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Obscure Taxa; For interesting or obscure organisms you'd like to share.
Topic Started: Dec 14 2016, 09:46 PM (48,932 Views)
kusanagi
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Insect Illuminati Get Shrekt
Jul 22 2017, 10:56 AM
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?
Yes a giant plankronivorous species of Onchorhynchus is claimed by two Wikipedia pages but I am not an ichthyologist so I have no idea how late it survived. Science papers I read incidentally state that O. rastratus was present no later than the Pliocene else did not even make it through into the Pliocene. This late extinction might be another Wikipedia error because sources contradict the entry and O. rastratus seems out of place amid the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions. Anadromous salmon and trout may be susceptible to human hunting probably with a noticable impact since at least the Upper Paleolithic, but in northern Europe it was into the medieval period before the protein demands of rising human populations severely impacted freshwater fish stocks and people turned to saltwater herrings instead. So I doubt Pleistocene Americans ever made a salmonid extinct, hunter gatherers don't impact fishes like that.

Edited by kusanagi, Jul 22 2017, 06:04 PM.
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IIGSY
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Salinella salve is a species of microscopic animal. It was given it's own phylum, monoblastozoa. It was discovered in slat pans in Argentina in 1892. It has not been found since and it's existence is dubious.
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Didn't Sayornis bring that up upthread?
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kusanagi
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Then I nominate Maotianoascus, a scleroctenophoran ctenophore with eight way radial symmetry, rigid body walls and anatomical similarities to the Ediacaran frond organisms. It not a problematicum its a ctenophore, yet it has a skeletonisation lost in modern neotenous comb jellies or never present in their ancestors and it solved one of the riddles of the Precambrian together with Rangea. Since sponges, ctenophores and bilaterians were already present in the Ediacaran the presence of ctenophores was expected at that time but the affinities of the rangeomorph frond organisms remained controversial until recently. (There is still question about the cephalozoans, dipleurozoans, trilobozoans or the other Ediacaran clades and one-offs though.)
Edited by kusanagi, Jul 26 2017, 09:16 AM.
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Sceynyos-yos
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Socratea exorrhizaWalking palm
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A walking tree? I agree: it isn't a common sight, yet Socratea exorrhiza can walk. Well, sort of. This tree's roots grow from the base of the trunk high above ground, making it appear as though it is standing on stilts. New roots constantly emerge from a higher point than older ones below. Over time the tree levitates itself off the ground, while the lower, older roots rot and fall away. The new roots grow towards better light and consequently the tree's position changes horizontally as well. The process is very slow and the palm does not seem to visibly walk, but over a period of a year, it can actually move up to 1 meter from its original position. The genus Socratea contains five species of walking palms found in tropical America. It belongs to the Arecaceae or "palm trees" family which has around 2600 species.
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Flisch
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Wow, so unrealistic. Would never work in real life.
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Except in a sense it is unrealistic, as it's accepted that despite the name the walking palm doesn't really move at all. It was hypothesized that they 'walked' in the past, as their root structures were unable to be explained (this was picked up by tour guides, allowing the idea to be spread). More recent and detailed studies show that they don't, one of the top researcher of the species Gerardo Avalos described it as a "myth". While some of the roots died, the trunk remained in the same place.

I would recommend trying to do a bit more research to prevent spreading misinformation. Even the Wikipedia article describes that the idea was disproved and links to the studies.

There are alternative explanations, but they aren't proven either. However, we do know that the plant has never been observed moving from its original spot. There's a reason why there's no time lapse footage of it happening.
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Yiqi15
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Tropical Africa and Latin America call home to a highly obscure family of arachnids known as the hooded tickspiders, or Ricinulei. These arachnids are most closely related to armoured group which went extinct around the Early Permian, though they only share a locking mechanism which functions during copulation. Also notable is that they lack eyes, instead having light-sensitive cells on the top of their heads, as well as pedipalps like a spider's, almost like a troglodyte.

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kusanagi
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Aug 3 2017, 11:14 PM
Except in a sense it is unrealistic, as it's accepted that despite the name the walking palm doesn't really move at all. It was hypothesized that they 'walked' in the past, as their root structures were unable to be explained (this was picked up by tour guides, allowing the idea to be spread). More recent and detailed studies show that they don't, one of the top researcher of the species Gerardo Avalos described it as a "myth". While some of the roots died, the trunk remained in the same place.

I would recommend trying to do a bit more research to prevent spreading misinformation. Even the Wikipedia article describes that the idea was disproved and links to the studies.

There are alternative explanations, but they aren't proven either. However, we do know that the plant has never been observed moving from its original spot. There's a reason why there's no time lapse footage of it happening.
Still theoretically easier than a sundew becoming a Venus flytrap though.
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Rodlox
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Yiqi15
Aug 4 2017, 11:31 AM
Tropical Africa and Latin America call home to a highly obscure family of arachnids known as the hooded tickspiders, or Ricinulei. These arachnids are most closely related to armoured group which went extinct around the Early Permian, though they only share a locking mechanism which functions during copulation. Also notable is that they lack eyes, instead having light-sensitive cells on the top of their heads, as well as pedipalps like a spider's, almost like a troglodyte.
still cool how they're an example of centaurism, only with their second pair of legs rather than their first.
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as you probably know Australia fossil record is scarse and very poor,with big gaps both in the mesozoic and the cenozoic,of this second era pre-plehistocene remans are unknown at least to most people.

Malleodectes was a medium size marsupial of the order Dasyuromorphia(numbats,thylaacine amd marsupial mice) that lived 17 million years ago around the middle or late miocene,is located in its own monotypic familie which seems to diverge from the rest 23 million years ago.tthe craneal remains show it had a rather weird dental structure that is said to be not found on any mammal alive or even extinct,is described as having "blunt hammer like teeth" or more exactly ball-peen-like premolar
and compare by some to the pink-tongue skink,a lizard sepcialised in snails,so is probable that this marsupial ate hard shelled gastropods.

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some craneal references showing the teeth

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it seems recosntructions are not super rare but never heard of this creature myself and proabably at least some of you neither

* very big images are on spoiler,former is some look from above of the jaw second is a DA paleoart piece
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
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Beetleboy
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Wow, cool!
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Sphenodon
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Picking up where we left off, several other taxa of vermivorous murines, spread throughout a multitude of radiations, exist in Southeast Asia; outside of the Philippines, the main hotbed of shrew rat diversity belongs to the island of Sulawesi. Most of these genera and species are also fairly poorly-known, with many discovered only within the past twenty or so years.

One of the more noteworthy of these taxa, described in 2012, is Paucidentomys vermidax. Endemic to Sulawesi, it is markedly similar in its appearance to the Rhynchomys shrew-like rats, to which it is highly convergent (convergent evolution being a common phenomenon among the Southeast Asian shrew-rats); it possesses reduced eyes, a highly elongated rostrum, stubby limbs, and a soft pelage, as well as a completely vermiphagous diet based off of stomach content analysis.

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Image of a specimen of P. vermidax in the wild.

Where Paucidentomys differs most strikingly from the Rhynchomys murids - and indeed all other mammals - is in regards to its dentition. The trend of increasing vestigiality in the molars of the various types of shrew-rats has reached its logical end point in Paucidentomys, which possesses no molars at all (in adulthood, at least - juveniles are as of yet unknown, and in theory could possess molars at some point in their development as seen in the platypus); possessing only four incisors total and a dental formula of 1:0:0:0, it is therefore the only toothed mammal to lack molars entirely. Another odd trait of Paucidentomys lies in its incisors, which uniquely among rodents are bicuspid.

Comparison of the skulls of P. vermidax and R. norvegicus

Another taxon of shrew-rats, described only in 2015, is Hyorhinomys stuempki. Also found on Sulawesi, this species is less morphologically derived than Paucidentomys, but still possesses some oddities of its own, such as the absence of the coronoid process in its jaw. Its most noteworthy factor, though, pertains to its naming: due to its particularly "hog-like" nose, the discoverers of the species nominated that is common name be the Sulawesi snouter in reference to The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades. The species' epithet, stuempki, reflects this, being referential to the book's fictional scientist, Harald Stümpke.

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Left: image of a live specimen of H. stuempki. Right: skull of H. stuempki.

Interestingly, Hyorhinomys isn't the only shrew rat named in reference to the snouters; another example exists in another Sulawesi endemic, Tate's shrew rat (Tateomys rhinogradoides).

Apart from the many taxa of Southeast Asian shrew rats, there still remains one other group of rodents with animal-leaning dietary habits: Ichthyomini, a tribe of sigmodontine rodents ranging from Oaxaca, Mexico to central Peru. Distributed across five genera, the group's members typically inhabit cold-water riverine environments at fairly high elevations, possessing webbed feet, broad tails, and dense pelts as a result of this lifestyle. All members of the group appear to rely exclusively upon animal matter for sustenance; freshwater invertebrates and small fish appear to comprise the bulk of this diet, with the exact composition between species varying with size and location.

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Skull of a Stolzmann's fish-eating rat (Ichthyomys stolzmanni)

Interestingly, while most species tend to be sparsely described and difficult to locate, reports suggest that Stolzmann's fish-eating rat (Ichthyomys stolzmanni) has benefited from the expansion trout farming in its native Peru, with predation by the rats upon young trout reportedly being a common occurrence; while the exact extent of this exploitation and its impacts on the species' population remain unclear, it has nonetheless come to be seen as a nuisance to the locals of trout-farming areas, who have taken to conducting burns of the grassland banking nearby rivers in attempting to remove the rats from the area. Other species are threatened by factors such as riparian pollution and habitat loss; while data on the exact ranges of most species is often deficient, most ichthyomyin species appear to be highly localized, making habitat destruction a serious threat to their continued existence.

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A specimen of I. stolzmanni captured at a trout farm in eastern Peru.
Edited by Sphenodon, Aug 6 2017, 02:59 PM.

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Inceptis
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Stromatoveris psygmoglena is an enigmatic organism from the Chengjiang deposits-big surprise there, huh? It is enigmatic, though in the fact that it resembles some Ediacaran fossils, even though all known Vendians died at the start of the Cambrian or immediately after.

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However, one hypothesis exists that it is a sessile, basal ctenophore, or closely related to ctenophores. Now, at first, this seems a little out of place-true, the tightly packed segments could resemble comb rows, but all ctenophores we know of are active, swimming predators, right? Not so. Enter Coeloplana sp. and friends. These guys live on the sea bottom, attached to various different objects and filter out plankton with their long tentacles. These guys are uncommon, but so far they constitute a third of ctenophore species, and we're likely to find more.

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Platyctenida is the only benthic group of organism in the phylum Ctenophora. Ranging in size 15 cm and below, they have dorsalventrally flattened, oval bodies and secondarily bilaterally symmetrical, platyctenids look very much like nudibranchs or flatworms and are often confused for them. All but 1 species of platyctenids do not possess the iconic ctene rows (the ciliated comb-rows) that distinguishes the Ctenophores but they still possess the pair of tentilla-bearing tentacles and adhesive collocytes that also characterize the phylum in pores along the dorsal surface.[1] They cling to and creep on surfaces by everting the pharynx and using it as a muscular "foot".

They are usually cryptically-colored, live on rocks, algae, soft coral, or the body surfaces of other invertebrates; primarily certain species of Cnidarians and Echinoderms (primarily the genus Coeloplana sp.). They are often revealed by their long tentacles with many sidebranches, seen streaming off the back of the animal into the current. They tend to be ectosymbiotic with the organisms they live on.[2]

Where as most Ctenophores are hermaphroditic, certain platyctenids have been found to be asexual, and furthermore, where other Ctenophores have been found to reproduce using external fertilization, certain species of platyctenids have been found to use brood pouches.[3]

Platyctenida are considered to be a phylogenetically young group along with the orders Lobata and Beroida and are believed to have stemmed from an ancestral version of the order Cydippida, after some kind of bottleneck effect in the phylum. This has been supported by strong morphological and developmental data, specifically the sharing of what has been termed a "Cydippida-like" larva form in all 4 orders. Platyctenida is thought to be a polyphyletic group.[4]


It says it's a young group, but I can't help but notice the similarities they have to Stromatoveris.

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This was getting fairly big.
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HangingThief
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The grotto salamander (Eurycea spelaea) is a species of blind, lungless brook salamander found in caves in a few midwestern US states.

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What makes it interesting isn't its troglobitism (cave salamanders are pretty run of the mill) but its diet. They were observed deliberately consuming guano from roosting bats, and analysis showed that the salamanders converted protein from the guano into muscle tissue. Guano from gray bats is apparently 54 percent protein, compared to 44 percent protein for stream dwelling crustaceans (a more normal food item for a cave salamander) and 23 percent protein for Big Mac hamburger meat (yes, that's what they tested.) Apparently bats have such a rushed digestion process that the end product has nutritional value similar to or exceeding the arthropods they eat.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1560199/#!po=50.0000

As far as I know this is the second confirmed case of a salamander feeding on anything that isn't living prey or carrion. The other is a siren that sometimes consumes aquatic plants. There's also something about an Aneides salamander possibly using its teeth to scrape lichen or algae from tree trunks, but I don't remember where I read that.


Hey.


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