thatfish

a guy who likes paleontology and speculative evolution

[swc-nite]

project lumachia:Long ago there was a planet, this planet was found and populated, by what?, by snails Not only that, but worms and millipedes were also brought in to complete the garden ecosystem that this planet had, after colonization the planet was left to itself and who knows what form of life would emerge in the future,This is the project lumachia

[bestcryptids]

Around December of 2015, a man was fishing in the Delaware river when he was attacked by a strange animal. Years later he saw a model of tiiktaalik at a museum and said that it looked exactly like what attacked him. (He was drinking)

[mutant-distraction]

This rare 'white' giraffe named Omo was first sighted in 2015 in Tarangire National Park in Tanzania.

Credit: Derek Lee (Wild Nature Institute)

[dougdimmadodo]

White-Tipped Sicklebill (Eutoxeres aquila)

Family: Hummingbird Family (Trochilidae)

IUCN Conservation Status: Least Concern

The distinctive elongated, downwards-curving and perhaps just slightly goofy-looking beak of this small, dull-coloured hummingbird is an adaptation that allows it to feed on the nectar of plants with curved, tube-like flowers, particularly “lobster claws” in the genus Heliconia, which in turn rely heavily on sicklebills for pollination. Found mainly in evergreen forests across southern Central America and northern South America, White-Tipped Sicklebills, like other hummingbirds but unlike the vast majority of other bird species, utilize an insect-like manner of flapping that allows them to hover and move in any direction while in flight in order to carefully position themselves in a suitable place to extend their beaks and long, flexible tongues into flowers in order to feed, with a diet of sugar-rich, easily digestible nectar being necessary to meet the immense nutritional requirements associated with the extremely rapid flapping that makes their style of flight possible. Unusually for a bird White-Tipped Sicklebills are believed to breed multiple times each year, with males gathering together during the breeding seasons, producing harsh, high-pitch calls to attract females to their location and battling for the attention of mates in mid-air in a form of synchronised competitive courtship known as lekking. After mating, female White-Tipped Sicklebills build nests out of mammal fur, plant roots and spider webs (often hanging from or near Heliconia leaves, allowing for easy access to flowers) into which they lay 1-2 tiny eggs.

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Image Source: Here

[tribbetherium]

'In nature, nothing is wasted. Even the repulsive leavings one animal produces are a treasure for deteitivores and re-enters the food web to in turn nourish many others. Thus, as a large foraging badgebear deposits its droppings onto the forest floor of the temperate woodlands of Gestaltia and departs without a second thought, a cleanup crew quietly gathers to exploit the bounty left behind.

While small dipteran flies hovering about the heap and opportunistic beetles hauling off large pieces in rolled-up balls are perhaps an expected sight, a more surprising guest to the scene is a very unsusual member of the burrowurm family known as the rootbrutes: the chupacrappa (Vermiosauromys purgamentophilus) which, while also feeding on roots when burrowing underground and on other plant detritus in the leaf litter, also takes advantage of well-used latrines of the forest's various herbivores, which it locates by scent. Its scoop-like fore-claws, useful for shoveling through dirt as it burrows, also allow it to pick apart and rummage through a dropping for the choicest bits of undigested plant matter, in particular seeds that have been deposited in the animal's leavings, which it cracks with its powerful incisors.

While this may sound disadvantageous to the plants that produce those excreted seeds, some have actually adapted to exploit this rattile's unusual diet. Some of the plants produce numerous tiny seeds contained within a larger pod that itself can be mistaken for a large seed within the fruit. Once a large herbivore has eaten the fruit and excreted the pods, they may often be in turn eaten again, and the pod broken down in turn to release the seeds the second time they are excreted by their final host. So specialized are some, that the seeds will not sprout until they have been stimulated twice by the passage through digestive enzymes: only germinating once they have been inside both a badgebear and a chupacrappa and then out again.'

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[alphynix]

What extinct animal has one of the most awesome and/or cheesy-movie-monster names ever?

Necromantis!

This bat from the Eocene of France (~44-36 mya) is only known from fragmentary remains, so its size is unknown for certain – but based on its skull measurements it may have had a wingspan of around 35cm (14″).

It had powerful jaws with large carnassial-like teeth, suggesting it was a carnivore specializing on vertebrate prey, similar to the modern ghost bat. It also seems to have been a nasal echolocator, and so may have possessed a nose-leaf.