#archaeoindris

[daily-mspaint-paleoart]

16/07/2026 Archaeoindris

[markhors-menagerie]

†Archaeoindris fontoynontii

Art credit: Van Hoang Dao

While Madagascar now sports relatively small animals, just a few thousand years ago it was home to some impressive megafauna as well. Built like a gorilla and weighing some 350 pounds (160kg), Archaeoindris was the largest lemur to ever live. It was probably a semi-arboreal herbivore. It, as well as many other now-extinct lemurs, would have been encountered by the first inhabitants of Madagascar.

[saritawolff]

Archaeoindris fontoynontii was a giant lemur endemic to, of course, Madagascar. Known as the “gorilla lemur” due to its size, it was also the largest member of a family called “sloth lemurs” due to their similarity to ground sloths. Remains are scarce, but it is estimated they were around the size of an adult male gorilla and weighed about 538 pounds. It’s skeleton suggest that was well-suited for both climbing and walking.

Archaeoindris probably went extinct only around 350 BC, with the arrival of humans on Madagascar.

(Side note: I try not to make the eyes too detailed to keep a thread of same style going for this series, but it’s too hard to draw a lemur without pupils... without it being absolutely terrifying. So you’ll have to forgive the slight style shift for this one.)

[si-nequal-is]

Voay vs Archaeoindris, literally Godzilla vs Kong but malagasy.

[alphynix]

Island Weirdness #19 -- Archaeoindris fontoynontii

The small and medium-sized sloth lemurs of Madagascar were incredibly convergent with modern tree sloths, and the biggest member of the group likewise seems to have been the closest they came to evolving a ground sloth equivalent.

Archaeoindris was the largest known lemur -- and one of the largest primates -- similar in size to a modern gorilla at about 1.5m tall (4′11″). It would have been a slow-moving animal which fed mostly on leaves, and while it was still capable of climbing around in larger trees it was probably much too bulky for upside-down suspension like its smaller relatives, and would likely have had to regularly traverse the ground to reach new feeding sites.

It seems to have been a fairly rare member of the ecosystem, living only in the Central Highlands, and the last known remains date to just over 2000 years ago -- around the same time that humans first reached that area of the island. Sadly a combination of factors such as the giant lemurs’ slow reproductive rate, habitat loss, and hunting pressure was too much for their population to recover from all at once, and they probably went extinct very soon after that date.

[si-nequal-is]

Archaeoindris vs Voay, malagasy edition of <King kong vs Godzilla>

[si-nequal-is]

Some crazy mashup between FGO and paleoart 1. Gilgamesh with Anzu 2. Caster Gilgamesh with Simurghia 3. Ozymandias with Alanqa 4. Minamoto no Raikou with Chupkaornis 5. Xuanzang with Archaeoindris and Wukongopterus

[dwollsadventures]

Daily D&D Monster: Dire Ape

And we've gotten to the dire animals! I'm a bit curious about Dungeon and Dragon's use of 'dire' since from what I've seen it basically means a bigger version of a normal animal. Some entries use extinct species to differentiate them from the giant animals category, but end up just being bigger versions of the animals. The definition for dire animals I'm using is similar to the dinosaurs we did previously: extinct animals that appeared suddenly because magic and adapted to the current environment. However, whereas the dinosaurs showed up relatively recently, the dire animals have been around for thousands of years. Because of this civilizations mistook them for monstrous versions of normal animals, even if they're entirely unrelated. Archaeoindris is the first of these, confusing the hell out of people since 2500 BC.