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A fun note about our ancestors, the aforementioned “cavemen”. It is as has been written, we did come down from the treetops and the sun, with no roof above us. But we have found our ancestors, hominids and ancient humans, within caves. We have found a lot of hominids and ancient humans in caves. Across millions of years, in a lot of interesting configurations...

Take for example, the Altamura Man: a Neanderthal man uncovered in Northern Italy, dated to hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s worth noting that his bones and especially skull actually fused to the cavern, to the point very little of him can be taken out. It’s actually really cool-looking:

Of course, this picture kinda buries the lede about how this man would’ve died. Even accounts describing how he probably fell through a sinkhole aboveground undercut that deep within these chambers, he would’ve been hung upside down:

There’s a non-zero chance that one day, this guy fell into a pit and was suspended upside-down, in the pitch-black dark of a space he was never meant to see, slowly dying as blood pooled into his head...

And that’s just one example. An earlier hominid, Petralona Man, is known from a cavern in Greece. Things like the fossil’s position in the human family tree are uncertain, but one thing’s for sure, he had had it much worse than the Altamura Neanderthal:

(Yeah, that’s a stalagmite sticking out of his head. Most likely impaled on the way down, and hopefully that had killed him...)

Over and over again, the mazes beneath the earth have eaten us. We have fallen prey to the spaces themselves, an unbeatable predator, for as long as we have spent out of the trees.

With the previous descriptions of gullets in the earth, chambers “built” where nothing can grow, it feels like maybe conceptions of caves where Something In It is Out To Get Us are almost a relief... then the isolation, the overwhelming space of it all, can come secondary to the Monster in the Cave.

I love caves as a horror theme but I HATE when there are things in the caves. Horror writers utterly ruin cave stories by not realizing that the cave itself is the monster.

It’s fine when caves are a gateway that something is coming through, or the cave is somehow alive and malicious, or if the only monster is what the narrator brings in with themself, but I hate hate hate when writers expect me to be creeped out by spelunkers being menaced by creatures that live inside the cave.

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Oh

My God

What even is a starfish

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Broken my streak of radio silence to boost my good friend’s work! Give her a follow - with hope there’ll be more 😋🤞🏻

Tiktaalik roseae

Late Devonian (375 Ma)

I’m back again, after a loooong time neglecting this blog. I’ve been planning to come back for a while, and I’m finally here! I thought I’d return with one of my favorite vertebrate fossils, Tiktaalik roseae! The common ancestor of all tetrapods was probably not Tiktaalik, but something very similar. Scientists use it as a model organism for that ancestor, though, and I’ll be doing the same here.

Keep reading

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I’ve never seen dinosaurs displayed in public and the BYU Museum of Paleontology made the wait worth it

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Y’know I hate to profile an entire nation’s pool of researchers, but Russian cladistic paleontology and taxonomy as a whole kinda sucks tbh

From Zelenkov 2009, for an analysis with 17 taxa

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Hescheleria greeting each other

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this is... EXACTLY how the eventual adaptation of the new comic needs to sound

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JoJo’s Bourgeois Adventure

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me, circa early 1800s, paying a stable boy a few coppers to ride overnight to deliver you an urgent letter with a thick wax seal that after you struggle to break it just says “bitch!” in tiny little writing 

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Could these anomalous balls of light be related to ‘Mothman’ sightings near Prairie Creek Reservoir?

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What Triassic animal has a name that sounds like a Transformers character?

Triopticus primus!

Living in Texas, USA, during the Late Triassic, about 229-226 million years ago, Triopticus was a type of archosauriform reptile (a “cousin” to crocodiles, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs). Classifying it any more specifically than that is rather difficult since it’s only known from a single partial skull.

It had five large bony bosses on its head that convergently resembled the domes of pachycephalosaurs, suggesting it may have engaged in similar headbutting or flank-butting behavior. At the back of its skull there was also a distinctive deep pit that looked like a “third eye socket”, inspiring it its name – although this feature probably wasn’t actually a parietal eye, instead just being the result of the way several of the bosses came together at that point.

The rest of its appearance is unknown, and this reconstruction is rather speculative as a result. But based on other archosauriforms it was likely to have been a small semi-sprawling quadruped, possibly around 80cm in length (2′7″).

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*1996 Santa Claus voice* They do exist...

the reason the wrinkle-faced bat is my favorite bat rather than the vampire bat or the sucker footed bat or even the hairless bat (which are all good quality bats!) is that the male has a hood of skin he can flip up to cover his weird face completely. I’ve never seen photos of the mask all the way up, though; this is the highest I’ve ever seen it. Supposedly it even has thinner patches where it covers up the eyes and it “hooks” onto the little ridge along the bat’s forehead. We don’t know even know what it’s for. Only the males have it so it’s possible it’s just something the girl bats like. Sexual selection does all kinds of messed up shit that otherwise seems useless.

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I like how there’s a dinosaur whose genus is essentially “big Paul”

I … actually didn’t see that part of the Wikipedia article on Magnapaulia and … wow.

The generic name is a combination of the Latin magnus, “large”, and the first name of Paul G. Haaga, Jr., the president of the board of trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

Big Paul

(image by @thewoodparable)

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Tavie

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I wonder if my ancestors are smilling apon me sometimes