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Obscure Taxa; For interesting or obscure organisms you'd like to share.
Topic Started: Dec 14 2016, 09:46 PM (48,934 Views)
lamna
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Yeah they are a pretty fascinating group of obscure amphibians, which I why I added some to Gondwanan Madagascar. There absence there seems weird, and I would not be surprised if it's because they just haven't been found yet.

If anyone want to pay me to go to Madagascar and dig a bunch of holes, I will accept that heavy burden.
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Zorcuspine
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lamna
Jun 27 2017, 09:00 AM
Yeah they are a pretty fascinating group of obscure amphibians, which I why I added some to Gondwanan Madagascar. There absence there seems weird, and I would not be surprised if it's because they just haven't been found yet.

If anyone want to pay me to go to Madagascar and dig a bunch of holes, I will accept that heavy burden.
A project that really deserves more updates by the way...
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LittleLazyLass
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Wait, links them to stereospondyls? I didn't think they were a candidate for lissamphibian ancestry? Or is Lissamphibia paraphyletic after all, merely being linked genetically because they're all temnospondyls?
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Inceptis
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Virtually all of these posts have concerned animals. So, I'm breaking the streak again with Nematophyta.

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This is a wastebasket taxon for all plant-like fossils from early in the Palaeozoic, ranging from the Upper Devonian all the way to the Cambrian. Various plant-like fossils from when there shouldn't be such complex plants are put in here, but a fair amount are possibly fungus. In fact, Prototaxites, a giant lichen mentioned earlier on this thread (by yours truly), is placed within this clade. So, if you're looking for enigmatic plants and early lichens, look no further than Nematophyta.
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Scrublord
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Continuing with plants, allow me to introduce Triphyophyllum peltatum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triphyophyllum
A climbing vine native to the rainforests of central Africa, this plant is remarkable for its three-stage life cycle, which was not discovered until 51 years after it was named. The three stages are so different from one another that they look like separate species. The first stage is a simple rosette of lanceolate leaves which grow directly out of the ground. The second stage is completely different-- it is a sundew-like carnivorous plant with sticky leaves for catching and digesting insects. Finally, it grows into its mature form, a tree-climbing vine with hooks on its leaves.
This "metamorphosis"--essentially the plant equivalent of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, with all the dramatic change that entails--is absolutely unique, and isn't even found in its closest relatives. Unfortunately, Triphyophyllum is endangered, and only three botanical gardens in the world (two in Germany, one in the Ivory Coast) keep them.
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IIGSY
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The Gondwanian
Jun 27 2017, 04:52 AM
A ancestor of the caecilians has finally been revealed. Meet Chinlestegophis jenkinsi
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Illustration by Jorge Gonzalez

Living during the Triassic, this creature links the caecilians to the stereospondyls, the major group of amphibians at the time. Unlike the legless modern caecilians, it has four legs. It was found in central Colorado, and the finding was published earlier this month. To find out more, click here.

Is it just me, or a caecilians fascinating? I'm going to do a terraformed world project with them sometime soon.
Has eocaecelia been dethroned?
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Punga: A terraformed world with no vertebrates
Last one crawling: The last arthropod

ARTH-6810: A world without vertebrates (It's ded, but you can still read I guess)

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Swamp world: A world covered in lakes, with the largest being caspian sized.
Nematozoic: After a mass extinction of ultimate proportions, a single species of nematode is the only surviving animal.
Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents.

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Inceptis
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Scrublord
Jun 29 2017, 04:56 PM
Continuing with plants, allow me to introduce Triphyophyllum peltatum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triphyophyllum
A climbing vine native to the rainforests of central Africa, this plant is remarkable for its three-stage life cycle, which was not discovered until 51 years after it was named. The three stages are so different from one another that they look like separate species. The first stage is a simple rosette of lanceolate leaves which grow directly out of the ground. The second stage is completely different-- it is a sundew-like carnivorous plant with sticky leaves for catching and digesting insects. Finally, it grows into its mature form, a tree-climbing vine with hooks on its leaves.
This "metamorphosis"--essentially the plant equivalent of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, with all the dramatic change that entails--is absolutely unique, and isn't even found in its closest relatives. Unfortunately, Triphyophyllum is endangered, and only three botanical gardens in the world (two in Germany, one in the Ivory Coast) keep them.
Just another example that plants are awesome and still have surprises in store. But there's another group than evolved multi-cellularity independent of animals and plants: fungi.

This delightful kingdom has certainly made a lasting impression on this forum in The Library at least, and numerous other projects have made entries about them. Among their arsenal is the skill to efficiently eject their offspring. In the case of basidiomycota and ascomycota, that mostly involves utilizing aerodynamics to draw out spores with lift, but in more basal species, they're too small for that to be efficient enough.

Meet Pilobolus. This genus consists of six species of zygote fungi (a type of 'mold', which seems to be as descriptive as 'bug') that all live on herbivore poop. Tough life. However, one species, P. crystallinus, holds the record for fastest accelerating organism, its sporangium capable of reaching 20000 g's, faster than most firearms.

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You might be thinking, A poop-mold can explode really fast. Not very impressive. Well, its life cycle means that the sporangium has to hit the grass in order to pass through the digestive track of an animal. It then comes out in the feces of the animal. (Man, these guys have a tough life.) However, in order to hit the grass and not the poop, they use an ingenius method:

They can see.

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Using the light refracting through the subsporangial vesicles (the things that eventually explode), they can tell if they're aimed toward the light or not based on how much light is refracted toward the light-sensitive bottleneck at the base of the vesicle. Mind you, it's not sophisticated, but it's good enough so that it doesn't hit the poop. And for a mold whose entire life cycle more or less depends on fecal matter, not only is sight an incredible ability, but it makes this sentence possible:

They get rid of their children by exploding their eyes.

And that, my good sir, is strangely awesome.
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Nembrotha
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Little
Jun 27 2017, 02:06 PM
Wait, links them to stereospondyls? I didn't think they were a candidate for lissamphibian ancestry? Or is Lissamphibia paraphyletic after all, merely being linked genetically because they're all temnospondyls?
Yeah, from what I know, Amphibian phylogeny is still a massive mess. You've got people saying either "Yeah, lissamphibians are paraphyletic" or "They're temnospondyls/lepospondyls/whatever" or any other theory. And of course the whole caecilian conundrum.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if any of those were true. For all we know, all living amphibians could be temnosondyls.
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IIGSY
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What is this thing? A harvestman? No! It's opilioacariformes!

These are the only mites that are neither parasitiformes nor acariformes. They are relatively large for mites, and they are rare. They are also not very diverse, with only 10 genera. They are also quite weird, because they have six pairs of eyes and abdominal segmentation. Surprisingly, there is two fossil specimens. One from the cretaceous and the other from the eocene. Their phylogenetic position is uncertain, but they may be a sister group to parasitiformes (ticks and friends).
Projects
Punga: A terraformed world with no vertebrates
Last one crawling: The last arthropod

ARTH-6810: A world without vertebrates (It's ded, but you can still read I guess)

Potential ideas-
Swamp world: A world covered in lakes, with the largest being caspian sized.
Nematozoic: After a mass extinction of ultimate proportions, a single species of nematode is the only surviving animal.
Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents.

Quotes


Phylogeny of the arthropods and some related groups


In honor of the greatest clade of all time


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All African countries can fit into Brazil
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Archeoraptor
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well I was on spanish wikipedia saerching some pretty mainstream primate stuff and the wallace line bring me to these interesting wild pigs,the Borneo bearded pig and its relative or maybe subsepices the Palawan bearded pig

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The Borneo bearded(Sus barbatus) pig despite its name is not only present in Borneo but also other parts of southeast Asia like Sumatra and Malay,prominent by lack of mane and its weird beard that looks like some sort of moustache in my opinion, some zoos like the San Diego zoo have them,personally never heard of these animals thoutgh I have a nature book with a drawing of ones of these but it just looks like a weird boar.

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The Palawan berarded pig(Sus barbatus ahoenobarbus) native to philippinas has a douthful classification,as you see in the image there is not much difference betweem these two animals, it should be a subspecies you migth say, some say it should be its own species,most scientist that have studied them say they are surely related to Borneo Bearded pigs, molecular analisis shows that the Visayan Warty Pig (Sus cebifrons) is closer to it, but there isn´t a consensu, this shows that even identic animals can be not so identical, I wonder how many apparently closely related exticnt animals aren´t that close

-Source:
Wikipedia
this cool page about wild pigs helped with the Palawan one.
Edited by Archeoraptor, Jul 6 2017, 08:36 AM.
Astarte an alt eocene world,now on long hiatus but you never know
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coming soon......a world that was seeded with earth´s weridest
and who knows what is coming next...........

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Sayornis
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Synophalos xynos is a Cambrian arthropod from China which apparently traveled in conga lines. Only one specimen has been found outside of these chained formations, which could include up to twenty individuals.
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More here.
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Aug 19 2016, 07:42 PM
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LittleLazyLass
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I was looking through the Dinosaur Mailing List, and the study on that caecilian has been questioned:
Quote:
 
(First, the trivial reminder that the paper is not registered in ZooBank, so the name will only be validly published when the paper version comes out. But that shouldn't take long.)

I'm not so sure it really is a stem-caecilian. But the anatomical details aren't the funny part. Chinlestegophis certainly came out as a stem-caecilian in the Bayesian analysis the authors reported in fig. 2, repeated in fig. S7A. They also ran a parsimony analysis, and the results of that make up fig. S7B.

That's a majority-rule consensus. It looks a lot like the Bayesian tree, but I noticed that none of the nodes between the caecilians and the karaurids + frogs + salamanders occurs in 100% of the trees. I happened to be talking to the first author already, so I asked him what was going on in the other trees – after all, there's no further mention of this in the whole paper including the supplementary information. He wasn't quite sure and thought they may not have saved the individual trees, just the consensus. So I repeated the analysis overnight, or rather in the first 2 hours, 19 minutes and 13 seconds of the night.

I found the same number of trees with the same length, and some were compatible with the majority-rule consensus as expected. But others (including the very first tree I got, as it happens) had a monophyletic, exclusive Lissamphibia next to Gerobatrachus in the dissorophoids, a very mainstream hypothesis, while Chinlestegophis stayed with Rileymillerus in the stereospondyls. Yet others found Chinlestegophis as a stem-caecilian within otherwise the same arrangement. And yet others found a monophyletic, exclusive Lissamphibia next to (Chinlestegophis + Rileymillerus) in the stereospondyls. In all of these alternatives, the karaurids are salamanders as everyone had been thinking so far.

Keep in mind: all these different topologies are equally parsimonious. Not only aren't the percentages on a majority-rule consensus tree any kind of support measure; but the majrule consensus does not offer an overview over the most parsimonious trees either! It is no better than looking at one individual tree plus the strict consensus. (In fact it's a little worse, because PAUP* rounds these percentages: I've seen it happen that a node was marked on the majrule tree as "100%", but was absent from the strict consensus – it turned out it occurred in 99.6% of the most parsimonious trees. But this didn't happen in this case.)

Recommendations for authors

1) Save all trees you get.
2) Don't use the majority-rule consensus at all. If you get a forest and the strict consensus isn't resolved enough to give you a good picture of what you've found, look at a sample of the individual trees (20–30, evenly spaced through the forest, are enough in almost all cases in my experience) and then find a way to describe and/or illustrate your findings (I've been using two different ones lately depending on how much space is available).

Recommendations for reviewers

1) Don't let people get away with only publishing a majrule tree.
2) You aren't given enough time to actually check a data matrix for mistakes, sure. But you do have time (see above) to simply repeat the analysis in order to check what comes out of the matrix as it is. Do that.

PS: in the other new paper, the one on Lethiscus and Coloraderpeton, you'll find the strange phrase "at least stemward of". That should be "at least as stemward [better: rootward] as" – in some of the trees from that matrix, Lethiscus and Coloraderpetonp are whatcheeriids, closer to Whatcheeria than to Pederpes. Again, fig. 3 won't quite tell you that, because it's a majority-rule consensus tree.
Quote:
 
> Thanks! I know of other Paleozoic amphibian workers who expressed some
> uncertainty as to the conclusions , and it is good to hear about your
> analyses of the results.

Mind you, this is just the matrix as it is. I haven't looked for problematic
scores in the matrix. Clearly, when so many so different topologies are equally
parsimonious, tiny changes to the matrix would change the results.

I think we're going to hear a lot about potential changes to the results. On
the one hand, I'll have something to say about the tabular or supratemporal of
Eocaecilia soon, having seen the holotype in 2013. On the other hand, Jason
tells me that 1) they bent over backwards when scoring Chinlestegophis, in
order to avoid any potential bias for their preferred hypothesis, so they've
made the weakest possible case for it, not the strongest possible one; 2) a few
very interesting features of Chinlestegophis were somehow cut from the supp.
inf. at some point before final submission, so that some interpretations in the
paper now seem to be founded on nothing when that's not the case. And so on and
so forth. This is just the beginning, you ain't seen nothin' yet, we're living
in interesting times, yadda yadda. :-)

One thing is very clear now, however: the stereospondyls cannot be left out of
considerations of lissamphibian origins anymore. We need stereo- and
lepospondyls and everything in between all in the same huge matrix with many,
many more characters, because otherwise we're just not testing all serious
options.
Quote:
 
> Mind you, this is just the matrix as it is. I haven't looked for problematic
> scores in the matrix.

Also, I haven't looked for questionable assumptions. All characters were
unordered – in a matrix this size, there are bound to be potentially continuous
multistate characters that really should be ordered on both theoretical and
empirical grounds. Ordering can both increase and decrease resolution (the
latter by revealing previously hidden character conflict), and its impact on
any given tree is pretty much unpredictable.


That's David Marjanovic and Tom Holtz (Holtz is the quote in my second quote, Marjanovic is everything else).
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I don't even really like this song that much but the title is pretty relatable sometimes, I guess.
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Inceptis
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There hasn't been an entry about ray-finned fish in a while, so I'll just show you this clade still has a few more tricks up its sleeves (or, fins).

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Enter the Waterfall climbing cave fish, or cave angelfish. Its name is super-straight forward: it climbs cave waterfalls using hooks on the undersides of its fins, sifting the water for bacteria and organic matter. They are only found in eight caves in Thailand, and the protection the government provides barely counts, as what really matters for keeping them alive is maintaining water quality and hydrographics, as well as minimizing disturbances. However, the Thai government has little restriction on agricultural methods and tourism of caves, which pollutes the water and causes major disturbances.

The thing that is perhaps the most interesting is that because of the high water flow, the fish can't move by hopping, which is what many other walking ray-finned fish do. Instead, it waddles in a fashion similar to an amphibian. As a result, scientists are interested in how it evolved this mechanism, as it could reveal more about the original migrating of fish onto land.



I just can't help but think about what this fish could do if it lived into the Erebozoic.
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IIGSY
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I once had this idea of making a terraformed planet where a bunch of amphibious/walking fish each got their own landmass to radiate and then all the land masses merged together.
Projects
Punga: A terraformed world with no vertebrates
Last one crawling: The last arthropod

ARTH-6810: A world without vertebrates (It's ded, but you can still read I guess)

Potential ideas-
Swamp world: A world covered in lakes, with the largest being caspian sized.
Nematozoic: After a mass extinction of ultimate proportions, a single species of nematode is the only surviving animal.
Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents.

Quotes


Phylogeny of the arthropods and some related groups


In honor of the greatest clade of all time


More pictures


Other cool things


All African countries can fit into Brazil
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Eastern North America is notorious for its lack of fossils from the Mesozoic, with only recently and in the earlier days of paleontology with the discovery of Hadrosaurus by Joseph Leidy the place getting any attention. Among the few known dinosaurs so far was a hadrosaur Hypsibema.
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Artwork belongs to Joshua Knuppe

Composed of two species, H. crassicauda and H. missouriensis, Hypsibema of the Campanian stage was massive among even among hadrosaurs, thought be around four meters high and 10 to 14 meters. Fossils of Hypsibema have been recovered from both North Carolina and Missouri, and is in fact the state dinosaur of the latter state.

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Current/Completed Projects
- After the Holocene: Your run-of-the-mill future evolution project.
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Future Projects
- XenoSphere: The greatest zoo in the galaxy.
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- Riggslandia V.II: A World 150 million years in the making

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- Klowns: The biology and culture of a creepy-yet-fascinating being

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