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Obscure Taxa; For interesting or obscure organisms you'd like to share.
Topic Started: Dec 14 2016, 09:46 PM (48,960 Views)
Sphenodon
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Very interesting stuff Troll Man! I'd forgotten about tongue worms; what bizarre creatures when you think about it, crustaceans (or stem-arthropods, depending on your viewpoint) entirely specialized to live off the lungs of amniotes.
Betting $10.00 right now saying that penguin parasite's a cycloid of some kind...

And now for a couple unusual, monospecific vertebrate taxa!


The musk duck (Biziura lobata) is, to put it lightly, an extremely odd species of freshwater Australian duck. For starters, they exhibit massive levels of sexual dimorphism; females average at about 3.5 pounds in weight while males average in at about 5.25 pounds in weight, with females sometimes weighing as low as two pounds and males sometimes as high as seven pounds. Secondly, they have become virtually incapable of terrestrial movement - while similarly at home underwater to loons (they spend a significant amount of time diving beneath the surface and float very low to the water's surface when above water), they're similarly awkward on land, with their legs placed far enough behind their center of mass so as to render them nearly unable to walk. Their diet is comprised primarily of crustaceans, aquatic insects, shellfish, snails, and other such hard-shelled prey; their deep bills reflect this diet. Males possess an extremely large, pendulous sub-gular dewlap, which is capable of being inflated with air.

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A male specimen; note the dewlap, thick bill, and distinctive fan-like tail.


Males put on a distinctive, peculiar mating display incorporating a combination of loud, splashing kicks (onomatopoeically referred to as "plonking" kicks), inflation of the dewlap, and a distinctive call of "cuc cuc"; these displays are so loud as to be audible from nearly half a mile away. During this time, they also emit a strong, distinctive musky odor, which forms their namesake. Once a female is sufficiently attracted, a simple, abrupt mating process occurs, and the two part - no bonding or pairing of any sort has been recorded in the species' brooding habits. Females then lay their eggs (apparently roughly half a pound each, remarkably large for a hen of such size) in a nest formed in a secluded area, most typically among thick reeds; most nests are built on the water itself, further reflecting the species' specialization to an aquatic existence. Other parts of their reproductive and neonatal lifestyle remain shrouded in mystery - a puzzling circumstance, as musk ducks are quite widespread and currently face no distinct population declines (they are considered poor game, scarcely flying and with distasteful flesh).

Even phylogenetically are musk ducks an enigma. A now-extinct sister species, Biziura delautouri, lived in New Zealand; fairly similar to the present species, it was approximately 8% larger and seemed to be starting to trend towards flightlessness (retaining flight, but in reduced capacity) prior to becoming extinct upon the arrival of the Maori in the 1500's. Aside from that, determining its relatives has proven to be a difficult process. It has so far been traditionally classified as a stiff-tailed duck (subfamily Oxyurinae), but musk ducks seem to be only distantly related to present species of the group; it seems to be closely related to the similarly-enigmatic pink-eared duck (Malacorhynchus membranaceus), which otherwise seems to bear no close connections to other anatid species. The two are theorized to represent the remains of an ancient Gondwanan radiation of ducks, and are currently believed either to be aberrant members of Oxyurinae or to be closely related to them, with the extent of their relation being as-of-yet unknown.

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A musk duck making a profound statement.



The bowfin (Amia calva) is a species of fish located throughout the eastern United States and ranging into Canada. It is the only remaining species within the order Amiiformes, and alongside the gars (order Lepisosteiformes) constitutes the entire remaining diversity of the infraclass Holostei. Related species are known from the Jurassic onward, and the group once bore a global distribution. While outwardly appearing to be a more physically primitive member of Holostei than the gar, various molecular studies (combined with peculiarities in scale morphology) have proverbially muddied the waters on their exact taxonomic placement; most studies place them as the sister group to Lepisosteiformes (and therefore support the monophyly of Holostei), while others place Amiiformes as distinctly closer to Teleostei than the gars (therefore suggesting that Holostei may be paraphyletic). The former theory is currently the most accepted; regardless, there remains much to determine with regard to the group's systematics.

In terms of physical characteristics, bowfins are among the smallest extant holosteans, averaging out at approximately 20 inches in length (with a reported maximum of approximately 43 inches). They are named for their massively-long, short dorsal fins, which undulate as the fish swims. Another notable trait is the presence of two large, yellow-rimmed black eyespots near the upper tip of the tail; oddly, this trait is only found in males. While otherwise highly similar to the unrelated snakeheads, bowfins host a suite of primitive characteristics - they possess heterocercual tails, only partial ossification in their skeletons, a bony gular plate, and a gas bladder lung through which they are capable of breathing atmospheric air. Alongside their distinctly non-gar-like physical form, bowfins feature another distinct difference from their lepisosteiform relatives; as opposed to the non-interlocking, scute-like bony ganoid scales exhibited by gars, bowfins possess cycloid scales as with teleosts - one of the reasons for their status of minor phylogenetic uncertainty.

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A male bowfin in an aquarium. Note the distinctive eyespot.


While exclusively carnivorous (juveniles primarily prey on crustaceans, whereas adults mostly consume other fish), bowfins are quite capable as predators; when combined with their hardiness to a multitude of environments (they are capable of inhabiting both cold and warm waters, surviving in low-oxygen environments with ease due to their airbreathing capabilities; they are even capable of tolerating brackish waters to an extent) has led to a widespread distribution throughout the eastern United States and adjoining areas of Canada. Only part of this range seems to be natural; a plethora of stocking efforts over the span of large-scale human inhabitation of the area have led to the species' range being increased by an as-of-yet uncertain amount, with introduced populations easily thriving due to their adaptability. Despite this propensity to establishing invasive populations, they seem to be far less destructive to native ecologies than the infamous, similar-looking (yet completely unrelated) northern snakehead.

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A group of mixed-size juvenile bowfins. Reproductive maturity is reached between two and three years of age; adults may live for upwards of ten years in the wild, and up to thirty years in captivity.
Edited by Sphenodon, Dec 24 2016, 12:15 AM.

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Microcosm: An exceedingly small environment.
Alcyon: A planet colonized by species remodeled into new niches by genetic engineering.
Oddballs: Aberrant representatives of various biological groups compete and coexist.

..and probably some other stuff at some point (perhaps a no K-T project). Stay tuned!
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Sheather
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Thank you for finally identifying for me a pair of fish I caught seining a pondside as a child and kept in my aquarium for several months many years ago. I never knew what the hell they were, but I believe they must have been baby bowfins.
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HangingThief
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I love bowfins!

Here's another weird North American freshwater fish from a monophyletic family: the Pirate Perch (Aphredoderus sayanus).
Spoiler: click to toggle

Not an awful lot to say about it, except that its digestive and reproductive tracts are rearranged in such a way that the anus is located very far up its body, just below the gills. The best explanation for this is that it helps females deposit eggs onto vegetation with greater accuracy.
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Mole Crabs (Hippoidea) are a group of crustaceans related to hermit crabs and squat lobsters. They have stocky, egg- shaped bodies and are heavily adapted for burrowing in sandy beaches. Their stubby, shovel like legs allow them to dig through sand extremely fast, but render them incapable of walking. (But they can still use their uropods to swim.) They often live just along the shoreline, emerging to feed when a wave washes over them and quickly burrowing back under the sand when the water retreats.
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They feed by means of their feathery antennae, which they wave around to capture edible particles from the water.

Spoiler: click to toggle

The form and sand burrowing habit of mole crabs is very convergent with certain members of the primitive true crab family Raninidae.

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Oh, I've seen mole crabs before, but I never knew that that's what they were.
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This thread is a goldmine for all sorts of projects.

Dragonthunders
Dec 23 2016, 06:38 PM
The fairyflies (Mymaridae) are a family of wasps found in temperate and tropical regions throughout the world, both in terrestrial as some aquatic environments, are characterized by being the smallest insects ever, some species as small as amoebas or other protozoa.

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I would've liked to hear the reactions if someone made complex animals smaller than amoebas in a spec evo project.

The wasp's head is as big as the amoebas nucleus. :|
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How many cells do those wasp have on average?
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Troll Man
Dec 23 2016, 08:41 PM
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"A, Pentastoma tamoides, female, of the natural size; C, Male of the same, of the natural size ; B, Larva of the same, greatly enlarged, showing the two pairs of articulated limbs."
They remind me of your snail worms. Also, if these really are crustaceans then would they represent what early crustaceans may have looked like or are they just weirdly divergent species?
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Something that's not super obscure, but maybe some of you don't know about them. Inland and freshwater seals. Seals are very adaptable, as long as there is plenty of cool water and fish, they can survive and thrive away from the seas.

First, the one you've almost certainly heard of, the Baikal seal Pusa sibirica. It's the only seal to live exclusively in fresh water.
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Second, a seal that often gets skipped over because the lake it lives in is very large and salty, the Caspian Sea. Seals aren't what usually comes to mind when you think of central asia, but Caspian seals Pusa caspica are right at home.
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Both these species are closely related to the arctic Ringed seal Pusa hispida, and it's believed their made their way south following Russia's rivers south. Lake Baikal is connected directly to the sea by the Yenisei River, while the Volga flows into the Caspian sea from the far north.

Representing a first step in this process there are two distinct populations of Ringed seal in northern Europe.

You have the Ladoga ringed seal Pusa hispida ladogensis that lives in Lake Ladoga in Russia
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There is also the Saimaa ringed seal Pusa hispida saimensis that only lives in Lake Saimaa in Finland.
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Finally there are some populations of Common seals Phoca vitulina that live in Iliamna Lake in Alaska.
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Lastly the Ungava seal Phoca vitulina mellona which lives in northern Quebec around Lower Seal Lake.
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Very high quality animal. Soft, round, shaped like a friend.
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Carlos
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Indeed. Seals, cetaceans, sireanians, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, dyrosaurids, gharials and possibly ichthyosaurs all reinvaded freshwater environments.

Diving birds, though, don't seem to have had much success in this regard. I can only think of a possible lake population of razorbills in Sweden.
Edited by Carlos, Dec 24 2016, 09:10 AM.
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http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/

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The pied babbler, Turdoides bicolor, is a jay-like bird native to dry grassland environments in Southern Africa. Though it resembles a corvid or a grackle, it's a member of a lesser known group of passerines, the Leiothrichidae. The babbler is notable for its complicated social structure, which in many respects mimics a wolf pack and is formed by a single dominant breeding pair which are assisted in bringing up chicks by their grown children. Though all live in a closely knit family unit, the parents alone reproduce, with the grown young from earlier clutches taking up specific "jobs" that vary from feeding their younger siblings once they leave the nest, allowing their parents to start another brood months before they otherwise could, and standing guard as a sentinel to keep a close watch of the group for danger while they forage. The environment the babbler lives in is relatively harsh, dry and with very limited supplies of food, and without a large number of competent adults to search out food for the chicks, it's unlikely most would survive. Rather than every pair of babblers breeding every season then, risking most of them starving, it makes the most sense for the birds to pool their efforts into only a few broods which, collectively, a group can provide sufficient food for.

Pied babblers are well-documented for their habit of teaching their young in a natural example of conditioning. Adults train their chicks from a very young age to come when called by producing a purring noise each time they feed their nestlings and later, when the nestlings associate this sound with food, encouraging the chicks to leave the nest at a very young age before even they can fly by calling to them some distance from the nest site and only feeding them when they arrive. The chicks thus learn to follow their parents orders at a very young age, following the adults to feeding sites and away from predators, and unlike the parental calls of most birds, pied babblers remain responsive to the purr calls of their parents for as long as they remain in the family group - usually several years, effectively allowing the dominant pair to instruct their grown young of the duties they want them to partake in to keep the unit cohesive.

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Pied babbler; male and female in this species are monomorphic.

~~~


The pied babbler is also one of very few birds to make the social distinction not to mate with familiar individuals they regard as their kin, preventing deleterious inbreeding. Most other birds are prevented from inbreeding only through dispersal and the reduced odds of pairing with a sibling that come as a result, but this particular species, perhaps because it is naturally less inclined to disperse at maturity but rather to stay at home and assist in rearing its younger siblings, is naturally averse to pairing with its relatives and refuses so even under captive conditions. In the event a parent dies, none of its offspring will take its place, for this would require pairing with a relative; in this instance, the group will generally dissolve, the various offspring and surviving mate dispersing and meeting with unrelated partners to begin their own "packs". Even while parents remain alive as the dominant pair of a family unit, offspring will usually eventually leave on their own after several years, when the next generation takes their place as helpers for their parents, for the ideal group size for maximum reproductive success is clearly more than two, but likely has a higher limit less than ten before it becomes less efficient than it's worth.

So strong is the pied babbler's parental instinct, as well as the need for a large social group to effectively reproduce in their environment, that in the event a newly formed group is unsuccessful in reproducing - as can happen if they lack helpers to assist in feeding their chicks - they are known to sneak into a neighboring territory and kidnap a fledgling from a rival colony, luring it away from its own family with the purr call and bribing it with tidbits of food until it has been successfully lured away from its rightful family unit. The group will then rear the fledgling as its own, and the fledgling, none the wiser, will accept the thieves as its new family and become part of its kidnapper's group, assisting in the rearing of their later offspring, and not those to which it is actually related.

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Adult feeding fledgling.
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HangingThief
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JohnFaa
Dec 24 2016, 09:04 AM


Diving birds, though, don't seem to have had much success in this regard. I can only think of a possible lake population of razorbills in Sweden.
What about cormorants?
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The bladderwort (Utricularia) is a genus of carnivorous plant found in freshwater or wet soil all over the world with over 200 species. The stems are mostly located underwater/underground, and they bear dozens of little pouches with sensitive hairs. As soon as a prey brushes against the hairs, the pouch opens and fills with water, effectively swallowing the prey whole to be dissolved by digestive enzymes. After that, water is pumped out to empty the pouch again.
Aquatic species have larger sacs, over a cm wide, and eat water fleas, tadpoles, fish fries, mosquito larvae and so on. Land-dwelling species feed on the protozoa and rotifers living in waterlogged soil, and their sacs can be as small as a fraction of a millimeter. Protozoa have been reported to survive digestion for several days.

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***

A few millennia ago, the Hawai'ian archipelago, and especially Kaua'i, might as been as creative with flightless birds as New Zealand, and using mostly ducks as raw material. Hawai'ian flightless ducks including:

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Chelychelyneches quassus, with a deep, short beak resembling that of turtles...

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... Ptaiochen and Thambetochen, with tooth-like beak lamellae and a large stomach to digest plants through hindgut fermentation...

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... and Talpanas lippa, the closest thing to a spink to ever actually exist. It had extremely reduced eyes, to the point of possibly being blind, and it had stout limbs and a broad bill to burrow in the forest floor.
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Carlos
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HangingThief
Dec 24 2016, 10:48 AM
JohnFaa
Dec 24 2016, 09:04 AM


Diving birds, though, don't seem to have had much success in this regard. I can only think of a possible lake population of razorbills in Sweden.
What about cormorants?

Not really a marine group, given how only a select few species prefer saltwater biomes. Certainly not a group that evolved in marine environments, considering all Suliformes groups aside from plotopterids have freshwater origins and only recently became marine.
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LittleLazyLass
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Most palaeo-nerds on here will be familiar with this one, but people with a more passing interest in dinosaurs might not have heard of Lurdusaurus. It has the distinction of being the only non-spinosaurid, non-avian dinosaur with compelling evidence of a largely aquatic lifestyle, which has been compared to that of hippos.

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Note that the bones in white aren't the only ones known - those are the ones figured in the description paper, Taquet & Russel (1999). The bones with diagonal lines were also all preserved and described. Only the ones with vertical lines (so the skull and tail, mostly) are unpreserved. So this is actually a pretty complete holotype, not a fragmentary pair of arms.

The evidence for this comes from the bizarre proportions of the animal. It was robust and stocky, and the authors of the description paper even said it would've looked like an ankylosaur or ground sloth in life. It was also very long - although only about two meters at the hips, it's been estimated in the range of nine meters in length, and about five and a half tons in weight. The name "heavy lizard" was certainly apt. In addition, it had a proportionally quite long neck. All of this make it look a bit sauropod-like, and indeed it was probably sauropod like. Although I generally don't like Luis Rey's palaeoart, his reconstruction really captures the wacky proportions very well.

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Notice the large, low to the ground belly, and just generally how huge it feels. This was made with only the paper to go off of, having pre-dated the skeletal above, as far as I know. It was produced for Tom Holtz's Dinosaurs, which is where the semi-aquatic lifestyle was first suggested.

Other evidence comes from its bizarre hand anatomy. The metatarsals were robust and short, in accordance with the robust build of the animal. The digits weren't strongly compacted and would've spread, which would've helped it move around in soft substrates. Incidentally, this is a great example of how more primitive iguanodontians weren't just shrunk down hadrosaurs - Lurdusaurus is within hadrosauriformes, around Ouranosaurus and Iguanodon, and even it didn't have the connected digits making a single pad that hadrosaurs had.

This evidence for a semi-aquatic lifestyle all fit very nicely with the fact that is came from the Late Aptian-Early Albian Erlhaz Formation of Niger in Northern Africa, which most of you know was a tropical freshwater fluvial environment, a precursor to the Baharia formation, overlying Echkar formation, and Kem Kem Beds, when and where Spinosaurus and contemporary fauna lived. Anyway, the Erlhaz Formation has plenty of familiar names as well - Suchomimus, Sarcosuchus, Nigersaurus, and Ouranosaurus all also hail from this formation. In addition, slightly less well-known taxa like Anatosuchus, a bizarre notosucian, Kryptops, an abelisaur, Araripesuchus, a very successful smaller notosuchian (it's also found in the Eckhar Formation), Erlhazosaurus, a dryosaurid known only from a femora, and Eocarchia, a carcharodontosaur, also all hail from the formation. Lastly, several bones and over forty teeth that probably come from multiple taxa from across all of North Africa used to grouped into the species Elaphrosaurus iguidiensis, none of which has ever been described well enough to assign past neotheropoda. At least some of this material might have came from the Erlhaz Formation.

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Julio Lacerda's take on semi-aquatic Lurdusaurus. It depicts it from the side, which shows the long neck better than Rey's reconstruction.

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This last one is my personal favorite, as it captures its size and robustness in addition to putting it in a semi-aquatic lifestyle.
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lamna
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Here is one I mentioned in SWHTYT, but it's interesting to bring up again.

Chendytes lawi was a large, flightless sea duck that lived on the California coast. Unfortunatly, it's not the kind of animal that gets a lot of media attention, so their is not a whole lot of info on what it was up to, but I have to assume it was eating molluscs and crustaceans like eiders and other sea ducks.

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One of the very interesting thing, for me is it's extinction. You expect human caused extinctions in North America to either die out some time between 11000 BC and 8000 BC, or to have died out since Europeans invaded. But Chendytes didn't. It survived alongside humans, who did hunt it, for 8000 years, dying out around the time the Roman Republic was starting to become more than just a city in Italy.

Does that mean it was in a very slow decline through this time? Or perhaps things changed at that time pushing them over the edge. Might be interesting to know about climatic or cultural changes at this time. This would overlap with the Roman Warm Period, but I don't know if that effected the Pacific in any noticeable way.

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