Paleontology and Previous Life on Earth Sperging Thread

[AMHOLIO]

we definitely should

Let's talk about Paleontology! Sperg about your favorite dinosaur or other prehistoric life here. Did you learn cool facts about the historical geological makeup of our planet? Did you want to talk about how much the pliocene ruled and we should go back to monkey? Do you want to bring up a cool but underappreciated prehistoric taximonic class or order? Do you just want to say how cool trilobites are and post pictures? Tell us here.

Here's some trilobites to get you started:

 

[Berwick]

Paleontology is geology but for manchildren.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Birds are little feathered dinosaurs that are descended from the survivors of that mass extinction ~6.5E7 years ago.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

I don't deal with paleontology. If prehistoric creatures were so cool then they wouldn't all be dead.

 

[Blouie]

I really love all the extinct megafauna, especially the ones that were in America.
They look so cool.

 

[AMHOLIO]

Paleontology is geology but for manchildren.

If it wasn't we wouldn't be here talking about mega autists.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Ancient fossil threads may be the oldest known archaea microbes | Sci…

archived 27 Jul 2021 15:29:02 UTC

archive.ph

Life appearing on Earth rapidly could support the panspermia hypothesis or point to it being stupidly common throughout the universe.

 

[NoReturn]

Me when people say the Nastapoka arc isn't an impact crater.

At least the one in Greenland is being taken seriously:

 

[Crex Crex]

Finally, now I can show my million-dollar, museum quality collection of a poorly preserved trilobite, a tiny fish and two shark teeth.

 

[AMHOLIO]

Ancient fossil threads may be the oldest known archaea microbes | Sci…

archived 27 Jul 2021 15:29:02 UTC

archive.ph

Life appearing on Earth rapidly could support the panspermia hypothesis or point to it being stupidly common throughout the universe.

That would be the most exciting shit on the block. I still like the life appearing from the ancient mineral water but everything coming from a giant meteor traveling across space would be pretty fucking kickass.

Me when people say the Nastapoka arc isn't an impact crater.

@Berwick are you an actual geology sperg? Because I'm curious if you have insight on this.

It always makes me wonder how much is buried under Antarctica and the ocean in general. It's so cool that tech is good enough we can see what's going on underneath ice now!

Finally, now I can show my million-dollar, museum quality collection of a poorly preserved trilobite, a tiny fish and two shark teeth.

Man look at the teeth on the black one in the corner. Prehistoric had so many wild shapes to it...

Speaking of teeth, let's talk about the Helicoporion for a second. If you were a paeloartist and someone handed you this fossil and said it was all they had left of a shark like species, what would you draw?



That was a conundrum for a while. Here's how some artist tackled it:

Spoiler: uzimaki shark coming at ya

The most currently accepted one is the spiral being part of the jaw with the extra toothy bits just being replacement teeth.

The Australian Museum has a great look at the thing in 3D plus fun facts here. We still don't know what this cartilagiounous fuck looked like beyond the jaw as cartilage is notably hard to preserve, but we do know that it probably had no upper teeth!

 

[Ishtar]

I seriously want to know what Ice Age antarctica was like? Did Antarctica in the pleistocene have megafauna?

 

[Dude Snakes]

I loved dinosaurs growing up.

 

[Astro Loafo]

Dinosaurs never existed.
Evolution doesn't exist.
Birds are not Dinosaurs.
And your trilobites

ARE

ALL

JUST

DIFFERENT

BREEDS

OF

HORSE SHOE CRAB

 

[12345]

Allow me to introduce you to Milo. He recently graduated and got really big on TikTok debunking archeology facts.
He is also on Youtube where he has a series called Awful Archaeology. Episode 6 was on the Baghdad Battery.
Having Milo in my playlist lead me to seeing a video by Artifactually Speaking watching Milo's Baghdad battery video. And he rips apart everything Milo got wrong seeing as he's a professor and this is his area of expertise. But so respectfully..

So anyway that all leads up to Milo, reacting to the professor reacting him and it's just all so wholesome. Milo trying not to be a fanboy and seriously being humble. I think this kid is going to go far, honestly. He is the Indiana Jones version of Gen Z and younger for sure! (It'll make more sense once you watch the video.)

If this is the wrong place I apologize, but to be fair I don't know what Milo's specialty is?
Edit 2: I retract the apology, we are life on earth too.

 

[AMHOLIO]

Dinosaurs never existed.
Evolution doesn't exist.
Birds are not Dinosaurs.
And your trilobites

ARE

ALL

JUST

DIFFERENT

BREEDS

OF

HORSE SHOE CRAB

I agree, I am a Trilobite trapped in a horseshoe crab's body. We never went extinct, science is holding us back bro.

Allow me to introduce you to Milo. He recently graduated and got really big on TikTok debunking archeology facts.
He is also on Youtube where he has a series called Awful Archaeology. Episode 6 was on the Baghdad Battery.
Having Milo in my playlist lead me to seeing a video by Artifactually Speaking watching Milo's Baghdad battery video. And he rips apart everything Milo got wrong seeing as he's a professor and this is his area of expertise. But so respectfully..

So anyway that all leads up to Milo, reacting to the professor reacting him and it's just all so wholesome. Milo trying not to be a fanboy and seriously being humble. I think this kid is going to go far, honestly. He is the Indiana Jones version of Gen Z and younger for sure! (It'll make more sense once you watch the video.)

If this is the wrong place I apologize, but to be fair I don't know what Milo's specialty is?
Edit 2: I retract the apology, we are life on earth too.

I love that this went from a worrysome "Let me introduce you to..." post we do for mini cows to "...and then he gracefully does his best to hold a conversation and be cordial while keeping himself accountable and his fanboying under control." Wholesome as fuck.

 

[Big Miss Steak]

I loved dinosaurs as a kid. Watched Jurassic Park, Land Before Time, Walking with Dinosaurs, Land of the Lost, etc. on basically a loop. Told my mom I wanted to be a paleontologist, she told me it's not as glamorous as TV makes it look and you spend a lot of time studying in classes, might go your whole life and never find something. Ended up not going the science route when I went to school. Still find paleontology interesting (more dinos than fish and horseshoe crabs if I'll be honest).

One of my friends is convinced that paleontologists are motivated to make new "discoveries" on little to no evidence to justify funding. idk how I feel about it but I find this conspiracy theory intriguing. I, as a layman, do lean in the direction of "a lot of these dinos that are classified as different are probably the same." A well-known example of this is pachycephalosaurus vs stygimoloch, where some scientists hold that stygi is a juvenile pachy. Also things like finding a tooth and a finger bone and declaring it to be a newly discovered organism.

Thoughts on this from people who know more about paleontology? Are we too quick to classify something as a new discovery? Are we classifying baby dinos as different animals? Am I crazy?

 

[Berwick]

@Berwick are you an actual geology sperg? Because I'm curious if you have insight on this.

It always makes me wonder how much is buried under Antarctica and the ocean in general. It's so cool that tech is good enough we can see what's going on underneath ice now!

Yeah. Also one for paleontology. Not too sure about insight, since I'm still studying the topic.

 

[7.62x38mmR]

Paleoallium billgenseli, a fossil relative of the modern day onions from the Late Ypresian of the United States of America, Washington.

Only a few centimeters tall, this short herbaceous plant was a part of the Okanogan Highlands flora, an upland assemblage of plants from the Late Eocene that represented a deciduous forest-type community in a lacustrine (=there's lakes) setting.
Capable of producing bulbs (and representing the first occurence of that type of structure in the fossil record), it was frequently subject to disturbances such as floods or even volcanic influence, and evolved a unique method of reproduction to withstand such conditions. As one can see, among the small campanulate flowers are large rounded structures, which are "bulbils", small bulb-like structures which may give rise to separate plants (even while still attached) when certain conditions are met. Although sexual reproduction was likely favored normally, such a method was exclusively used in certain conditions, as evidenced by the fact that all associated flowers happened to be sterile

This feature likely helped it withstand the numerous adverse events on the highlands, and along the presence of a bulb is still seen today in its nearest living relatives that live in similarily unstable conditions

 

[Berwick]

Let's get a little Precambrian in here! And obscure too.

(source)
What you see here are fossils of Chuaria circularis, a precambrian (before the Cambrian period, which started ~538 million years ago) organism. It is eukaryotic, which is surprising since its fossils can be up to 1,630 million years old. Eukaryotes would've been around for at least 170 million years at that point. What is truly remarkable is that even organisms this old had separate life stages.

(A) Chuaria circularis (B-D) Tawuia (with C-D being Tawuia dalensis).

Those longer fossils were initially thought to be their own species. Paleontologists and geologists had known about Chuaria since at least the 1800's, since it was useful for dating rocks and these little bastards got preserved everywhere until they went extinct in the early Cambrian. In the 1980's, the similarities between the two organisms became obvious, as more and more specimens in the 'gray zone' between the two were found. The two were very similar.

(source)
Sometimes they get a little more thicc and are called Longfengshania elongata.

Chuaria (13-14) becoming Longfengshania (1-9) (source).
If you wonder what these little guys would've looked like alive, here are some reconstructions:

The main legacy they have left behind, other than making it easier for geologists to date rocks, is to cause debates due to their weird nature.

 

[NoReturn]

I seriously want to know what Ice Age antarctica was like? Did Antarctica in the pleistocene have megafauna?

Spoiler

Paleoallium billgenseli, a fossil relative of the modern day onions from the Late Ypresian of the United States of America, Washington.

I'm way more excited to learn about this ancient onion than I should be. Look at those flowers! Do you think they were purple like chives?

Thoughts on this from people who know more about paleontology? Are we too quick to classify something as a new discovery? Are we classifying baby dinos as different animals? Am I crazy?

I absolutely think we're too quick to name things, 100%, even with existing creatures.
Relevant video: