Paleontology

 The following is an article by John C, McLoughlin, published in Science Digest , a popular science magazine for the general public in October 1982. I was looking for this issue, which I owned as a child, for this blog. it and two other issues, got torn up too much, and I had to throw them away. I have managed to find this one with Argentavis Magnificens , which was a recent discovery back then. It assumes that Argentavis was a giant condor, a type of teratorn related to Teratornis , the giant condor of North America, whose remains have famously been found among the La Brea tarpit fauna. Argentavis may not have been an actual teratorn, however, and could have been more of an active hunter than scavenger, and may have hunted like a colossal eagle. The article shows it bearing off prey, possibly a thoatherium calf.  There is also a common mistake for the time, the assumption that diatryma , now known as gastornis, was a predator, when we now have confirmed evidence that it w...

Extinct animals of Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion, and nearby islands. Clockwise from right: Reunion White Dodo, Mauritian Common Dodo, Mauritian broad-billed parrot, Mauritian Blue Pigeon, Magaladaptis (Madagascar Giant Lemur), Reunion Solataire (a dodo cousin), Reunion Parrot, Seycelles Giant Tortoise, Mauritian Red Rail, Madagascar Coua, Reunion Crested Starling, Madagascar Elephant Bird, Madagascar Pygmy Hippo The above painting is from the Time Life Nature Library volume on Africa. All of the animals are now extinct, and only three of them are actually from Madagascar, the rest from nearby islands. These happen to be the most striking and the largest, however: the elephant bird, the pygmy hippo, and the giant lemur Magaladaptis .  The island of Madagascar once harbored a unique megafauna all its own. It was not originally part of Africa, but split off from the Indian subcontinent, which at the time had to have sported a great assortment of pro-simians from before true monkeys ...

These are some sketches of the South American marsupial sabertooth, thylacosmilus carnifex by Jay Matternes. Since I've been posting artwork of marsupial carnivores lately (perhaps I should have a blog devoted to just those), I've searched out some others that I also remember growing up with. This one is from the volume of Time Life Nature Library on South America. I remember this and the other Time Life books I used to get out of the public library, but which I never owned until now. You gotta love ebay! I just got this and one on Africa, having remembered the artwork in these two volumes of extinct animals.  These sketches of the animal and how it might have moved were unfortunately not included in the recent tome showcasing Matternes art, but only focused on his most famous mural-like paintings.  The sketch of the musculature, showing the smaller, related animal seems to be a small species of Borhyena , possibly Prothylacinus , an ancestral form of the borhyeanids, that lo...

  Back in college, I once wrote a story about the first human clone, a boy named "Nolan Williams" after Logan's Run author William F. Nolan. That story, like most of mine, was never published. I'd recently read a book on the possibility of discrimination and persecution of real human clones, were they ever to exist. The false, and grotesque portrayal of a cloned boy in the movie Godsend , is an example of the negative attitudes toward cloning that could very likely lead to the persecution of human clones themselves.  The portrayal of the cloned child in the final two JP films is virtually the opposite of that in Godsend . Meaning its' way more realistic. She's an average kid, save merely for the manner of her conception. For that, we see her as a hunted child. However, in this case, they don't really mean her harm, merely consider valuable property. Actual cloned kids might suffer far worse.  In the previous film, there is a brief scene where the villain i...

 Someone of Facebook shared with photo with me on Facebook, on the Save the Thylacine group's timeline. The man's name was Steve Rushton. What he said regarding it was this: Here's another type of Quall, a Queensland animal was known as the "Northern Wonder" As big as a medium sized dog, sadly this one was shot in Kenilworth Qld in the early 1920s What is this then? A quoll the size of a medium size dog? Is it just an extra large tiger quoll? or a possible candidate for the fabled Queensland tiger, thought by some to be a surviving thylacoleo.  I get the idea that perhaps here is a marsupial analogue to the now-infamous DeLoys ape photo. You can't really get the actual size of it, but it looks large compared to the crate, and what looks like a regular-size paint can. The DeLoys photo, purportedly showing an "American ape", was actually an average-sized spider monkey with its tail concealed.  So waht's up here? 

 I've already discussed this a bit in the Our Continent post.  It is a painting by Czech artist Zdenek Burian that had already appeared in his Life Before Man book. It is shown here in Our Continent . I used to take these books out from the library all the time. I now own copies of them.  Our Continent was one I begged my folks to order from NG, and as I re-discovered, it was for my twelfth birthday.  It shows what I first assumed was a Eurasian cave bear ( Ursus Spelaeus ), among the vastness of the Eurasian taiga. However, taiga stretched across North America as well. Our Continent , suggests this is a North American short-face, the largest and probably fiercest bear species of all time. If so, it should actually be taller and rangier, so I still have my doubts as to what species Burian sought to depict.  The painting is mesmerizing to me, giving the impression of the vast wild wilderness before any civilization on earth. Humans were around, Cro-Magnon and N...

 Back when I was  kid, I remember book pictures of Spinosaurus , depicting it as a generic theropod, like Allosaurus or Megalosaurus , with an enormous Dimetrodon -like fin on its back. Even the dinosaur toy-company Carnegie named for the Carnegie Museum depicted their Spinosaurus that way at the time. Some depictions even showed it in a quadrupedal, Dimetrodon -like pose. Spinosaurus Aegypticus was first discovered in Egypt during the early part of last century, and was only known from a series of gigantic spines arising from its back and few jaw fragments, indicating a large theropod. The remains were housed in a museum in Germany until they were infamously destroyed in a bombing rid during WWII. So even these valuable remnants were destroyed, having survived millions of years and we had merely that photographs of these to go by.  Since there was virtually nothing to go on so far as what the rest of it looked like, some Spinosaurus depictions in fiction tended to be ...