#saurosingularities

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April Fools 2017: Solved Paleo Mysteries Day

With Unsolved Mysteries Month over, and the first day of April upon us, it’s time for an important announcement: after many hours of grueling research, I’ve managed to solve every single one of the past month’s mysteries.

So, in no particular order:

Horse Snoots As we all know, weird noses are always trunks.

Ichthyoconodon There’s only one logical explanation.

Mosasaurs Mosasaurs were in fact the sister group to sauropodomorphs.

Amiskwia & Typhloesus Lichens.

Kakuru As recent discoveries like Deinocheirus and Spinosaurus have shown us, dinosaurs previously known only from fragmentary remains always turn out to be utterly ridiculous-looking and weirdly proportioned. Thus we have to go much much weirder to have a chance of ever predicting what Kakuru really looked like.

Paleodictyon DEEP SEA BEES

Godzillus An ancient kraken’s art project. It may have been a crude attempt at a self-portrait sculpture.

Trilobites Despite their apparent biological complexity, trilobites are really just naturally-occurring inorganic structures.

Diskagma Proterozoic macroviruses.

Acallosuchus Actually a giant tenrec.

Ammonites The lack of soft tissue is immediately explained if we reconsider ammonites as shelled ghosts. (Modern ghosts are of course secondarily shell-less.)

Chitinozoans Early skyfish eggs. Their disappearance from the marine fossil record marks not an extinction but their evolutionary transition to an entirely aerial lifestyle.

Maxberg Archaeopteryx While most specimens of Archaeopteryx are elaborate hoaxes, to the surprise of everyone the Maxberg specimen was actually a genuine fossil -- it just wasn’t a dinosaur. Further preparation of the slab after the casts were made found traces of the missing parts of its body, a discovery that had to be quickly covered up.

Pterosaurs Transitional pterosaurs went through a highly unusual “assisted flight” stage.

Vetulicolians The long sought-after transitional forms between crustaceans and fish.

Dinosaur Snoots Weird noses are ALWAYS trunks.

Permian Extinction “average extinction rate of 70% of all species” factoid actualy just statistical error. average extinction rate of 0% of all species. Lystrosaurus georg, who lives in early Triassic & displaces over 10,000 terrestrial vertebrates each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Ediacarans The Ediacaran biota seems so strange and alien in comparison to all other known groups because they really weren’t related at all to any modern organisms. They were actually the very last native lifeforms of this planet, wiped out after the arrival of our invasive extraterrestrial ancestors.

Andrewsarchus Upon closer inspection of the nasal region of the skull, it turns out Andrewsarchus was a rhinogradentian.

Gluteus Preserved three-dimensional cross-sections of ancient extra-dimensional beings. Upper Devonian spacetime in Iowa was unusually “sticky”, trapping these odd manifestations within our universe.

Bats My own independent analysis recovers bats as highly modified armadillos. Also, through rigorous application of digital image enhancement, I have discovered many previously unseen anatomical features in photographs of fossil bats, and can now accurately reconstruct their ancestral form:

Amphicoelias Clearly no terrestrial animal could grow so huge and still be able to support its own weight. Sauropods that large would have inevitably begun to collapse under their own gravity, shedding most of their outer layers in a sudden explosion and scattering rare heavy elements around their immediate vicinity. (This is the primary reason we only find isolated bones of giant sauropods and no complete skeletons.)

The very largest individuals would also have occasionally become just massive enough to potentially collapse past their Schwarzschild radius and form an unstable saurosingularity -- which would have then violently evaporated via Hawking radiation with an energy output equivalent to a small comet impact.

And that’s why no animals get that big anymore.