A small window of time

little cenozoic guys

(hyaenodon, langstonia, smilodon, dromornithidae, stegotetrabelodon, glyptodon, moropus)

Thylacines sunbathing at the Hobart Zoo By: Unknown photographer Unknown year

Anomalocaris plushie 🦐

Only Skeletons

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💗🪷 a Hadrosaur who had a long nap under the camellias and a bonus on my base :]

[ The skull is mounted on a custom steel armature, which allows for it to be seen all the way around. ]

"After seven years of work, the best preserved and most complete triceratops skull coming from Canada — also known as the "Calli" specimen — is on display for the first time since being found in 2014 at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta. A museum news release calls the specimen "unique" because of where it was discovered, the age of the rock around it, and how well it was preserved. Following the floods that tore through Alberta about 10 years ago, the Royal Tyrrell staff were engaged in flood mitigation paleontology work when the triceratops skull was discovered in 2014. Triceratops fossils are rare in Canada. This skull was found in the foothills of southwestern Alberta — an area where dinosaur fossils in general are uncommon — and nicknamed "Calli" after Callum Creek, the stream where it was discovered. Transported via helicopter in giant, heavy chunks, the skull and most of the jaw pieces were extracted over the course of a month in 2015. The rest of the triceratops' skeleton was not found. Roaming the earth roughly 68 to 69 million years ago, the museum says this skull was buried in stages, evident by the fossilization process.  "Paleontologists know this because the specimen was found in different rock layers, and the poorly preserved horn tips suggest they were exposed to additional weathering and erosion," reads a museum blog about the triceratops skull.  "The rest of the skeleton likely washed away," noting that the lower jaws were found downstream. From 2016 to 2023, Royal Tyrrell technician Ian Macdonald spent over 6,500 hours preparing this fossil, removing over 815 kilograms of rock that encased the skull. This triceratops skull is the largest skull ever prepared at the museum and its third largest on display."

Read more: "Canada's biggest and best triceratops skull on display in Alberta" by Lily Dupuis.

Do you have any favorite extinct/prehistoric frogs?

Like basically everyone, probably gastric-brooding frogs, genus Rheobatrachus, famed for raising their tadpoles in their stomachs.

Src: Mike Tyler, 1973

Possibly/probably driven to extinction by chytrid fungus.

Colorized Thylacines pt. 3

Lost Americans wheel. Watercolor and ink.

'Aurochs' by Jennifer Tetlow, Dales Countryside Museum, Hawes, Yorkshire Dales

little cretaceous guys + guest appearance of our even older friend the gorgonpsid (triceratops, pteradon, carnotaurus, parasaurolophus, deinonychus, ichthyosaur, gorgonopsid, repenomamus)

‘Lost’ pigeon found after more than a century

A September expedition to Papua New Guinea confirmed via video the existence of the black-naped pheasant pigeon, a critically endangered species that has not been reported for 140 years.

“For much of the trip, it seemed like we had no chance of finding this bird,” said Jordan Boersma, co-leader of the expedition and a postdoctoral researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We were just two days away from the end of our time on Fergusson Island in Papua New Guinea when one of our remote cameras recorded the bird walking around and fanning its tail.”

The group captured the first-ever video and still photos of the bird, a large ground-dwelling species with a rust-colored back, a black head and body, and a bobbing pheasant-like tail. It may only exist far inland on Fergusson Island in hot, extremely rugged geothermal terrain laced with twisty rivers and dense with biting insects and leeches...

Read more: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2022/11/lost-pigeon-found-after-more-century

A male thylacine who lived at the London Zoo from 1910-1914 By: Zoological Society London 1910s

This 36x48” oil on canvas diptych is part of a series I’ve been working on based on the thylacine, also known as the “Tasmanian Tiger” or marsupial wolf.

One of my biggest interests has always been animals, and in particular the ones that humans have destroyed. Every lost or vanishing species is its own story, and as an illustrator theirs are the stories that I am the most invested in telling (hence the blog).

The thylacine is one of the classic examples of human-caused extinction: an utterly unique creature, deliberately exterminated due to a combination of greed, ignorance, hubris, and fear.

Scared or anxious marsupials have a habit of stretching their jaws in a display known as a yawn (you’ve probably seen memes of opossums that look like they’re yelling—it’s the same thing). This display was especially striking in the thylacine, which could open its jaw to over 90°. Some of the most famous photos of thylacines capture them in this attitude of fear.

Unfortunately for the thylacine, humans have more direct methods of dealing with the things that scare them.

The title of this pair of paintings is ‘When They Are Frightened, They Show Their Teeth’.

The overall series is called ‘Here Be Monsters’, as a nod to both the far-flung environs of the thylacine, and the behavior of those who intruded upon it.

Stay tuned for more.