Axel Sauro

Congratulations!

Btw, to avoid sounding dismissive towards the mongoose feat: it's very impressive that a prey-sized mammal evolved a strategy to almost perfectly counter formidable predators like venomous snakes. I also suspect this strategy might have started as nest defensing behavior turning into predation.

Now, as always I'm sure you can find the exceptional case, but you can also find exceptional cases of the opposite scenario.

Indeed, they can punch above their weight, but the visual comparisons look way more impressive than the numbers (a 3kg snake and a 3kg mammal don't look like they're in the same weight class at first glance). In fact. Most attacks you see on larger snakes are from packs, and usually start as defense

It does happen sometimes, usually the biggest factor is how big the snake is, which tends to lead to 1) more venom injected 2) the skull is harder to reach and crush (which is why large pythons regularly eat mongoose without any venom at all)

I really didn't like this series at all, but I keep saying that as a comic-style cartoon it could've slapped

Ngl, kinda unrelated, sometimes my spec evo brain makes me tolerant towards some invasive species too 👁️👁️ but only when there doesn't seem to be a negative impact, maybe because the new species "replaced" an extinct one's function

Now with a closer look at the concept art that I made ;)

I am very happy and proud I could be part of the process and hope I can contribute a little more in the future in similar productions ^^

A couple years ago, we reported one from even further south, in Namibia. A giant early tetrapod with affinities to species of tetrapod from the earliest Carboniferous, which we named Gaiasia. But is Gaiasia unique only to the far south, or was it part of a Gondwana-wide fauna?

New paper! How weird could Permian animals get? Turns out, pretty weird. Meet the stem tetrapod Tanyka amnicola from the Pedra de Fogo Formation of northeast Brazil

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Yep. Quality of paleofictions has skyrocketed lately, but this is the next step.

The only major difference I can think of is a shift to mammalian prey/competition, but I struggle to see why that'd change the selective mechanisms towards serrated teeth. Maybe Cenozoic marine mammals have proportionally thicker blubber, living in colder waters (on average)?

It's especially nonsensical because shark teeth are still blade-like even if unserrated, and never dulled since they get constantly replaced. Plenty of predators do just fine with unserrated teeth, often even less optimised than shark ones (sub-conical, with less or no replacement etc...)

One of my favourite observations in the natural world is how animals don't really care if their anatomy is "suboptimal" for a specific function: if it works, it works.

Random chance? It was "good enough" until the mutation happened and it got positively selected, that's my assumption. It's plausible we could see a shift in prey handling which may have "helped" the selection process, but it's hard to pinpoint from fossil evidence only.

Does it need a different function? It's not unusual for behaviour to precede anatomical specialization.

*any extant whale, at least

Yeah assuming a full sized individual, it's nonsense. Comparably sized whales are taken down by 10+ orcas, which work together to tire and *drown it*. That's not even counting that a whale can't bite an orca in half.

And the same applies to their complex anti-predatory migration patterns, still not fully understood but possibly useful to "shake off" orcas

CRUROTARSI🐊 these are only a few examples of how diverse the lineage Crocodiles come from used to be 🐊 #crurotarsi #pseudosuchia #paleoart #purussaurus #deinosuchus #postosuchus #plesiosuchus #arizonasaurus #phytosauria

In reality animals will often die of stupid things and survive remarkable events, still most prey flee or die and most predators fail or kill. It's not a 50:50 scenario, it's a spectrum of a myriad of scenarios with some more common outcomes depending on the variables.

I used to be frustrated by the monsterification of predators the most, recently I'm finding the opposite even more annoying (people believing predators are way more risk-avoidant/prey being way more effective killers than they are), cause of the perceived "groundedness" of this position.

It's a shame how one of the most fascinating phenomena of the natural world, the predator-prey dynamic, has been tainted by very fantasized oversimplifications. Predators as invincible killing machines or ridiculously risk-avoidant, prey as gentle victims or ruthless warmongers. Where's the nuance?

Bad timing with the new BotM rex, because that one's articulation is mind boggling

He's a very distinguished gentleman

I really want to know how entelodont-like Andrewsarchus was. The fact that it seems to be a much more "fragile" biter despite comparably frightening jaws is very interesting. I wonder if similar differences characterized its whole anatomy.

The whippomorpha way

EVERY CURRENT ART OF THIS ANIMAL IS WRONG!!!!!!!

for this to have the normal tail its usually depicted with, it would need a string of like 150 caudal vertebrae, instead of the expected 30-40

it had big manual claws and a big bone support for a MEAN angry brow over the eye

a man in a suit and tie stands in front of tie racks ALT: a man in a suit and tie stands in front of tie racks

The hundreds of healthy adult trikes it killed without injuries throughout its prior hunts:

a man wearing a plaid shirt and a blue vest is standing with his hands on his hips ALT: a man wearing a plaid shirt and a blue vest is standing with his hands on his hips

That one T. rex dying of perforating ulcer caused by an Acheroraptor foot claw getting stuck in its throat