Sarcosuchus ('flesh crocodile')

Sarcosuchus was ridiculous. Growing up to 39 feet long and weighing 8 tonnes, sarcosuchus make modern crocodiles look positively Toys 'R' Us by comparison.  For a fun juxtaposition, here's what a sarcosuchus head would look like stood next to a modern man in an Hawaiian shirt:

Our understanding of this true giant started in 1964, when a nearly complete skull was found in Niger, Africa. To make room for its 132 teeth, the head of the sarcosuchus was 6 foot alone!

Sarcosuchus lived 112 million years ago, in the mid-Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, and displayed a lot of the features and characteristics of their crocodilian descendants today. The sarcosuchus could not 'death roll' like modern crocodiles do, but had a bite that was so powerful that it didn't need to perform such acrobatics to prepare its meal. Such was its size that its only potential for competition came from the 49-foot dinosaur Spinosaurus, one of the fiercest and largest predators this planet has ever seen (Spinosaurus has a star turn in Jurassic Park III, if you remember.)

Without knowing who would win in a sarcosuchus vs spinosaurus fight, what can be said with certainty is that both of these creatures were unable to use their awesome statures to survive the changing climate towards the end of the Cretaceous period. As the Earth's climate became drier, neither could adapt from their reliance of an aquatic habitat. Both went extinct roughly 90 million years ago, a good deal of time before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction came for pretty much every other living thing 25 million years later.

PS: Here's Nigel Marvin re-enacting what a human-sarcosuchus encounter might play out like. I love you, Nigel Marvin.

Megatherium Americanum (Giant Ground Sloth)

In terms of the Earth's  history, the Pleistocene Epoch (beginning 2.6 million - 11,000 years ago) was a particularly exciting period of development and change for mammals. The most recent Ice Age occurred, and within this time homo sapiens evolved to the beautiful beach babes that we are today. But most exciting of all was the rise and fall of the megafauna, giant beasts which roamed Australia and North and South America. Megafauna are classified as large or giant animals, and so elephants today fall under that category. (When they go extinct in about 5 minutes time, perhaps future generations will look at elephants in the same way that we look at megafauna of the Pleistocene epoch.)

 No Pleistocene megafauna has captured my imagination like Megatherium Americanum, the largest of the giant ground sloths that inhabited South America. There has been much debate on whether these beasts were omnivores, but what can be said with certainty is the 13 foot tall giants used their stature and massive claws to shred vegetation off of the plant life around them, much of which was unattainable to their short-arsed herbivore contemporaries. It's incredible to think that, despite weighing 4 tonnes, the megatherium were able to support that frame and walk on their hind legs. Still, I suspect many of us will manage a similar feat after the festive season has ended.

 What made the megatherium and other megafauna go extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch is hotly contested. The most popular theory points the finger at homo sapiens (again), as their global movements correlate with a rapid extinction of other species (again). In their excellent book 'Megafauna: Giant Beasts of Pleistocene South America', Farina, Vizcaino and De Juliis, cite evidence of a Lestodon sloth collarbone found in Uruguay with 87 human-made marks - chopping sawing, incisions and scraping. Whether this means that homo sapiens actively sought out and hunted megafauna, or whether the homo sapien nomads enjoyed an opportunistic find, it indicates an exciting period in our history where our ancestors shared a stage with these extinct beasts.

 Other theories come from a changing climate and extraterrestrial debris - that falling objects from space set areas of North America on fire and caused extreme climate disruption. This theory holds a lot of questions about our own sustainability, because it shows the devastating domino effect that occurs when food chains and ecosystems are disturbed.

                               

Anyway, more on Megafauna later - you won't believe the size of the Glyptodon armadillo!

Anthropornis Penguin

Whether it's the online videos of them slipping and sliding all over the Antartic, or just their comical way of waddling around, penguins are one of nature's most popular animals, enjoying the sort of celebrity status that hippos used to have, before everyone realised that hippos are actually extremely aggressive (see also: Bill Cosby)

But whilst modern penguins are certifiably fun for Planet Earth - with an added cute factor that many of them mate for life - there's something a little less Disney about the Anthropornis penguin, a terrifyingly giant penguin that lived during the late Eocene epoch in the Paleogene period 37-45 million years ago. Fossil discoveries - including a 9cm tarsometatarsus (a bone found only in the lower leg of birds) suggest that this bird could have measured anywhere between 5.5 - 6.5 feet tall. By comparison, Emperor penguins are the tallest of the living penguin genus, at 3.5 feet tall.

I would love to be able to press a button and have a couple of hundred Anthropornis penguins come back to life and just waddle around, trying to inconspicuously blend into our crowd scenes. And seeing as they would have matched us at head height, a homo sapien vs anthropornis basketball match would make for interesting viewing.

Argentavis Magnifices

This website like is like being in a nightclub in Wigan, because we go from one big bird to another. The Argentavis Magnifices holds the honour of being the largest flying bird ever recorded (well, until we get some clearer facts about new kid on the block, Pelagornis sandersi) and lived during the relatively recent Miocene epoch 23 - 6 million years ago. These birds had wingspans of 23 feet and were master gliders through the air, but because of their size had difficulty in taking off to fly, and so much like a human hang glider would have to take off today, they ran downhill into wind blowing directly in front.

Argentavis lived in Argentina and probably enjoyed long lifespans of up to 100 years with no predators, most likely going extinct because of a changing, cooler climate at the end of the Miocene epoch.

The Argentavis is a member of an extinct group of massive birds of prey called Teratorns that lived between the Miocene and Pleistocene epochs. And whilst modern humans would never have had to have deal with a beast like Argentavis swooping around them and picking them up for dinner, they certainly would have had to have contended with another member of the Teratorn group, Aiolornis incredibilis, which had wingspans of 16 feet - smaller than Argentavis, but still huge. The closest animal we have to these today in terms of behaviour is the Californian Condor, which is the largest bird in North America, but has sadly been on an evolutionary life support machine since the 1980s.

  The Pleistocene epoch in which the Aiolornis incredibilis lived, is such an incredibly interesting period of time, because you get modern humans interacting and causing the extinction of certain megafauna - huge land mammals like the mammoth, giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cat and our friends in the Teratorn group. In fact, the cast list of the extinct megafauna of North and South America is so mind-blowing that I could spend the entire lifespan of this blog covering just that era, but for now I think the giant ground sloths need to be the next to have their moment in the sun purely because they were, quite frankly, ridiculous:

I mean, WHAT!

Pterosaur

The first non-insect animals to evolve powered flight, these absolutely terrifying winged reptiles could be found in all three periods of the Mesozoic era, lasting roughly between 228 - 66 million years ago. Pterosaurs were carnivores that came in all sizes, the largest of which is shown below:

Scared now.

 With one group of Pterosaur having 4-inch long needle-like teeth, and a wingspan of over 10 meters, these reptiles used their arms to polevault themselves into the air, and they were the #1 divas in the sky during the dinosaur era. A misconception is that the pterosaur was a dinosaur, but the reality is that dinosaurs and pterosaurs were cousins who shared an ancestor, the Archosaurs. The evolutionary split on the archosaurs timeline sees one branch evolving into dinosaurs, pterosaurs and later birds, and another branch evolving into crocodiles. And it's because of this that we can say crocodiles and alligators are the closest living relatives to birds today! Recent family portrait:

Gigantopithecus

 Setting the dial on our geological time travelling machine to a relatively recent period now, as we head back only 150,000 years ago to the Pleistocene epoch. In the dwindling bamboo forests of South Asia we might find our extinct homo-genus cousins, Homo Erectus (the oldest living of the homo- species) treading very carefully. That's because Homo Erectus had to share these forests with Giganthopithecus Blacki, the largest ape ever known. At nearly 10 feet tall, these bamboo-eating apes were King Kong before King Kong was even a thing.

My interest in Giganthopithecus was fuelled when I saw an artistic interpretation of what one of these apes might have looked like, and I was struck by the immediate resemblance to my ex-partner. Regardless, much of what we know about this 540 kg 'bigfoot' comes from teeth and jaws found in Vietnam, and the dental studies show that they lived on a diet of seeds, fruit and bamboo. What led to their extinction is likely to be a combination of climate change and a low reproductive rate, although there is also a strong possibility that Homo Erectus aggravated their demise, as shown in this aforementioned illustration:

Meganeura/Arthropleura

The Carboniferous period (358-298 million years ago) is one of my favourite periods of geological history, simply because my imagination runs wild with what it would be like to get to spend 24 hours in a world with giant amphibians as the dominant land animal and king-sized versions of insects we know today buzzing around -
                          

    Presuming somebody found a way to fulfill my dream send me back 300 million years for a day jolly, I'd actually only have to last 22.4 hours in a Carboniferous forest, as the Earth's rotation was faster back then. There'd also be the added problem of ensuring that I didn't immediately die from change in atmosphere as the oxygen level was much higher. The high oxygen level in the carboniferous forests (35% compared to 21% today) meant that insects such as dragonflies, cockroaches and millipedes grew much larger than their ancestral equivalents we know today. For example:

The Meganeura is one of the largest insects of all time, with a wingspan of nearly 26 inches (remind me to insert a picture of myself holding two 12-inch rules side by side here later for dramatic scientific effect)

Of course, should I manage to bat away the Meganeura and not wet myself in bug horror, I'd need to keep an eye on the forest floor too, in case I trip over an Arthropleura, the largest arthropod of all time. Scientists estimate that these arthropods could reach sizes of 6 foot 6 inches:

Here's a great clip from David Attenborough's "First Life" which shows an Arthopleura in action:

....A dramatic change in climate marked the end of the Carboniferous period and the reign of these TERROR INSECTS (as I'm now nicknaming them) came to an end. The following Permian period started with an ice age, and the continents all locked together to form PANGEA, one giant mass of landlocked land.And it's in the Permian period that we meet the ancestors of the very first dinosaurs, but more on those bad boys later...

Phorusrhacidae (or 'Terror Birds')

In the wake of the mass extinction 65 million years ago that left all of the non-avian dinosaurs for dead, the Cenozoic period saw the first and only time in Earth's history that BIRDS were the #1 predators on the planet. And no bird was more terrifying than Phorusrhacidae (or Terror Bird, if like me you can't pronounce that mess of consonants either) ---->

With the largest fossil found measuring one of these bad boys at 9.8 feet tall, and beaks at an estimated 18 inches long, scientists have also reached the terrifying consensus that the Terror Bird was carnivorous, and an extremely fast and nimble runner. They inhabited South America and preferred ambush tactics to hunt their prey.

They disappear from the fossil records 1.8 million years ago, and their demise is thought to be the result of climate change in the Andes' Mountain Range, which meant that the forests became open savannahs with less places to sneak around, rendering the Terror Bird's ambush tactics less effective. Just to add to their problems, 3 million years ago the 'Great American Interchange' - the moment where the landbridge betweeen North and South America finally joined - meant that species previously separated by separate land masses were now free to mingle, and predators like Smilodon (see below) challenged the Phorusrhacidae, in what is one of countless examples in the Animal Kingdom of a Whitney/Mariah situation emerging. 

Second Supereon

In our geological timescale, the Precambrian supereon (from 4.6 billion to 541 million years ago) set the stage to prepare our favourite players from the Animilia Kingdom to shine bright like the weird, wonderful and motile multi-cellular organisms that they are. In the Hadean eon, we are searching right at the back of grandpa's broom cupboard, and finding the earliest evidence of anything and everything. We say hello the formation of Earth itself, welcome the formation of our moon, and start to get serious about photosynthesis.

   But it is not until the as-yet-unnamed second supereon that we start to see the huge diversification of animal life, a process that started to really take wind during the Cambrian Explosion 541 million years ago.  During the Cambrian radiation , the spotlight shone on protists, a group of microorganisms made up of, amongst others, protozoa ('proto' - first, 'zoa' - animals), which were able to transform complex food particles into energy.

   The early protozoa were probably plant-eating organisms to begin with, but as food resources got scarce, the herbivore policy was forced to change and the process of hunting other microbes for food started - thus causing an early version of what we know as a food chain. This in turn caused evolutionary pressure to favour mutuations which enhanced defensive, sensory and mobility mechanisms. The protozoa also evolved protective strategies by way of organising themselves into large colonies, which was beneficial for protection from predators, and this led to the organisation of larger and more complex groups that would later evolve into metazoa - multicellular animals - ie, eventually you, me and the cat next door.

 And so, following possibly the shortest summary of the first 4 billion years of Earth ever, this blog PANGEA will look at some of the most unusual and interesting examples of metazoa that have graced our curious little planet. 99.99999% of all species that have lived here are now extinct - either through competitors, changing environment or evolutionary change - and this is a celebration of some of the weirdest and best.