Prehistoric Life - Blog Posts
The thought that dinosaurs and other prehistoric life forms were at one point truly alive and roaming the earth and just behaving no different from any other living thing today just makes me so happy.
I don't even know if happy is the right word, I just couldn't possibly describe the type of amazement I get from thinking about it, I can't put words to it.
Like, these were real living creatures, they aren't from fantasy or mythology.
They breathed and ate and slept and did all sorts of normal animal things, because they were normal! Not some bloodthirsty monsters, they just did what they had to to survive, just like modern day animals.
Looking at the fossils I have in my collection and really thinking about it just amazes me. My little fish, at one point, was swimming around in the water with all the other fish, except this was millions of years ago. It's a little piece of the past, frozen in time, letting people today have even just the smallest glimpse of things that happened so long ago that we'd otherwise have no idea about.
It just, amazes me that at one point, all these creatures that, by comparison to today's life, are so strange or creepy or alien or whatever were once just the norm. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary to see a huge beast of a reptile looming ominously in a forest, or a flying creature far more deadly looking than today's birds of prey soaring through the air, or just, whatever the hell was going on in the Cambrian period, and it was all normal.
I know I'm just repeating myself a lot but wow I just get all sorts of feelings when I think about this stuff
Fuck man the past is so cool
Dino sticker!! He’s available on redbubble! :D
https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Archaeopteryx-Dinosaur-by-AzuriteMagpie/112283802.EJUG5
水族館
♪Shinin' star
Helicoprion: What if, like, teeth,
Mesosaurus: Yeah?
Helicoprion: but WHEEL
Mesosaurus: No don't -
Helicoprion:
(Image by ДиБгд)
WHY THE TRIASSIC????
What the FUCK is so WEIRD about the Triassic?
Well I will TELL YOU!
Okay so first of all, the Triassic is SUPER DUPER OLD. In the grand scheme of the Earth, sure, it happened relatively recently, but working on the scale of the entire geologic time span of the Earth’s existence is not exactly fair:
I mean, animals that we can recognize today didn’t show up until that line in the Phanerozoic (Hadean is the oldest stuff), so like, it’s smack dab in the middle of THAT
Look, basically, here’s what happened:
- The earth Formed. Life Appeared. Chaos reigned (4,600 million years ago until 4,000 million years ago)
- Life began to become more complex. Some life began to stick its blueprints inside of pockets so they’d be safer. They then swallowed other life forms that were better at getting energy, but kept them around like a buddy inside of them. Some of these guys could make a shitton of oxygen. This made the earth cool and a lot of shit die out super duper quickly. Extinction rate unknown. (4,000 million years ago until 2,500 million years ago)
- Climate change and fluctuating oceans allow life to start to group up together into SuperLife aka Multicellular Things. These multicellular things got more and more complicated. Some became animals and started moving around a lot. Some plants went on land. Some things were super weird looking and mysterious. LOTS of experimentation by life. Things start to change and a lot of these early experiments go extinct. Extinction rate unknown. (2,500 million years ago until 541 million years ago)
- Animals can suddenly burrow underground and go absolutely apeshit and diversify faster than you can say “wait a second whAT THE FUCK IS THAT”. Ice Age causes Death, 85% of species die out. (541-444 million years ago)
- Fish suddenly have a chance to be weird too and some of them decide, what the heck, let’s crawl onto land. Why not, right? Some other animals decide to join them. Plants make everything super cold, 75% of all species die out. (444-359 mya)
- Land-vertebrates start to diversify. They try out a lot of new things, but there aren’t a lot of them yet. So there’s still a lot of experimentation in body plans. Mammal-relatives are actually some of the most diverse ones. Reptiles are fairly rare. A GIANT MASS EXTINCTION CAUSED BY A GIANT LAVA FIELD EXPLODING KILLS ~95% OF LIFE ON EARTH. (359-252 mya)
- NEW animals get to try to diversify and do lots of crazy shit in the wake of SO MANY JOBS IN THE ENVIRONMENT GETTING CLEARED OUT. Reptiles diversify so fast you don’t know what the heck is happening. Other animals also take this opportunity to do new and weird shit. VOLCANOS EXPLODE, KILL ~80% OF LIFE (252-201 mya)
- Dinosaurs finally get to do fun things now that other reptiles are no longer being weird. Modern life starts to show up. (201 mya-today).
BASICALLY:
- Land Animals had only just started to diversify and try out new funky things with their bodies in order to cope with the challenges of terrestrial life
- Then a giant mass extinction killed everything. Mass exinctions are bad news for a lot of shit that’s specialized for the environment that’s been destroyed, BUT it allows things that make it through to have a chance to try out new shit to fill all those empty jobs in the environment
- So, generalist reptiles, who hadn’t had a chance to do jack diddly squat before, now suddenly had the whole planet to play with. And the other animals around them, from mammal-cousins to amphibians to fish to insects to other invertebrates, also got to try out some new stuff in this new world
- AND THEN ANOTHER MASS EXTINCTION HAPPENED RIGHT AFTER THAT RESET THE CLOCK AGAIN
This means that the TRIASSIC has some of THE MOST UNIQUE ANIMALS TO HAVE EVER EVOLVED IN EARTH’S HISTORY. Experiments were tried, rapidly, and MANY were lost RIGHT AWAY. It’s not like the life that evolved after that, which was honestly similar to what we see today - or those that evolved after the end-Cretaceous extinction, which was even more like today. These were weirdos that appeared and were wiped out before they could continue on to today
And, because this was a rapid evolutionary period, we see the starts of many of today’s modern groups of animals, and they’re super weird, too!
Honestly, the only weirder period in Earth’s history is the Cambrian Explosion, when animals first started doing anything notable at all
On top of THAT, the ENTIRE EARTH was ONE GIANT SUPERCONTINENT called Pangea! Everyone could go everywhere! There were no terrestrial barriers to movement! So many creatures spread all over the globe. It was a HOTSPOT of biodiversity and a major turning point in Earth’s History
But, because the dinosaurs that evolved in the Triassic were kind of Meh, it doesn’t get enough press!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So, we’re going to cover the Weird and Wonderful animals of the Triassic - we have a carefully curated list of Weirdos ready to take Tumblr by storm, and we hope you’ll enjoy learning about these amazing animals right along with us! You’ll have to wait till tomorrow to see them, though - don’t want to give away the surprises!
GET! PUMPED!
IT’S TRIASSIC TIME!
Helicoprion: What if, like, teeth,
Mesosaurus: Yeah?
Helicoprion: but WHEEL
Mesosaurus: No don't -
Helicoprion:
(Image by ДиБгд)
The Most Hardcore Period in Earth’s History, or the Permian, was preceded by a complete ecosystem collapse, and featured three different major mass extinction events - including the largest in earth’s history, the Great Dying, which lead to nearly all life on earth dying out.
During the Permian, all the land on Earth was in one supercontinent, called Pangea; and all the water was in one ocean, called Panthalassa. This meant that life intermingled and expanded all over the world, more so than it was able to in other periods (besides the Triassic, which also featured a single continent and a single ocean).
Pangea, and the Permian, was characterized by extremes. The beginning of the Period featured the end of the Karoo Ice Age - the poles were filled with ice caps, the center of the continent was dry, and temperature extremes were found throughout the land and ocean. The end featured multiple mass extinctions and a rapid warming of the continent, reaching the extreme heat of the Triassic period.
By @franzanth
The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse was primarily caused by an intensification of that ice age - leading to the start of the Permian featuring dry, harsh, extreme climates. This time period featured the rapid diversification and specialization of some of the earliest animals adapted for a dry existence - prior to now, life almost entirely existed in the oceans, or in the forested and swampy world of the Carboniferous. This was the first truly dry time for (at least some) life.
By @alphynix
Olson’s Extinction marked a change from that initial habitat in the Cisuralian epoch to the next, the Guadalupian. As the world began to rapidly warm after the Karoo Ice Age ended, this lead to a major extinction of plants and vertebrates especially. The vertebrates would not fully recover before the Triassic; however, it did lead to many new forms, especially among synapsids, appearing in the new vacant environmental roles.
(By @paleoart)
The Capitanian Extinction was caused by the explosion of a moderately sized laval flow system, the Emeishan Traps, which lead to immediate global cooling followed by rapid global warming. This greatly affected ocean chemistry, making it far more acidic than previously. Many reef animals were killed by this extinction, in addition to brachiopods; many vertebrates were also affected.
(By @paleoart)
So the Permian was a hard, broken world when the Siberian Traps - one of the largest lava flows in Earth’s History, and one of the largest volcanic events known - exploded, leading to even more dramatic climate change and extremely rapid global warming. This lead to acidification of the ocean’s and a dramatic drop in ocean oxygen. Almost every group of organisms was dramatically affected, and this extinction was the largest known in Earth’s History, with between 85-96% of life on Earth dying out (and some researchers thinking it may have even been higher), leading to this extinction being dubbed The Great Dying. Many groups utterly disappeared, despite having been features of the entire Paleozoic Eon (the eon that the Permian was at the end of) - trilobites, eurypterids, “spiny sharks”, tabulate and rugose corals, and blastoids complete disappeared, as did many other groups. Brachiopods, Gastropods, Ammonites, Radiolarians, Foraminiferans, Crinoids, and most Parareptiles also went extinct, as did many synapsids and amphibians. It was an utter catastrophe.
(By @paleoart)
The Permian was a time of extensive hardship, dramatic changes, and extinction event after extinction event. Life was truly on the brink - just as it was beginning to settle into terrestrial existence. So new animals, from insects to amniotes to conifers, spent their school years in a prehistoric hunger games - and only a few species managed to reach the weirdness kiln of the Triassic.
Welcome to the Permian.