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Fossil What?
An animal related to otters, other mustelids, or potentially related to pinnipeds (e.g. seals and sea lions) could have many overall forms. Thankfully, of course, we have quite a few good quality...
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River Facts
The River Beast Potamotherium was an intriguing mammal, as extant River Otters and their cousins Sea Otters are as well. Its furry cuteness makes it an excellent animal to share and discuss today; it...
View ArticleNo Videos
There are literally zero videos about Potamotherium. Small mammals really get ignored by the media and documentary makers. Sometimes small mammals show up in animated movies, but Potamotherium has not...
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Favorites
As everyone not new here knows, I love a good old fashioned paper. The 1957 description of the anatomy of Potamotherium is not one of my all time favorites, but I do rather enjoy the thoroughness of a...
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Skulls and Fur
Potamotherium valetoni saint gerand le puy Musee d'Histoire Naturelle, ParisThe idea of Potamotherium being covered in fur is directly related to the fact that it is defined as a mammal. The mammalian...
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Not So Popular Otters
Pretty much all of the evidence we saw this week pointed toward our lovely large otter Potamotherium being a rather large mustelid rather than a small basal pinniped. The fact that it is a mustelid may...
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Fur-bearing Finale
December will not start until after the next week begins. However, this is going to be the last No-shave November mammal week that we are going to have here this year. This week's animal is an...
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Facts About Thylacosmilus
(C) Angie WilsonAmazingly Thylacosmilus is exceedingly popular on the internet, so much so that it has almost more pages dedicated to it than its more popular look-alike Smilodon. The pages dedicated...
View ArticleReconstruction of Skeletons
Videos on this popular felid-like marsupial are not often professionally created. That does not stop people from putting up videos of the animal, however. These videos are often quite badly done...
View ArticleWhy those Teeth?
What makes an animal develop the way it does is not as much of a mystery as it once seemed to be, but with an animal like Thylacosmilus there is still a healthy dose of skeptically looking at the teeth...
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Holiday Birds
(C) Amanda (Flickr user spakattacks)In the United States the time between November and December is a very bird-oriented time frame. There are turkeys and geese as well as official bird counts spread...
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Silhouetting Terror
(C) Tuomas KoivurinneThroughout the course of this blog we have never been disappointed by the art of Tuomas Koivurinne. A bird like Titanis could be illustrated in either very magnificent poses or in...
View ArticleTitanis in Motion
Titanis facts can be found littered about the internet. There are all kinds of reading levels represented ranging from the everyone friendly About to the literature-like Prehistoric Wildlife. Medium...
View ArticlePeople Hate Television
People always have complaints about their favorite fossil animals on television. Documentaries, news reports; I have been critical in the past as well of these sorts of outlets. I have to say that in...
View ArticleTitanic Research
A great deal of research has been conducted regarding Titanis walleri over the years. The bird's body has been discussed many times over for many different reasons, but mostly for descriptions of the...
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Strange Ideas
There was a hypothesis once that Titanis, and other Phorusrhacids, may have had a theropod-like claws at the end of their wings. This hypothesis came to light because the writs was considered to be...
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Like an Ostrich of Doom
Whenever a bird is popular, or any fossil animal for that matter, it is always fun to look at extant birds to see what kind of similarities there are in the two popular taxa. Terror birds in general...
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Long Tails and Little Teeth
The bird from Jehol, a region in China (now Hebei Province), was turkey sized and capable of powered flight. Despite having teeth Jeholornis had a diet consisting of mostly seeds. Their long tails,...
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Flying and Chasing
(C) Emily WilloughbyJeholornis is hypothesized to have been a seed eating bird with a long tail and claws on its wings. The long tail and the claws on the wings are more than a hypothesis, of course,...
View ArticleToo Much Fame
Jeholornis is so well known in the public domain that finding simple fact files or short essays describing the small primitive bird is actually quite difficult. The problem is that there are just too...
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