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Magnificent Bumstinger [Speculative Dinosaur Project] vs. Meiolania [Zoo Tycoon]
Best Fictional Marine Reptile Tournament: Cyan Bracket; Round 1H, Poll 7/8
Magnificent Bumstinger [Speculative Dinosaur Project]
Meiolania [Zoo Tycoon]
(The bracket color names are just for thematic organization and are NOT representative of the candidates!)
Propaganda (if any) under the cut! Please be civil, and feel free to reblog!
Miolania oweni from A Guide to the Fossil Reptiles and Fishes in the Department of Geology and Paleontology in the British Museum (Natural History), 1896.
Horned turtle from Australia and near islands Meiolania
Scale: 1:35
Material: super sculpey
Meiolaniidae
So honestly I'm relatively new to digital painting. I sketched a little here and there, made skeletals, but actual painting I've done very little. But I ended up putting this together for my work on the Wikipedia page for meiolaniid turtles. (Yes the Ninjemys colours are a reference to it being named after the TMNT)
I've rambled a bit about them before, but basically, meiolaniids are weird stem-turtles thought to be outside the two main modern groups we have. They were decently large animals, their shells alone range from 1 meter to 2 meters in length (3 to 6ft I believe?), they were land animals, had some crazy horns and tails that were encased in spiky armored rings and tipped with a tail club. Here some photos with paleontologist Victoria Arbour, a Ninjemys tail club photographed by Serjoscha Evers and a Meiolania tail club illustrated by W.H. Wesley.
They were found throughout almost the whole Cenozoic, with the oldest form dating to the Eocene of South America and the most recent ones living from the Pleistocene to Holocene in Australia and on various South Pacific Islands. They are honestly pretty cool animals and super underrated, which is why I decided to give their wikipedia pages upgrades in the first place. Which also meant doing a bunch of other illustrations (that I was more in tune with) and pulling a bunch of public domain photos and putting them on wikimedia. Here some skeletals and charts I made, open the last pic, it shows multiple different Meiolania species atop each other.
The results were pretty mixed tbh. Some of the most recent forms, Gaffneylania, Warkalania and even Ninjemys had relatively little to write about. But things were more exciting with Niolamia (if you remember my rant about its messed up history). Meiolaniidae itself was just a big summary of all the other stuff, but easily the most extensive was Meiolania itself, which took AGES to research and put togehter. Tho I'm pretty happy with the result. Here's a little side by side, old and new.
Gaffneylania: Argentinian Horned Turtle
Those familiar with the reptiles of Cenozoic Australia may be familiar with the turtle family known as the Meiolaniidae. A group of stem-turtles that appear deceptively like modern snapping turtles or land tortoises, yet are not especially close to either. To those that know them, Meiolaniids bear some resemblance to ankylosaurs or even ceratopsians, possessing horns that sometimes form frill like structures and having clubbed tails. The two illustrations below are by the always talented Hodari Nundu and were drawn for the articles on New Caledonia and Lord Howe Island by The Extinctions (check them out), featuring Meiolania mackayi and Meiolania platyceps respectively.
While meiolaniids are mostly associated with Australia and the surrounding islands, primarily around the later half of the Neogene and the Quarternary, their lineage starts much earlier and far away. Meiolaniids first appeared in Patagonia some 50 million years ago. Previously one genus was known from there, the frilled Niolamia, until in 2015 Sterli and colleagues described a second Argentinian meiolaniid: Gaffneylania auricularis (Gaffney's Roamer with Ears).
Now on a surface level, Gaffneylania is a wonderfully complete animal. We have parts of the skull, most of the lower jaw, multiple vertebrae of the neck and tail, various shell plates from different specimens and limb bones. In theory great, in practice not so much, as most these elements are sadly very fragmentary and disarticulated. So it takes some creativity to put things together.
Take the horns for example. While we have parts of the skull, we lack the skull roof and most of the upper jaw (safe for a fragment of the maxilla+premaxilla). So we don't have as clear a picture of how the horns and shields of Gaffneylania should look like. We do have a horn, but its broken at the base so we can't tell how it would fit on the skull. Still we can look at it and compare it to others. Now from the front, the horns of Gaffneylania (1st from the left) are broad and flattened, similar to what we see in Niolamia (2nd from the left) yet different in having rounded, not pointed, tips. They also differ clearly from the less flat horns we see in Ninjemys and Meiolania (3rd and 4th respectively). The images below in order are from Sterli et al. 2015, Victoria Arbour, Ghedo and David Morgan-Mar.
In other parts it also generally matches other meiolaniids. The limbs are very robust and short, the lower jaw is short but differs from Meiolania in having two, not three cutting ridges, and further differs in which ridge is the bigger one. The shell tho known mostly from individual fragments does at least show that its outer edge was serrated rather than smooth. The fossil material also includes a series of osteoderms, bone that was embeded into the skin and functioned as armor. These osteoderms came in different sizes and likely covered the forelimbs of Gaffneylania. Below are elements from Gaffneylania compared to Niolamia (reconstruction by Sterli et al. 2011) and to Miolania (Richard Owen 1888).
Anatomically there isn't a whole lot more to break down, as we don't have preserved tail rings that form the tail club in derived neiolaniids (tho that would have been useful in determining relationships). So lets briefly address how it happens that meiolaniids are known from Australia and South America, despite their distance. The short answer is rather simple. Antarctica. Meiolaniiformes were a chiefly Gondwanan group that at one point or another disperesed into Antarctica, at the time not yet a frozen wasteland, and continued to diversify there. From Antarctica, meiolaniids could have traveled to both South America and Australia before the two continents split off entirely. Through this, members of the same family ended up on vastly different continents when climate began to change for the worse, becoming colder and dryer. And that's when the paths diverged. South America didn't move especially much and around the Middle Eocene turtles began to go extinct in Patagonia, unable to deal with the temperatures. Things would have gone similarily in Australia if it wasn't for the fact that the continent was continuously drifting north at the same time, balancing out the climate change with just getting closer to warmer latitudes. But even then, meiolaniids on the mainland suffered the same fate as much of Australia's megafauna while their island relatives might have survived longer, but obviously not until today.
To any paleoartists out there, there has seemingly never been an attempt at reconstructing this animal. Just thought I might mention that. And of course the obligatory Wikipedia page, courtesy of yours truly: Gaffneylania - Wikipedia
Meiolania also known as the horned turtle, is an extinct genus of meiolaniid stem-turtle that lived throughout Australia, Lord Howe Island, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Fiji from the Middle Miocene to early Holocene some 20 mya to 2,000 years ago. The first fossil remains of Meiolania where uncovered from Lord Howe Island by Sir Richard Owen in 1886 who thought they represented ancient lizards and assigned the remains as belonging to two species M. platyceps and M. minor (now a synonym of the former), dubbing the genus Meiolania meaning small roamer. In time however it was learned that Meiolania was actually a terrestrial turtle and today 3 species are recognized: M. platyceps, M. mackayi, and M. brevicollis. Reaching 4 to 8 feet in length and 250-1,000lbs in weight, Meiolania is a candidate for the largest known terrestrial turtle/ tortoise, rivaled only by Megalochelys atlas from Pleistocene Asia. Meiolania had an unusually shaped skull that sported many knob-like and horn-like protrusions. Two large horns faced sideways, and would have prevented the animal fully withdrawing its head into its shell. Aside from the large spikes on the head, Meiolania also had a spiked tail similar to some tails of the ankylosaurus and glyptodonts, these may have been defensive features for protecting the head and tail extremities from predators as such adaptations would have made it difficult for predators to close their mouths around these spots without getting a mouthful of spikes. In life Meiolania would have inhabited Forests, Savannahs, and Wetlands feeding upon sedges, grasses, shrubs, flowers, cacti, fruit, and carrion. The disappearance of much of the Pleistocene megafauna is often attributed to the arrival of humans and in the case of Meiolania there is actually strong evidence to support this. In Vanuatu the remains of Meiolania have been found in the rubbish dumps of early human settlements, going extinct some three hundred years after the first human contact.
Art can be found here:
https://twitter.com/serpenillus/status/1264250510753890307
https://www.deviantart.com/hodarinundu/art/New-Caledonia-3000-years-ago-903959697
On International Turtle Day we celebrate these shelled critters that are so hard to place in the reptile family tree. Get the cool stem-turtle Meiolania on t-shirts, tote bags and mugs. Design by Greco Westermann sulc.us/turtle
Although Meiolania - the extinct giant horned tortoise from Australia - is currently thought to have been a coastal herbivore, tortoises are not to be trusted around free meat.
Done with the help of an edited Planet Zoo model.
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