Toothy Grin

It's worth noting that sampling bias might be a factor here. Fossil marsupials are generally identified by teeth, while reptiles tend to be postcranials. One individual megalania had a lot of vertebrae, so it probably isn't surprising that those are the most commonly found bits.

I suspect that Thylacoleo was more common in the southern parts of Australia (which also includes most of the documented Pleistocene assemblages), while big reptiles were more common in the tropical north.

Two green t-shirts, bearing a life restoration of a chuffed-looking diprotodonid in a striding pose, along with the text “Keep Ambulating”. In the background of the shirts is a trichrome image of the famous Shibuya crossing in Tokyo.

In these trying times, take some advice from a giant extinct marsupial named ‘Ambulator’. Now available from the Toothy Grin online shop.

Siderops.

A bunch of colourful button badges with various animals on ‘em.

Some new badges! There’s a mix of new designs and colour variants here. Among them are Antechinus, Trilophosuchus, Sarcosuchus, Deinosuchus, Edenerpeton and Petaurus.

Also, "munted" is the new adjective for fossils of less-than-ideal preservation.

I learnt that multiple Aussie palaeos apparently have beef with the Essendon Football Club.

I spent this week at CAVEPS, which is the best vert palaeo conference in Oz + NZ.

…or maybe a bonebed with multiple Thylacoleo around a Tenontosaurus? 😁

What would be acceptable evidence? A trackway, I suppose.

Can't wait!

Never expected to see one of my drawings on a beer.

Digital illustration of a Procoptodon, an extinct megafauna kangaroo with a short face, standing in front of a semiarid sandstone outcrop

Anyone know what's going on with this strange looking kangaroo...

#palaeoart #paleoart #procoptodon #megafauna

@jorgoristevski.bsky.social just alterted me to this absolutely horrible page of false AI slop being passed off as an educational page on the Queensland Museum website.
www.museum.qld.gov.au/learn-and-di...

1/n

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7759136/

Photo by Mark Marathon: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quinkana_timara_skull.jpg#mw-jump-to-license

A couple more reptiles I want to appear in PhP Ice Age are Paludirex and Quinkana. Megalania and the saltwater crocodile weren’t the only large predatory reptiles of Pleistocene Australia.

Here I’m going to focus on Paludirex.

If you can't get any aDNA, use collagen instead. I wonder if this technique might help resolve the taxonomy of suggested "dwarfed" species like Macropus titan/giganteus or Sarcophilus laniarius/harrisii?

Digital illustration of a brown skink with white markings with large pointy scales, it is eating wildflowers and there are vegetated sand dunes in the background.

Well this is as done as it's going to get. Tiliqua frangens, a megafauna skink from pleiocene and pleistocene australia with large pointy scales feeding on spring wildflowers. #palaeoart #palaeoart #reptile #lizard

doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
new paper out now with @royalsociety.org on limb structure & function of the #fossil #kangaroo, Dorcopsoides fossilis, from central Australia. The oldest known macropodine (subfamily of all but one of living roos) & a fun glimpse into the great Late Miocene kangaroo radiation

Australia’s oldest crocodylian eggshell: insights into the reproductive paleoecology of mekosuchines Alongside large madtsoiid snakes, the largest known lizards, thylacoleonid marsupials and a range of other terrestrial carnivores, the now extinct mekosuchine crocodylians were significant predator...

New paper describing the eggshells likely belonging to the early mekosuchine Kambara, possibly indicating a different incubation method relative to modern crocodiles
doi.org/10.1080/0272...

55m-year-old eggshells unearthed in Queensland may be older relative of infamous ‘drop crocs’ Scientists believe new discovery to be the oldest crocodilian eggshells ever found in Australia

Some media coverage, including an mention of the infamous 'drop croc'.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Australia’s oldest crocodylian eggshell: insights into the reproductive paleoecology of mekosuchines Alongside large madtsoiid snakes, the largest known lizards, thylacoleonid marsupials and a range of other terrestrial carnivores, the now extinct mekosuchine crocodylians were significant predator...

Croc eggshell from Tingamarra!
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Some tideous studies for an upcoming illustration of a certain fragmentary Wakaleo Species, perhaps the youngest of them...

Credit to gtg141 on DeviantArt for the W. schouteni and W. oldfieldi skull reconstruction as helpful guides to doing my own reconstruction of W. alcootaensis.
#sciart

I'd like to nominate "Diprotodudes" as word of the year.

The news today is making me think of this amended display in the biology building at UNSW.

I know of one. Not sure if I'm meant to say who at this point though. Wait for the credits after the episode.

All extinct animals have stripes. Common knowledge.

Figure from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2023.0704 showing silhouette containing some material of Tiliqua frangens, an extinct megafauna skink

this has to be one of the cutest animals ever

DROP BEAR!!

(Recent art) Ceratodus nargan Illustration!

Ceratodus is a wide spread prehistoric lungfish species that is related to the extant queensland lungfish. Here lies a species in the Early Cretaceous of Southern Victoria, Australia, in the Euremella formation.

#paleoart #sciart #illustraation #fishart

Illustration of Koolasuchus next to the silhouette of a ca. 1.8 m tall human

One of the largest temmnospondyls ever to exist: the gigantic Koolasuchus was also the last non-lissamphibian temnospondyl to exist. It survived into the Early Cretaceous of Australia when all other stereospondyls were long gone

#temnospondyls #paleoart