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Things We Do Not Talk About
There is an entire Class of animals that we have not really discussed. They are always right there when we look up fossils. We should take a closer look at these alien, but very familiar, animals....
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General Anatomical Survey of Trilobites
Calling trilobite anatomy simple is not fair to these highly diverse creatures. Some of their fossils may make their anatomy appear to be highly simplified, but many of those fossils are lacking...
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Rather than rush a post today (the first day of the semester was rather busy), I want to encourage you all to listen to Dr. Melanie J. Hopkins discuss trilobite fossils. She is an authority on...
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Triarthrus - Preserved Legs and Antennae
Often when we imagine a "typical" trilobite we picture an animal something like this genus, Triarthrus. Known from the Upper Ordivician soils of North America (midwestern states as well as New York and...
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Awesome... Antennae? or Forks?
Walliserops, a genus consisting of four recognized species, is a really interesting group of trilobites. Known from Devonian rocks of Morocco, there are a number of interesting anatomical features in...
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The Name of Many Terrors
The holotype is a mandible in the Museo de La Plata in Argentina and it is labeled MLP-118. The name that the scientific community knows this mandible by is Phorusrhacos longissimus (Ameghino 1887). In...
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Flightless Tradition
The ancestors of Phorusrhacos were mainly flightless animals. Studies like Alvarenga et al. (2003) placed these giant birds in the family of rails (Ralliformes), indicating that their closest living...
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What Does it Eat?
The simple answer to the question "What does Phorusrhacos eat?" is pretty much anything smaller than itself that it could chase down or surprise. However, we could instead scour the literature and...
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Article 0
This image shows the bones that were studied by Degrange et al. (2019) in white and the remainder of the reconstructed skeleton (Paul 2002) in grey. As we mentioned very briefly yesterday, the skull is...
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During the early Pleistocene the South American landscape was filled with giant animals. Out birds from last week were (specifically Phorusrhacos) not a significant feature of the landscape anymore....
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Man or Nature
Megatherium went extinct approximately 12,000 years ago. They were endemic to the southern continent of the Americas (South America). We know that the extinction events at the end of the Pleistocene...
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Wrinkly Sloth
In 2002 Richard Fariña published a paper in Ameghina that, while it did not forever change the view of Megatherium, did cast an interesting perspective on what the animal may have looked like. The...
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Tail for Balance
In the more distant past, we are thinking about 100 years ago possibly, Megatherium was not considered a bipedal animal. It may have been described as facultatively bipedal, meaning it could...
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Giant's Diet
Despite discussing the bipedal implications of biomechanical analyses yesterday, it is important to note that many of the foods Megatherium was thought to have consumed are on the ground. Unlike...
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Megatherium Mysteries
As a disclaimer: The story below is simply me relaying the facts. I do not have any stake in how these facts are interpreted or the validity of the published or reported facts.The Natural History...
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The Qianzhou lizard
A young (in terms of how long we have known it) alioramid tyrannosaur from China was first described in 2014 and was immediately given a rather interesting nickname. Due to the narrow and elongate...
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Standing Tall
Possessing a femur approximately 70 cm (27.6 in) long and a tibia approximately 76 cm (30 in) long, Qianzhousaurus was a long-legged, though not overall a very tall, dinosaur. These measurements come...
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Toothless in Death
It is not weird to find fossil teeth. It is not weird to find fossil jaws (mandibles, lower jaws, or maxillae, upper jaws). It is not even strange to find fossil jaws with few teeth or many broken...
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Revisiting Utah
On this blog we have covered a lot of different dinosaurs over time. Nine years ago we discussed one of the largest of the dromaeosaurs, Utahraptor ostrommaysi (Kirkland, Gaston and Burge, 1993). I...
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Popular Raptor
Proof that the author did once like a lot of sports all at once, but more importantly, the pretty great 1995 Toronto Raptors logo, mostly.Utahraptor once inspired an arguably wonderful digital mashup...
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