A
Anonymous10/22/26, 00:34No.5169851Extinct Phenotypes
>Marine reptiles in the Mesozoic swam in a way not shared by any animal alive today.
>Sabertooth predators existed all throughout prehistory and just happened to die out right as the modern age arrived.
This shits so cool, normally when studying extinct animals you can look at living ones for reference, but that's not possible here. Paleontologists have to start from square one to figure out what the fuck these animals were doing. Any other examples of this?
37
Replies
A
Anon10/22/26, 01:32No.5169863
The Ancycloceratina were a large family of externally shelled squids that were just the weirdest fuckers ever.
The one major thing that unifies this group is that their shells are bafflingly strange.
Knotted, extremely long and thin and looping around on themselves, forming long screw shapes, etc.Why they would ever evolve to look like this and it somehow propagate for millions of years is totally unknown.
If it is sexual selection, it makes peacocks look restrained.
A
Anon10/22/26, 01:50No.5169868
Would the general theropod body plan count? we don't have any bipedal animals that stand horizontally and have arms and long tails
A
Anon10/22/26, 06:26No.5169907
Unless I'm mistaken, ceratopsids were the only animals to have ever evolved bony frills. Other animals have evolved elaborate horns and crests, like living bovids for the former and hadrosaurs for the latter, but the frills seen in ceratopsids are completely unique to them. The sheer number of ceratopsids known from Laramidia made them ubiquitous like bovids in Africa or birds of paradise in Papua New Guinea as well, which makes it even stranger that this adaptation has only evolved once. You would expect other animals to have convergently evolved bony frills at some point.>Sabertooth predators existed all throughout prehistory and just happened to die out right as the modern age arrived.
Glyptodonts like Doedicurus and meiiolanid stem-turtles both were also the last animals to have evolved clubbed tails for defense and they died out just a few thousand years ago after encountering humans. They converged on the same body plan as ankylosaurs during the Jurassic and the Cretaceous, not just with the clubbed tails but the body armor as well.
A
Anon10/22/26, 12:22No.5169963
No living animals have an euryapsid skull. it's similar to synapsids (one postorbital fenestra), but it was located higher on the skull between different skull bones.
It was found in ichtyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and placodonts
A
Anon10/22/26, 12:26No.5169965
Whatever Helicoprion was doing with that weird pizza cutter mouth
A
Anon10/22/26, 16:05No.5170004
Sabertoothed animals appear to be a Synapsid-line staple.
Whenever sabertoothed animals appear, they are calling back to their Permian ancestors, the first sabertooths. It's in their DNA.
It's kino.
A
Anon10/22/26, 18:03No.5170022
That one herbivorous archosaur with HORNS PROTRUDING OUT OF ITS SHOULDERS
A
Anon10/22/26, 19:42No.5170035
Sails pretty much died with the dinosaurs. There are still some reptiles that technically have them but they're meme tier compared to pic related.
A
Anon10/23/26, 18:17No.5170234
As far as i'm aware Carnotaurus was the only predator ever to have had proper horns
A
Anon10/24/26, 03:42No.5170329
the pterosaur quadruped launch has no modern equivalent nor is there any animal that could reasonably evolve it again
