Biology Ancient Australia (Extinct Megafauna, Dinosaurs etc)

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CD Xbow said:
Ars has an article that updates the considerable progress made in sequencing Thylacine DNA. Not content with simply sequencing, they are adding a few tweaks such as resistance to bufotoxin, the cane toad toxin. I have no idea if this will work but may clever folks think it will. Is it a good idea?

De-extinction company provides a progress report on thylacine efforts

Stem cell editing, complete genome, and cane toad resistance mark necessary steps.
arstechnica.com
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Interesting study

As a flip would they then be introduced as the CTs predator?
 
GreyCrow said:
Interesting study

As a flip would they then be introduced as the CTs predator?
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would be cool to see happen. I believe the swamp rat has learnt how to kill the toads and bypass the toxins.
 
GreyCrow said:
Interesting study

As a flip would they then be introduced as the CTs predator?
Click to expand...
It would be a bloody miracle if they did. Mind you the whole cane toad disaster is a warning about bioengineering. Young folks may not know, the toads didn't even eat the cane beetles they were introduce to control. How stuffed is that?
MP_ said:
would be cool to see happen. I believe the swamp rat has learnt how to kill the toads and bypass the toxins.
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No surprise it's a rat, they have an extraordinary ability to breed resistance to toxins.
 

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CD Xbow said:
It would be a bloody miracle if they did. Mind you the whole cane toad disaster is a warning about bioengineering. Young folks may not know, the toads didn't even eat the cane beetles they were introduce to control. How stuffed is that?

No surprise it's a rat, they have an extraordinary ability to breed resistance to toxins.
Click to expand...
One of the biggest biological control failures ever
 
This story is a bit of a beat up, folks are always speculating about Dino intelligence, which did include speculation some time ago that toothy old T Rex may have been as smart as a Baboon. I will remind people, there are two sorts of speculation, the first, is reasonable speculation based on data and then there is wild speculation. T Rex is as smart as a baboon belongs to the later. This article talks about it and the problems of using endocasts of skulls to estimate intelligence and behaviour..

We've Probably Been Wrong About T. Rex Again, Study Says

Dim-witted dope or brainy brawn? The debate over T.
www.sciencealert.com

This graph from the article, shows forebrain size of the different reptile lineages, which show a clear progressive increase in forebrain size from lizards, crocs, dinos and finally birds. From this you would expect T-rex to have the cognition similar to a bird, most likely a dumb one. This is consistent with other evidence of their behaviour such as nesting and forming herds.

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Original paper here https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25459
 
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Full size skeleton reconstruction of a Thylacoleo carnifex skeleton has been completed by Flinders University Palaeontology researchers, led by Professor Rod Wells (pictured above, the Prof is the one on the left)

Australian lion fossil reconstructed for the first time

A complete model of Thylacoleo, Australia’s once-fearsome carnivorous marsupial lion, including its missing tail bone and other anatomical features of
cosmosmagazine.com

As you can see Thylacoleo was a heavily built ambush predator. At 120 kg Thylacoleo carnifex was the largest of the Thylacoleonids, I posted earlier about some of the smaller species. I actually did a skull reconstruction a few years ago based on a 3D model, which worked out well, though the image is fairly poor quality, it looks better in the flesh ABS plastic

1734908862843.png
 
CD Xbow said:
View attachment 2192487

Full size skeleton reconstruction of a Thylacoleo carnifex skeleton has been completed by Flinders University Palaeontology researchers, led by Professor Rod Wells (pictured above, the Prof is the one on the left)

Australian lion fossil reconstructed for the first time

A complete model of Thylacoleo, Australia’s once-fearsome carnivorous marsupial lion, including its missing tail bone and other anatomical features of
cosmosmagazine.com

As you can see Thylacoleo was a heavily built ambush predator. At 120 kg Thylacoleo carnifex was the largest of the Thylacoleonids, I posted earlier about some of the smaller species. I actually did a skull reconstruction a few years ago based on a 3D model, which worked out well, though the image is fairly poor quality, it looks better in the flesh ABS plastic

View attachment 2192490
Click to expand...
Look at the size of those front teeth , clearly a bite and hold predator.
 
Article about LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) and discussing how quickly life got started on the then hellish earth. Luca is the ancestor to all three domains of life, eukaryotes (all animals, plants and fungi), bacteria, and archaea (ancient microbes). Interestingly Luca’s reconstructed genome seems to include genes for an anti-viral CRISPR-Cas-like structurea suggesting that viruses were common back then.

Luca is the progenitor of all life on Earth. But its genesis has implications far beyond our planet

New research into the single-celled organism is providing clues about what the early planet looked like – and raising the prospect that we may not be alone in the universe
www.theguardian.com
The way life started so easily in rugged conditions suggests simple life will be common in the universe, complex life much rarer and intelligent life rare.
 
Two articles about local dinos. The first describes a large, unnamed megaratoidrid. These roamed around Oz 120 million years ago. They were 6 to 7 meters long with strong arms and fearsome claws. Not the sort of gals to get a hug from. The article talks about another Ozzie therapod, a Carcharodontosaur, also unnamed. Australia has a pretty poor record of therapods so these finds are significant.

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Australia's 'upside down' dinosaur age had two giant predators, 120 million-year-old fossils reveal

A new study has revealed that "hug of death" megaraptorids and previously unknown carcharodontosaurs shared Australia's unique Antarctic dinosaur ecosystem during the Cretaceous.
www.livescience.com

1740708958184.png ​

The next is a visually unimpressive bone from the flipper of an icthyosaur that was found in a draw of the WA Museum. The importance of this bone is it has allowed better understanding of decline and extinction of Ichthyosaurs. They disappeared at the start of a period global warming in the Creataceous, 20+ million years before the big rock hit Earth.
 
Not Megafauna or a Dino, but the extinct Desert Rat Kangaroo. Last seen in 1930 and declared extinct in the 90's. The article points out at the start that a third of the mammals that have gone extinct in the last few hundred years have been ours. A shameful record. The article headline is a bit of a beat up, the paper it is based on was about skull biomechanics, which morphed into they could still be out somewhere in the vast desert. Sure they could and there are some repots of something like them but the paper doesn't actually add any evidence.

1740709565894.png ​

Simple finding suggests extinct species may still secretly roam Aussie desert: 'Could be out there'

There have been multiple unconfirmed sightings over the years, one as recently as 2011.
au.news.yahoo.com
 
CD Xbow said:
Not Megafauna or a Dino, but the extinct Desert Rat Kangaroo. Last seen in 1930 and declared extinct in the 90's. The article points out at the start that a third of the mammals that have gone extinct in the last few hundred years have been ours. A shameful record. The article headline is a bit of a beat up, the paper it is based on was about skull biomechanics, which morphed into they could still be out somewhere in the vast desert. Sure they could and there are some repots of something like them but the paper doesn't actually add any evidence.

Simple finding suggests extinct species may still secretly roam Aussie desert: 'Could be out there'

There have been multiple unconfirmed sightings over the years, one as recently as 2011.
au.news.yahoo.com
Click to expand...
Wasnt the 2011 sighting around Ceduna? Or was that another colony of marsupial extinct survivors?
 

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dirty2 said:
That's cool 😎
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It came out really well, but had a rough gestation, it needed significant repair after falling off the mantlepiece when it was about 90% done.

Peter took this photo of a beautiful specimen of Moythomasia an early ray finned fish. It was used in his drawing course at Flinders Uni. It's from the Gogo formation in WA during the late Devonian period, making it around 350 million years old. Almost expect to see it served up with a slice of lemon and cracked pepper. The specimen is remarkable for its completeness and detail, but it becomes extraordinary when you realise it's 2 sided, the other half shows the internal aspect of the fishes right flank Someone certainly got lucky when the limestone cracked!

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There is not much about Moythomasia on the internet for interested folks, the wiki entry is trivial. For the scholars only https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2015.952817
 
I have been experimenting with some of the AI's for graphics and coding. I made a short video at Crea AI of triceratops. The prompt I used was 'A herd of Triceratops walking through the desert'. It looks magnificent, but......

View attachment tricertops-herd.mp4
....count the horns. Some of these guys are quadraceratops! The toe number is wrong and in the last frame you get a glimpse of a bifid tail. When the leading dino gets close you can also see what looks like teeth and part of a mouth underneath the jaw. What is it with these LLM's?
 
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These 2 are videos of still graphics that have been animated by Pixverse ai. The first is Peter Truslers megafauna picture on the first page of the thread, the second is a scene from the Ordovician of Ostracoderms, jawlwss fishes that preceeded the placos.


View attachment peters-megafauna-stamp.mp4

The ai missed animating Megalania (the lizard), I think it failed to recognise it as there is a log which looks similar nearby


View attachment ordivician-seas.mp4
I am actually blown away by these. Most new tech I'm a bit how hum nowadays, this is exciting. For free I got to do these 2 then I ran out of credit and asked me to subscribe. The lowest level plan is $10 per month.
Added - the lowest level plan has been reduced to $8, for that you get 1200 credits a month. These 'cost' 30 credits each.
 
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With the aid of different PC, a VPN and a different account I managed to do 2 more for free. The first is the opening pic in the thread, of thylacoleo defending its kill. It worked great until the thylacines attack, a bit of meat appears then one one of the thylacines just disappears.

View attachment thylacoleo.mp4

I did another with the short faced roos I drew, it looks good until you notice at the 4s mark one of the legs disappears on the far roo.

View attachment roos.mp4
 
The reanimation for the day is the Cretaceous panel of the famous Rudy Zallinger mural in the Peabody Museum at Yale. For people of my generation these images established what dino's 'really' looked like. They are one of the the reasons many of the incorrect tropes in paleoart have been hard to get rid of, the T Rex dragging it's tail is one of them. The start image is direct from the panel. It does a an amazing job, look at the reflections, the movement of the critters is convincing but.......

View attachment zallinger3.mp4
....it turns the pterosaur into a bat. Other than that it's just about perfect. I'm going to alter the original to use as a seed image by putting T-rex in it's proper pose. Sadly I'll loose the pinkish duckbill doing that. I'll take out the pterosaur, too. I was trying to think of a title for it and the only think that came to mind was 'Who farted?'.

Added just noticed the Trex gains an arm. looks like a kanga with a joey in the pouch. Weird things these LLM's.
 
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Biology Ancient Australia (Extinct Megafauna, Dinosaurs etc)


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