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Obscure Taxa; For interesting or obscure organisms you'd like to share.
Topic Started: Dec 14 2016, 09:46 PM (48,933 Views)
Nyarlathotep
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Inceptis
Jul 17 2017, 01:43 PM
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).

Posted Image

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.
Oh the speccing potential :rolleyes:
Edited by Nyarlathotep, Jul 17 2017, 05:47 PM.
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Fazaner
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Maybe not as obscure as other animals here, but still needs more attention.

Posted Image

This magnificent horns once belonged to Eucladoceros , bush antlered deer, a genus of several species ranging from Europe to China. The animal in picture is a Eucladoceros dicranios from Europe.

The deer was up to 1,8 m tall in shoulders, while antlers had incredible 1,7 meter in width. While smaller than more famous Megaloceros it's antlers make it stand out. Looking like a well branched bush (like it's name) it's antlers must have been on hell of a sight. I know few hunters that would love to have a opportunity to hunt those, but that would be a waste of one magnificent life.
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lamna
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Just a quick one. When we think about the Pleistocene we generally think of those in Europe and North Asia, the Americas and Australia.

Africa we generally think of as being as being a continent spared these extinctions. And while, thankfully we did not loose as much as we did elsewhere, Africa was not untouched.

Two very large species of bovids died out during this time.

The first is Megalotragus, it was a antelope related to wildebeest, bonteboks but most closely to hartebeest. Megalotragus was by far the largest member of Alcelaphinae, at 1.4 meres at the shoulder it was similar in size to kudu and eland. In addition to its large size, it had some very large, curved horns. Must have been quite the sight.

Posted Image

Pelorovis was a large cow, probably closely related to African buffalo. It too was a giant among its kind, one of the largest ruminants ever, with average animals weighing more than a tonne, and some bulls weighing as much as two tonnes. To give you an idea of how large these animals are, that's the same weight of black rhinoceros.

And like Megalotragus, it had some incredibly impressive horns to go along with it.
Posted Image

There is even rock art that may depict it.
Posted Image

Posted Image

So why did these animals die out when most of the rest of Africa's megafauna survived? Hard to say, though their large size and huge horns probably didn't help, along with a drying Africa and expanding human population.
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IIGSY
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Did the Pleistocene oceans also have large numbers of megafauna comparable to land?
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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)

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.

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Nyarlathotep
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lamna
Jul 19 2017, 10:15 AM
Just a quick one. When we think about the Pleistocene we generally think of those in Europe and North Asia, the Americas and Australia.

Africa we generally think of as being as being a continent spared these extinctions. And while, thankfully we did not loose as much as we did elsewhere, Africa was not untouched.

Two very large species of bovids died out during this time.

The first is Megalotragus, it was a antelope related to wildebeest, bonteboks but most closely to hartebeest. Megalotragus was by far the largest member of Alcelaphinae, at 1.4 meres at the shoulder it was similar in size to kudu and eland. In addition to its large size, it had some very large, curved horns. Must have been quite the sight.

Posted Image

Pelorovis was a large cow, probably closely related to African buffalo. It too was a giant among its kind, one of the largest ruminants ever, with average animals weighing more than a tonne, and some bulls weighing as much as two tonnes. To give you an idea of how large these animals are, that's the same weight of black rhinoceros.

And like Megalotragus, it had some incredibly impressive horns to go along with it.
Posted Image

There is even rock art that may depict it.
Posted Image

Posted Image

So why did these animals die out when most of the rest of Africa's megafauna survived? Hard to say, though their large size and huge horns probably didn't help, along with a drying Africa and expanding human population.
There are cave paintings in the Sahara which may indicate that Pelorvis and Sivatherium survived till at least 6000BC if not later. Pelorvis seems second only to Bison latifrons among the largest known bovids, and the latter outweighs a modern giraffe.

Don't forget the Carthaginian elephant and Atlas bear, both of which also died quite recently.
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LittleLazyLass
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Haven't those cave paintings been doubted now and then?
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Carlos
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African megafaunal extinctions have been linked to better hunting tool technology.
Lemuria:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/

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lamna
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Insect Illuminati Get Shrekt
Jul 19 2017, 10:32 AM
Did the Pleistocene oceans also have large numbers of megafauna comparable to land?
Yeah, but it's all still around. Aside from Steller's sea cow and Atlantic grey whales.

We've lost a lot in the sea, but it's mostly numbers rather than whole species.
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Fósseis Vibos: Reserva Natural


34 MYH, 4 tonne dinosaur.
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Are nipples or genitals necessary, lamna?
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lamna
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Time for the obscurest of the obscure.

The Canary Island Big Bird. The Canary Islands are perhaps not as famous for their native wildlife as they should be, eclipsed by other island chains like Hawaii and the Galapagos.

But one animal that lived there is fantastically mysterious, as the only remains we have are large egg shells from the Miocene.

What laid them is a real mystery, some have suggested they could be Pelagornithid eggs, but generally they are regarded as belonging to a Ratite.

Originally they were described as being elephant bird eggs, because of the large pore size, though that is probably just because they are big eggs, not because a Madagascan bird also lived on the Canary Islands.

Information on these is extremely limited online, and we only have the eggs. But judging from this video, these must have belonged to birds as big as ratites, assuming no kiwi madness was going on.
http://www.lanzaroteinformation.com/content/giant-fossil-eggs-lanzarote

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Fósseis Vibos: Reserva Natural


34 MYH, 4 tonne dinosaur.
T.Neo
 
Are nipples or genitals necessary, lamna?
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Archeoraptor
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canarias also had one of the fewfligtgless paserines
Astarte an alt eocene world,now on long hiatus but you never know
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kusanagi
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Jul 19 2017, 10:32 AM
Did the Pleistocene oceans also have large numbers of megafauna comparable to land?
No it didn't. The loss of coastal habitat during the Pliocene caused an earlier marine extinction including most sirenians, megalodon, Thalassocnus, pelagornids and desmostylians. Apart from the extinctions of island nesting tubenoses there were no anthropogenic extinctions of marine tetrapods till the early modern period. Save possibly two marine otters on Sardinia and now there is a flightless eider that are left to explain, but the Channel Island auk and Chendytes are thought to have died out because of climate change owing to their long coexistence with the native people and the actual timing of their disappearence date.

lamna: eggshell morphology can discriminate neognaths from palaeognaths.

Nyarlathotep: This paper summarises the Pleistocene/Holocene extinctions and their dates. Pelorovis probably got to the mid Holocene before facing competition from pastoralists and their domestic herds. Oddly there are no dates given for Holocene sivathere material despite its presence in the rock art making a cryptid. In the Cameroonian savannahs a large folkloric animal with "six horns" (ossicones?) is referred to as the ngoubou and it might plausibly refer to the Saharan Sivatherium. Then there is the curious Songhai word for camel (*yo) which is not loaned from other languages and suggests the Pleistocene wild camel of Africa may have survived into the Holocene near the Sahara. Iwo Eluru is a fossil hominin of very late date perhaps early Holocene, that has been interpreted as a female counterpart of Kabwe: historically Kabwe was interpreted as a so-called African Australoid but Kabwe and Iwo Eluru are clearly too archaic for crown H. sapiens. Unlike the end Pleistocene extinction event other continents where hindgut fermenters and browsers were worst hit, African extinctions were mostly ruminant.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001282521300175X

And for an odd organism, I nominate Salinella.
Edited by kusanagi, Jul 22 2017, 09:28 AM.
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kusanagi
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Inceptis
Jul 17 2017, 01:43 PM
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).

Posted Image

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.
Owing to the fact actinopterygians on land including bichirs out of water tend to crawl primarily via their pectoral fins, the use of pelvic fins by this species is interesting. Lungfishes and elasmobranchs will walk on the bottom with their pelvic fins alone in a similar way to underwater tetrapods. The only pelvic-walking benthic teleosts are specialised so pelvic-driven locomotion seems primitively lost in actinopterygians and had to reappear in certain teleosts.
Edited by kusanagi, Jul 22 2017, 09:57 AM.
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IIGSY
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kusanagi
Jul 22 2017, 09:10 AM
Insect Illuminati Get Shrekt
Jul 19 2017, 10:32 AM
Did the Pleistocene oceans also have large numbers of megafauna comparable to land?
No it didn't. The loss of coastal habitat during the Pliocene caused an earlier marine extinction including most sirenians, megalodon, Thalassocnus, pelagornids and desmostylians. Apart from the extinctions of island nesting tubenoses there were no anthropogenic extinctions of marine tetrapods till the early modern period. Save possibly two marine otters on Sardinia and now there is a flightless eider that are left to explain, but the Channel Island auk and Chendytes are thought to have died out because of climate change owing to their long coexistence with the native people and the actual timing of their disappearence date.
Any notable large Pleistocene fish?
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
Online Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Rodlox
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kusanagi
Jul 22 2017, 09:10 AM
And for an odd organism, I nominate Salinella.
?
.---------------------------------------------.
Parts of the Cluster Worlds:
"Marsupialless Australia" (what-if) & "Out on a Branch" (future evolution) & "The Earth under a still sun" (WIP)
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kusanagi
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Rodlox
Jul 22 2017, 12:55 PM
kusanagi
Jul 22 2017, 09:10 AM
And for an odd organism, I nominate Salinella.
?
Salinella, the most highbrow of cryptids.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32622/title/The-Salinella-salve-Mystery/
http://blog.devicerandom.org/2013/10/20/salinella-or-the-last-mythological-animal/
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