Symbion pandora

Unicorns and dragons, paleo and extant non-humans, random creature concepts, photography and original characters can be found here. I like bugs, rocks, paleontology, and related stuff. This is a side blog, so I can't follow you under this name.

[takebacktheyuri]

Very unruffled Great Egret on Coronado Island, San Diego

[dreadkarkadann]

Surf Scoters, Brant goose, Lesser Scaup, American Wigeon

Not pictured Buffleheads because I didn’t get any pics of them :( San Diego, on the bay

[crevicedwelling]

a meeting of creatures…

[crevicedwelling]

some context from Twitter preceding this historical and entirely uneventful moment

[yaspup9000]

@p4rt2cle

[johnconway]

Do you like necks? Because I have a great one for you!

[dreadkarkadann]

Gaboon Viper

[dreadkarkadann]

African Crowned Cranes

[takebacktheyuri]

Sichuan Takin and Lesser Kudu

[takebacktheyuri]

Newly arrived Nile Lechwe! Beautiful animal.

[dreadkarkadann]

Big Cats @ St Louis Zoo featuring one of the new leopard cub girls

[stagbeetleboy]

Pegasus but built like a pterosaur

[stagbeetleboy]

Really fucked up bat

[skycowboys]

This is terrifying but i LOVE IT

it works so well HOW. the markings, the hoof on the wing, the short tail, the pink eye

[zinjanthropusboisei]

Obsessed with this actually

[synapsid-taxonomy]

Anyways guys look at this fucking mummified Lystrosaurus

From Smith et al. 2022, which describes a bone bed of juvenile Lystrosaurus from the earliest Triassic (Lystrosaurus declivis Assemblage Zone, ~252 Ma) of the Karoo Basin, South Africa. A drought drove a large number of them to congregate in one spot, where they then starved to death.

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

that’s just a whole Animal sitting there!!!

Also, it’s a very interesting datapoint on the extremely murky “when did hair evolve” question! Lystrosaurus is what we call a non-mammalian synapsid, or “stem-mammal”, related to the ancestors of mammals but on a diverging evolutionary path. So evidently, in the lead-up to mammals hair must have evolved at some point, but we have very little evidence either way for the majority of early synapsids.

My favourite part of this question is that we actually have coprolites, fossilised dung, from the Late Permian which seem to contain hair. So basically, something had hair at this point, but we don’t know what!! Lystrosaurus, however, has now been shown to have bare, bumpy skin, which is a good indicator that hair may not have evolved until higher up in the stem-mammal tree!

[dreadkarkadann]

Lizards from Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum-- Chuckwalla, probably Desert Spiny LIzard, and possibly a Whiptail?

[dreadkarkadann]

Red Kangaroos with joey >w<

[dreadkarkadann]

From STL Zoo:

Male kudu having a friendly spar, a unicorn Addax, and pair of Banteng-- absolutely gorgeous bovids!

[lycaniums-room]

*makes another silly little poster*

[dragonfelling]

Happy Kulinday

Have a Kulindad