Scientific Illustration

astronomy-to-zoology:

Genus Palaeotragus

(meaning Ancient Antelope)

Was a genus of primitive okapi-like artiodactyls (even toed ungulates) that lived in Miocene Africa and Eurasia. there are two currently described species; P.primaevus which was a smaller 2m animal which had no ossicones. and P.germaini  which had ossicones and was alot taller at 3m, resembling a tall okapi.

Phylogeny

Animalia-Chordata-Mammalia-Artiodactyla-Giraffidae-Paleotraginae-Palaeotragus

Source, Source

(via rhamphotheca)

stilllifequickheart:

John Day

Euanthe Sanderiana

1883

rhamphotheca:

GIGANTOPITHECUS, EXTINCT ASIAN APE:

1. Did Bigfoot Really Exist? How Gigantopithecus Became Extinct

Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Yeti. The Abominable Snowman. Whatever you want to call it, such a giant, mythical ape is not real—at least, not anymore. But more than a million years ago, an ape as big as a polar bear lived in South Asia, until going extinct 300,000 years ago.

Scientists first learned of Gigantopithecus in 1935, when Ralph von Koenigswald, a German paleoanthropologist, walked into a pharmacy in Hong Kong and found an unusually large primate molar for sale.

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/01/did-bigfoot-really-exist-how-gigantopithecus-became-extinct/#ixzz2EV4uJw4J

2. The Ape That Was:

For thousands of years, Chinese pharmacists have used fossils - which they call dragon teeth and dragon bones - as ingredients in potions intended to cure ailments ranging from backache to sexual impotence. The fossil-rich caves of southern China have been, and still are, sedulously mined by farmers, who sell these medicinal treasures to apothecaries in the cities. In just such a pharmacy, in Hong Kong in 1935, the German paleoanthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald came across a large fossil primate molar that did not belong to any known species…

read more: http://www.uiowa.edu/~bioanth/giganto.html

rhamphotheca:

GOOD NEWS:

Two-foot-long cloud rat rediscovered after missing for forty years in the Philippines

by Jeremy Hance

Czech computer programmer, Vaclav Rehak, was the first person to see a living Dinagat bushy-tailed cloud rat (Crateromys australis) in nearly forty years, reports GMA News. Rehak was traveling on Dinagat Island with his new wife, Milada Rehakova-Petru, a specialist on Philippine tarsiers, when he stumbled on the rodent, which has only been recorded once by scientists in 1975. Found only on the Dinagat Island, the rodent was feared extinct, but is now imperiled by mining concessions and logging across its small habitat, which is thought to be less than 100 square kilometers.

“My husband, programmer Vaclav Rehak, saw a big hairy rat creeping through the vegetation slowly at the beginning of 2012. A week later, we took the first photographs and video recordings [of the rodent] in the wild,” Milada Reháková-Petru told Czech media, Ceske Noviny…

The almost orange-colored rodent sports a long tail with a bushy white end. From head to tip-of-tail, the Dinagat bushy-tailed cloud rat is nearly 2 feet (21.6 inches, 55 centimeters) long, making it one of the world’s longest rodents. Currently listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Red List, it was thought ‘possibly extinct.”…

(read more: MongaBay)                

(images: L - Milada Řeháková and Vaclav Rehak/Tarsius Project; R - William Oliver, Philippines Biodiversity Conservation Foundation)

rhamphotheca:

A Scene from Prehistoric China

A thick rain of volcanic ash sends a rat-size mammal, Gobiconodon zofiae, and three Dilong paradoxus dinosaurs fleeing for their lives in this artist’s depiction. Based on the features of a 125-million-year-old fossil preserved by such ashfalls, these tyrannosaurs exhibit a downy covering of protofeathers, the first found among their family. The evolutionary precursors of true feathers, protofeathers were hairlike and probably developed for insulation.  

(Artwork by Lars Grant-West)

from National Geographic Magazine: Liaoning Province—China’s Extraordinary Fossil Site

rhamphotheca:

Sakhalin taimen (Hucho perryi)

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED

… also called the Stringfish, Japanese huchen, or Ito, is a species of fish in the salmon family (family Salmonidae) of order Salmoniformes. Sakhalin taimen is one of largest, most ancient salmon species and primarily inhabitats the lower to middle reaches of lakes and rivers.

Fishes over 30 cm long are almost exclusively piscivores, while the young feed mostly on aquatic insects. Females typically lay between 2,000-10,000 eggs in the spring on the sandy or gravelly river bottom. The average specimen caught have weighed around 5 kg (11 lb).

The global population of Sakhalin taimen has dwindled in recent years for a variety of reasons. The loss of more than 50% of their original habitat due to agriculture, urbanization, and more recently oil and gas development, is a major factor. Other considerable pressures include bycatch in the commercial salmon fisheries of Russia and Japan, as well as illegal fishing practices in Russia. The fish are also prized as trophies by Japanese recreational anglers…

(read more: Wikipedia)              

(illustration from Notes on some figures of Japanese fish : taken from recent specimens by the artists of the U. S. Japan expedition, 1856, James Carson Brevoort)

rhamphotheca:

Paleoparadoxia

… is a genus of large, herbivorous marine mammals, a Desmostylian, that inhabited the northern Pacific coastal region during the Miocene epoch (20 to 10 million years ago). It ranged from the waters of Japan, to Alaska to the north, and down to Baja California, Mexico. Paleoparadoxia was about 2.4 m long.

Paleoparadoxia is thought to have fed primarily on seaweeds and sea grasses. The jaws and the angle of the teeth resemble a backhoe bucket. Its bulky body was well adapted for swimming and underwater foraging, but not for extended deep-sea living or deep diving. Like the modern-day seal, Paleoparadoxia probably came on shore for breeding and basking in the sun.

(via: Wikipedia)                  (image: Nobu Tamura)

rhamphotheca:

The Cebu Flower Piercer…

If a bird calls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it really exist?

by Shaun Hurrell

Cebu Flowerpecker Dicaeum quadricolor, although Critically Endangered,is a lucky bird. It is also a great reminder for us to never give up hope for a species. For almost a century, Cebu Flowerpecker retreated into the ever-diminishing mountainous forests of Cebu Island, Philippines, whilst conservationists worldwide were oblivious to its existence.

Every fallen tree heard at the edge of the forest was one less thin, high-pitched, sweet note heard towards the centre; yet no-one heard the bird’s distress calls until 1992 because it was officially thought to be extinct. It was thanks to a visitor determined not to stick to the well-worn birding circuits that Cebu Flowerpecker was rediscovered at the eleventh hour, and work to conserve the species belatedly began…

(read more: BirdLife International)     

rhamphotheca:

from Wild oxen, sheep & goats of all lands, living and extinct (1898)

by Richard Lydekker

rhamphotheca:

Coelodonta thibetana • Out of Tibet: Pliocene Woolly Rhino Suggests High-Plateau Origin of Ice Age Mega-herbivores

[Mammalogy • 2011]

Ice Age megafauna have long been known to be associated with global cooling during the Pleistocene, and their adaptations to cold environments, such as large body size, long hair, and snow-sweeping structures, are best exemplified by the woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos. These traits were assumed to have evolved as a response to the ice sheet expansion.

We report a new Pliocene mammal assemblage from a high-altitude basin in the western Himalayas, including a primitive woolly rhino. These new Tibetan fossils suggest that some megaherbivores first evolved in Tibet before the beginning of the Ice Age. The cold winters in high Tibet served as a habituation ground for the megaherbivores, which became preadapted for the Ice Age, successfully expanding to the Eurasian mammoth steppe…

(read more: NovaTaxa)

______________________________

reference:

Deng, T., et al. 2011. Out of Tibet: Pliocene Woolly Rhino Suggests High-Plateau Origin of Ice Age Megaherbivores. Science. 6047: 1285–1288. doi:10.1126/science.1206594

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6047/1285