Page 4 of 4 [ 50 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4

Aristophanes
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 10 Apr 2014
Age: 42
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,603
Location: USA

07 Jul 2018, 6:42 am

naturalplastic wrote:
My favorite prehistoric epoch was the era represented in the Burgess Shales of British Columbia. The assemblage that has Hallucinengenia .

Late Precambrian?

Anyway its fascinating because it gives a glimpse of what living things were like when nature first experimented with bigger than microbial life. And clues to how the major phyla of animals are related to other major phyla (the fossil Lucy is just a recent twig, the Burgess Shales show the roots of the whole tree).

But the Burgess Shale era would not make particularly good cinema the way the dinosaurs do. Its not the same sorta fascination.

One group of animals that rival dinosaurs in "box office draw" are sharks. Every popular science magazine gets a spike in newsstand purchases if it puts a shark on the cover. And its the living species of sharks that are the stars. Though the extinct cousin of the Great White, the megaladon, also has a definite cult following. The megalodon died out only like a couple millon years ago (recent compared to the dinosaurs). Many folks desperately want to believe that they are still around in some remote corners of the ocean despite the total lack of evidence for that.


Ediacaran is the name of the pre-Cambrian period. It’s ‘new’, only ratified about a decade ago. It used to be part of the Cryogenian period, but was classified it’s own specifically because it included complex life while the preceding Cryogenian did not.



naturalplastic
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 26 Aug 2010
Age: 69
Gender: Male
Posts: 33,873
Location: temperate zone

07 Jul 2018, 7:52 am

DarthMetaKnight wrote:
Check out this creature!

Image

Steropodon was a primitive, basal monotreme that lived in Australia during the Cretaceous. It was half a meter long. Unlike modern monotremes, it retained molars into adulthood.


Interesting. Its easy to imagine that thing evolving into a duckbilled platypus.