#extinct critters

[thalassicgravedigger]

A Dakotaraptor preening its back :)

[mildlybizarrecorvid]

Fun fact: dodos were big pigeons.

Do with that what you will

[mildlybizarrecorvid]

Fun lil reminder: wooly mammoths used to exist, and we may soon get the bootlegs

[mildlybizarrecorvid]

More people need to know about Hallucigenia.

I myself know very little, but it's something.

Spread the creature

[brachyurans]

by the way i tagged the last post #A TINY ANOMALOCARID!! but I'm well aware the name is technically anomalocarididae and therefore "anomalocarids" is incorrect and should be "anomalocaridids". wikipedia states linguistic justification is off of this sentence: "class Dinocarida (linguistically corrected here to Dinocaridida, based on the Latin caris/caridis and the taxonomic suffix -ida)" from xianguang et al 2006--since the stem of caridis is carid-, when you add the family suffix it becomes carididae. this is indeed technically how you latin your family names.

HOWEVER!!!

article 29.3.1.1 of the 5th edition of the ICZN states in the case that a stem ends in -id already, these letters may be elided before adding the family suffix, and in fact commonly have been. there was NO need for xianguang et al to make this "correction" except for being fucking pedants i guess and given that first of all, anomalocaridae is not in alternate use so there can't be any confusion, and second of all, not eliding the first -id makes family names way fucking harder to pronounce, i reject this!! taxonomy isn't real latin and you're just showing off!!

this happened to ragworms/Nereis too even though nereidae was described first (1865) and had priority SOME 1970s bitch (pettibone im looking at you) "corrected" it to nereididae without even the grace to explain his pedantry in the paper. he was just like "i know a lot about latin and i want to make this shit hard to pronounce" and anyways that's why i disown taxonomists

[violeteyedvampiremolloy]

//From the beginning - the Natural History Museum, London - prehistoric animals. Trilobites - they had the first complex eyes.