#obscure fossil synapsids

[obscurefossils]

Milosaurus mccordi

Milosaurus was a genus of haptodontiform synapsid from the Late Carboniferous Period. Its type species is M. mccordi. Its known specimens were found in Jasper County, Illinois, USA. Milosaurus is one of the first amniotes to have a body mass above 20kg and is incredibly important in understanding the evolution of early synapsids.

Milosaurus mccordi is named for Mr. Milo Flynn and Mr. Chester McCord on whose property the fossils were found.

Its autapomorphies include mainly the odd morphology of the femur, which consists of an anteroposteriorly broad and slightly flattened anterior condyle, a uniquely cylindrical posterior condyle with a flattened distal surface, and an unusually prominent internal trochanter. Its fifth metatarsal also has a broad proximal end.

Milosaurus is known from its holotype and nearby referred fossils which consist of a pelvis, hind limb and pes, many caudual vertebrae, a lumbar vertebra, a lumbar or caudal neural spine, a presacral rib (which may actually be a femur), and a small chunk of maxilla containing two teeth. Originally, the advanced features of its skeleton placed it certainly within Sphenacodontia, but its retention of primitive features placed it more basal than Varanops. A more recent cladistic analysis from 2018 places it within Haptodontiformes, outside of Varanopsidae. The additional referred teeth, dorsal rib (femur), dorsal vertebrae, and neural arch are argued to not necessarily represent a member of Milosaurus due to additional pelycosaur discoveries in the area and are not included in the analysis.

Citation: Original description paper, Re-examination of the taxon

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milosaurus

[alphynix]

Crystal Palace Field Trip Part 1: Walking With Victorian Monsters

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs take their name from the original Crystal Palace, a glass-paned exhibition building originally constructed for a World's Fair in Hyde Park in 1851.

In 1854 the structure was relocated 14km (~9 miles) south to the newly-created Crystal Palace Park, and a collection of over 30 life-sized statues of prehistoric animals were commissioned to accompany the reopening – creating a sort of Victorian dinosaur theme park – sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins with consultation from paleontologist Sir Richard Owen.

The Palace building itself burned down completely in 1936, and today only the ruins of its terraces remain in the northeast of the park grounds.

The Crystal Palace building then and now Left image circa 1854 (public domain) Right image circa 2011 by Mark Ahsmann (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Six sphinx statues based on the Great Sphinx of Tanis also survive up among the Palace ruins, flanking some of the terrace staircases. They fell into serious disrepair during the latter half of the 20th century, but in 2017 they all finally got some much-needed preservation work, repairing them and restoring their original Victorian red paint jobs.

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…But let's get to what we're really here for. Dinosaurs! (…And assorted other prehistoric beasties!)

The "Dinosaur Court" down in the south end of the park still remains to this day, displayed across several islands in a man-made lake. Over the decades they've been through multiple cycles of neglect and renovation, and are currently cared for by the London Borough of Bromley (Crystal Palace Park Trust are due to take over custodial duties in September 2023), with promotion and fundraising assistance from organizations like Historic England and the Friends of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs charity.

Just about 170 years old now, the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs represent fifteen different types of fossil creatures known to 1850s Victorian science, with only three actual dinosaur species featured. Although often derided for being outdated and very inaccurate by modern standards, they were actually incredibly good efforts at the time, especially taking into account that the field of paleontology was still in its very early days.

They also just have a lot of charm, with toothy grins and surprisingly dynamic poses.

Unfortunately on the day I visited in early August 2023 most of the statues were heavily obscured by plant growth, both on their islands and on the sides of the paths they can usually be viewed from. Since I'd seen images from about a month ago showing things being less overgrown, this was probably just some unlucky timing on my part coinciding with some explosive summer foliage growth.

The first island on the trail features a few Permian and Triassic animals which were only known from fragmentary remains in the 1850s. These "labyrinthodonts" were recognized as having similarities to both amphibians and reptiles, and so were depicted with boxy toothy jaws, warty skin, stumpy tails, and long frog-like back legs.

Today we'd call these particular animals temnospondyl amphibians, specifically Mastodonsaurus, and we know they were actually shaped more like giant salamanders with longer flatter crocodilian-like jaws, smaller legs, and long paddle-like tails.

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Somewhere in the foliage beyond this specific "labyrinthodont" there was also supposed to be a pair of dicynodonts, but I couldn't see much of them at all and didn't manage to get a remotely visible photograph.

Crystal Palace Dicynodon when much less overgrown Left photo by London looks (CC BY 2.0) Right photo by Loz Pycock (CC BY SA 2.0)

These Dicynodon are depicted as looking like sabre-toothed turtles complete with shells. That was fairly speculative even for the time, but considering only their weird turtle-beaked-and-walrus-tusked skulls were known it was probably the best guess Hawkins and Owen had. Today we know these animals were actually synapsids related to modern mammals, but Victorian understanding considered them to be a type of reptile.

Modern reconstructions of dicynodonts have a slightly different face shape, along with squat pig-like bodies and semi-sprawling limbs. They may have had fur, but currently the only known actual skin impressions from the genus Lystrosaurus show leathery bumpy hairless skin.

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Next time: the Jurassic and Cretaceous sculptures!

[altamaranempire]

You always seem really knowledgeable and full of ideas about troll lusi! I was wondering, do you have any ideas about that Lusi would be for mid bloods?

OOOh what a cool question! I’ll do my best to come up with some ideas<333

OKAY so Idk if we know -that- much about mid-bloods in canon, but we can make a few assumptions at least:

We know from Mindfang’s diaries that dragons do not usually pick teals as their troll of choice, so we can rule out dragons as the norm. (I’m sure a lower blooded troll can still totally get lucky though, obvs.)

There’s also a bit of correlation between lusus size and caste with the canon trolls! It’s not perfect but roughly speaking it seems like the lower bloods have some of the smaller lusi (tinker-bull, aradia’s lil kangaroo looking thing) and with higher up we have goatdad, spidermom and g’lbgolyb. There’s some wiggle, but we’re probably talking about something medium-large, maybe something that could carry a young troll on their back or in their arms?

Lower blooded trolls also seem more likely to get mammalian (or mammal-like) lusi- we have the aforementioned kangaroo-thing, a fairy bull, and in hive swap a ground sloth? With the closer you go towards high blood, there’s a lean towards the mythical and strange like from yellow up we have a two-headed humanoid thing, a deer-feline????, a two-mouthed cat, then pyralspite, the mother grub and THEN some more mish-mash mythical animals, the centaur and the sea goat/capricornus before sliding into sea beasties.

I’m starting to go off topic here I think, but TLDR it looks like you’d probably see some mid-sized, probably mammalian or mammal based mythology based lusi in the mid blooded range! There’s a lot of ‘m’s in that sentence wheeze.

Possible mythical ideas might be:

Peryton, roughly speaking, a stag with wings and feathers.Cactus cat, a spiny cat-like animal with a branching tail, could be good for jades who dwell in deserts?Leucrotta, one of my personal faves, a weird badger-deer-reptile-hyena thing with gems for eyes- an obscure mythical animal popularised by DnD. It’s ‘magical’ eyes could be handy for a lower mid-blood who still rolled some kind of psychic power.

Some extinct animal ideas (going on the ground sloth from hive swap):

Sabre-toothed felines, you may be like ‘oh not smilodon again’ but actually there are a few different extinct ‘sabre-cats’ not all of which are even closely related! This may give you some cool ideas!Entelodont, aka the ‘hell pig’. Not actually a pig but name says it all.‘Synapsids’, aka ‘mammal-like reptiles’ there are *loads* of fossils and reconstructions to look at of all sizes, some of them with weird af skulls and bodies, they’re also basically a free design for a weird chimeric looking creature without having to try!

Hope these are useful<3

[tyrantisterror]

ATOM Create A Kaiju Contest Entry List

We’re over two weeks into the ATOM Create a Kaiju Contest with a little under five weeks remaining, and already there are a plethora of amazing entries!  So many, in fact, that I figure it’d be helpful to compile them in a list - both for me and for those of you who are still working on yours and want to check out the competition.

If your entry does not appear on this list and was posted as of 3/16/2017 it was lost in the mail (so to speak).  Please contact me to make sure I’ve seen it.

For those whose entries ARE on the list, know that you are still free to revise your entries before the due date - nothing will be judged until March 16th, so if you think of some important revision you are free to make the change!

The full list of entries is after the cut!

@raffleupagus‘s entries:

Pogo Tomiyama, the giant one-legged gnat

Kaerugon, an enormous heroic toad

@bugcthulhu‘s entries:

Bocagran, a daffy, floating prehistoric salamander

Dreg, a tumorous kaiju driven by its insatiable hunger who sometimes reverts to smaller, pathetic form as a result of its unstable biology

@takingturnsatrandom‘s entries:

Blasteroid, a heroic, human-loving starfish

Sibaun, a mangy coyote monster

Hammerbeak, an axe-faced quadrupedal bird

Vermamand, a colossal flatworm

Herpradon, an amphibious chameleon

@cerothenull‘s entries:

Aiguan: a dragon-like flying retrosaur that adapted to live in the sea rather than fly through the air

Osteogre: an improbable hybrid of aquatic retrosaur and placoderm that vaguely resembles a fish-like humanoid

Scutlgor: a sweet, nurturing centipede

Onigoro: an oni/ogre-like sasquatch kaiju

Ublen, a devilish beast from New Jersey

@skarmorysilver‘s entries:

Julkath, a wooly, sabre-fanged feline

Bamutan, a strange serpentine fish

Oz (and children), a bizarre winged marsupial

Gnashphalt, a toxic sludge monster

@dinosaurana‘s entries

Barusstrakk, a Venusian monster with hammer and sickle-like arms

President Rushmore, a bizarre golem accidntally made out of the sculptures on Mt. Rushmore

@theload‘s entries:

Pengku, a bizarre prehistoric missing link between birds and reptiles

Parakon, a serpentine, sail-finned lizard

@connorricks‘s entries:

Dangalar, a bizarre monster controlled by unseen puppetmasters

Normus, a horrifying fusion of man and beast

@titleknown‘s entries:

Malorel, a crystaline entity partially made of Yamaneon that uses the human Karrol Bishop as its host

Panku, a gooey alien in an egg-shaped robot suit

The Head, a big giant head

Javelarro, a wild pig whose healing factor keeps it going well after the point where it desires death

Playboy Rumble, a hard light playboy bunny

@canadian-tuxedo-mask‘s entries:

X-nertha, a fusion of ground sloth, automobiles, and several ghosts

Captain Sensation, a giant plant-human hybrid with a spicy attack strategy

Malzzang, a wicked wasp woman with an army of smaller wasps at her beck and call

Lance, a mutant possum with the brain of man’s best friend

Pescalagorio, the living sea floor

@highly-radioactive-nerd‘s entries:

Blastra, a strangely familiar burrowing retrosaur

Voce Fortissimo/Sibelisaurus, a duck billed retrosaur with amazing acoustic abilities

King Solomon, a blinged out babboon

Salagara, the extraterrestrial guard lizard

Tutandra, a mummified land-shark-like retrosaur

@glarnboudin‘s entries:

Salikor and Terravia, a long necked sea tyrant and a flying retrosaur (respectively)

Tabboagan, a sledding retrosaur

@akitymh‘s entries:

Kabold, an alien vampire

King Horn, a bizarre alien whose ape-like form only slightly obscures its extraterrestrial anatomy

Rampart, a retrosaur with particularly strange arms

Sevarahz, a pink martian

Awkwas, an amphibious retrosaur

@quinnred‘s entries:

Odinokiy Soldat, a kaijufied and heavily mutated human who is the result of extreme genetic and radioactive experimentation

Papaver Magnus, a walking and possibly thinking poppy bush that can even intoxicate other kaiju

King Benkantan, a massive monkey, but, moreso, a purveyor of fruits

Humarr Petram, a group of massive crustaceans that pretend to be islands to lure in prey

The Slickener, an bizarre monster whose venomous anatomy and unknown origin baffle scientists

@godzillakiryu91‘s entry:

Rayken, a giant gila monster

@bowlofgabe‘s entries:

Clawdia, a pair of conjoined twin crabs who fight with flair for the citizens of Mexico

Eldritch Ed, a pitiable fusion of a astronaut and his animal test subjects that nonetheless became a defender of humanity

@iamthekaijuking‘s entries:

Plume, an affectionate and loving prehistoric bird kaiju

Bubblor, a baby kaiju from another world

Shēnghuó tǎ, an alien kaiju that coincidentally resembles Chinese architecture

Dhyandogen, a rare peaceful Beyonder kaiju

Unit 01, a hybrid of human, plant, and retrosaur

@virovac‘s entries:

Artilleron, a strange herbivorous retrosaur that can fire its gastroliths as though they were cannonballs

Bajingis, a synapsid that is curiously similar in shape to a paleo tyrant retrosaur

Pomogitan, a bizarre furry Venusian

Hagayag, a simian crone

@plebiantologist‘s entries:

Nosferatu, a vampiric hummingbird monster

Dromeo, a lovelorn bee monster that’s better off single

I-am-Fish-Mage’s entries:

Gurt, a hound that is literally an undead vampire

Ignorilla, a psychic sasquatch

@bonelessnerd‘s entries:

Manoamano, an extraterrestrial right hand of doom

Nogad, a living island

Rizablitz, a plastic-skinned size-shifting dog

@polygonfighter‘s entries:

Index, a tar monster with fossilized armor

Volcanus, a bizarre high temperature arthropoid

Sir Kaiju of Vaudeville’s entry:

Torgong, the mole monster

@scatha5‘s entry:

Cervere, the kaiju cat

@cstalli‘s entry:

Trifitan Arum, a group of fairy-like flora

@profcene‘s entry:

Gevlek, a cave hyena

@ask-drakos‘s entry:

Okhalee, a massive songbird

King Crustacean, four crustaceans fused together