terror birds of the time period had, leading to interpretations of what its complete skeleton may look like. Due to having excellent movement in their neck, it is believed that Titanis would chase down its prey and batter the animal to death with its massive beak. Titanis most likely went extinct due to competition from new predators, especially bears and big cats.

Rating- 11/10 (Could outrun a horse.)

[dimetrodone]

Ice Age 1, 2, 3, as I don't care or interest with other rest

Answering for all 5 baby whether you like it or not

Ice Age 1: Extremely nostalgic, so I'm very biased towards it. I know its not really anything special but i still am very fond of it. I remember getting as little embarrassed watching it when i was little cause the ending made me so emotional and i didnt want to cry. When i got older it became a long car ride classic for a few years

The movie looks rough now, but choosing to make your main cast of characters a bunch of fuzzy hairy mammals in 2002 when rendering hair was hard as hell really set Blue Sky on their path to being phenominally good at fur and feathers in their later movies.

Fucked up they never brought the baby back in the sequels but maybe it was for the better…

Ice Age 2: Manny gets a wife

As soon as the first movie ended this series basically became a sitcom about three bachelors slowly getting married off. I hold some fondness for this one since I did watch it as a kid, but even then I felt it wasn’t as good as the first one.

I remember kid being bothered by the uh…vague Mesozoic critters frozen in ice being the main antagonist in the end. It made me think of all the Land before Time sequels where they would just throw in a random prehistoric predator each movie that doesn’t talk and was just there to be a scary thing in the end that gets pushed down a cliff.

I like how they added Crash and Eddie the opossums to the gang as hip new characters but you can tell the writers didn’t care about them at all as the movies went on.

Ice Age 3: Scrat gets a babe. Also dinosaurs

Better than the second one? The plots with the main characters was boring, fortunately the little weasel guy completely stole the show and made the movie pretty fun even as someone with no attachment to it. Manny’s baby daughter is named Peaches which is admittedly a really cute name for a baby mammoth.

Tween me had a vandetta against this movie cause it bothered me SO much that the movie series giving Pleistocene critters some love resorted to using dinosaurs by the third movie. Tsk tsk

Ice Age 4: Diego gets a wife. Also pirate

Feels like the writers had no idea what to do with Peaches as a child so we get a time skip and cut to her as a teenager with a boyfriend Manny doesn’t like. Meh

Ice Age 5: Sid gets a wife. Also space ship

You can really tell they were really running out of steam at this point. I like that they didn’t know what to do with Peaches now that Manny accepts her boyfriend so they uh…gave her a different boyfriend/mammoth finance Manny needs to get along with. I remember this one the least despite having watched it the most recently besides the first one.

The output of Blue Sky somewhat reminds me of Illumination, where they have one main hit series they milked to death who’s most iconic character(s) are little unintelligible creatures who barely have anything to do with the actual movie plots.

[amnhnyc]

Smile like Smilodon, because it’s Fossil Friday! This saber-tooth cat roamed the Americas during the Pleistocene, and went extinct some 10,000 years ago. Scientists estimate that its signature teeth, which could reach lengths of 7 in (18 cm), grew at the rapid speed of .24 in (6 mm) per month—double the growth rate of an African lion’s teeth. To unsheath these knife-like canines, Smilodon could open its jaws twice as wide as today’s big cats. You can spot this fearsome predator in the Museum’s Hall of Primitive Mammals.

To see Smilodon and more, plan your visit.

[headspace-hotel]

One of the things that fascinates me most is the question of how fast new species, and new ecosystems, can evolve, and how our very limited observations of ecosystem change within the memory of the human species compare to how it has happened in the past.

I've been thinking a lot about the extinctions of Pleistocene megafauna.

The suggestion that humans hunted them to extinction makes sense in light of simple correlation between extinctions and human presence on landmasses, but this doesn't prove causation—it might well be the other way around: that extinctions of megafauna and change in climate prompted human migration to new areas.

And the conditions on Earth really were so totally, radically different during the Last Glacial Maximum, that it's hard to imagine many megafauna species successfully adapting even in the absence of human predation.

The counter-argument to this is that those megafauna species survived past interglacial and glacial periods, but the survival of those particular species doesn't mean anything unless there were no comparable extinctions of any species during interglacial periods. And the resolution of the fossil record is just...really low.

It also puzzles me how quickly seemingly intricate ecological relationships have popped up in a time period that, evolutionarily speaking, is the blink of an eye. How can the reintroduction of bison, for example, have such a profoundly positive effect on plant life when the relationship between the two and the biome that both belong to is virtually brand-new? How can so many insects have developed obligately symbiotic relationships with specific plants that, a mere 15,000 years ago, could not have existed close to this place?

How could there be such a stark difference between invasive plants and native plants, when so little of the plant life that grows here could possibly have been in this same place for long enough to evolve substantially according to our current understanding of evolution? There were caribou in Mississippi and Alabama during the last ice age. Since Mississippi is now subtropical, most species can't have been there for very long, but Mississippi and surrounding areas have loads of rare endemic species with intricate relationships to other organisms.

I don't know enough about it...

[alphynix]

April Fools 2023: How Titanis Lost The Right To Bear Arms

Huge, flightless, and carnivorous, the phorusrhacids (or terror birds) were some of the largest apex predators in South America during its Cenozoic "splendid isolation" as an island continent – and they were possibly the closest that birds ever came to reclaiming the ecological roles of their extinct non-avian theropod dinosaur relatives. 

And for a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a hypothesis that they'd even re-evolved clawed hands.

This idea was based on the wing bones of Titanis walleri, the only terror bird known to have dispersed northwards during the Great American Biotic Interchange when North and South America became connected via the Isthmus of Panama.

Living during the Pliocene and Pleistocene in Florida and Texas, between about 5 and 1.8 million years ago, Titanis stood around 1.5-1.8m tall (~5-6') and was heavily built, with long strong legs and a massive hooked beak. Remains of its small wings were incomplete and fragmentary but had seemingly unusual joints, with what looked like a stiffer wrist and more flexible "fingers" than other birds, which led paleontologist Robert Chandler to propose in 1994 that this terror bird species had modified its wings into clawed grasping arms similar to those of dromaeosaurs, used to restrain prey animals while its beak tore them apart.

But the idea of a giant murder-bird with added meathook-hands only lasted about a decade. Further investigation in 2005 showed that Titanis' arms weren't that weird after all – the same sort of joints are found in terror birds' closest living relatives, the seriemas, and so Titanis really had the same sort of small vestigial wings as many other large flightless birds.

…However, there still could have been some claws on there. Many modern birds actually have one or two small claws on their hands that aren't visible under their feathers, and terror birds like Titanis having something like that going on is completely plausible – they just wouldn't have been using them for any sort of specalized predatory function.

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