Naturalhistory Magnets

A species of trilobite from the Upper Ordovician, about 445 million years ago, it was discovered in 1838 by an American geologist and paleontologist named James Hall, in the Beecher’s Trilobite Bed in Rome, New York. These specimens were particularly well preserved with even soft body parts preserved in iron pyrite (fools gold). The fossilisation was so good that scientists were able to study their legs, gills, antennae, digestive system, and even some eggs. As a result of this exquisite preservation, this species is often referenced as the standard for scientific text describing trilobite anatomy. Triarthus was a small animal, on’y about 2 inches in length, but that is pretty average among most species of trilobite.

A trilobite found in deposits near Saint Petersburg Russia. It first appeared on the fossil record about 500 million years ago, and died out around 390 million years ago, it was discovered around 1845. Sadly there isn’t as much specific info on this one, but there are more than 20,000 currently identified Trilobite species, and not all of them has as much info as others.

In 1598 Dutch sailors landed on the shores of Maritius looking for supplies during an expedition to Indonesia, while on the island they encountered a large, odd looking, flightless bird. According to the surviving translations of that first account the birds were somewhat tasteless, leading to their discoverers initially calling them Walghvogel (Dutch for “tastelss” or “sickly” “bird”). The origin of the name Dodo is somewhat nebulous, but it’s possible that it may have it’s routes in the word Dodaars, meaning “fat-arse” or “knot-arse.”

Roughly 76 to 75 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period, large herds of an animal now known as Lambeosaurus congregated around the shallow rivers that ran through what is now Alberta, Canada. These beasts could be up to 31 feet long, and weigh up to 3 and a quarter tons, they would mostly walk on all fours, switching to two when speed was required, their huge tails stiffly hanging in the air behind them, making up nearly half of their length. On their heads, they sported large, flamboyant crests, the males likely sporting ones larger and more complex than those of the females.

Discovered in the Gobi desert, Velociraptor was roughly the size of a modern day Turkey, standing at just around 1.6 feet in height at the hip and measuring 6.8 feet in length, it likely only weighed around 33 pounds when fully grown. Like all members of the dromaeosauridae family it possessed a pair of specialized claws on the second inner toe of each foot. These claws were over-sized and were held off the ground by tendons that allowed them to retract when not in use, it’s thought they deployed this menacing weaponry as a means to pin struggling prey, much like modern day eagles and hawks do.

In the 1920s Captain Marshall Field funded two expeditions to South America which were undertaken by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois; these expeditions were launched under the hopes of finding fossils of mammals and other animals from the Cenozoic Era. In 1926, during the second expedition, a team was searching the Ituzaingo Formation in northern Argentina when they came across the remains of three animals thought to be never before discovered species of ancient marsupial. It was roughly 4.9 feet in length and weighed around 330 pounds and it lived during the Late Miocene to Pliocene, roughly 9 to 3 million years ago.

While being a member of the overall group that dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus was a part of, Sauropelta edwardsorum was a member of a different branch known as Nodosaurs. Unlike Ankylosaurs, Nodosaurs did not possess tail weapons, though they often displayed large shoulder spikes and still possesses a body covered in armor. Sauropelta could grow up to 17 feet in length and weighed around 2.2 tons, they lived during the Early Cretaceous period, around 108 million years ago.

Zuul was discovered on a dig in the Montana Badlands in 2014, during the excavation of what was thought to be Gorgosaurus, an early relative of Tyrannosaurus rex that stalked North America roughly 76.6 to 75.1 million years ago. While it was initially thought to be a specimen of another ankylosaur called Euplocephalus that had been known to science since 1897 known to live in the same area at the same time, research done at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada would later identify the specimen as belonging to an as yet unknown genus of armored dinosaur. The specimen was given the genus name of Zuul, after the horned monster dog from the classic 1984 film, Ghostbusters, and the species name of crurivastator meaning “Destroyer of Shins.”

Named for the enormous neural spines running along it’s back to form what most have theorized to be a large sail or possibly a hump-like structure, Spinosaurus was first uncovered by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer in 1912 while he was in Western Egypt in the Bahariya Formation. The fragmented remains looked to be from a very large and unusual theropod, possibly one bigger than the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex, which had been discovered less than 10 years prior. Unfortunately the museum holding those remains was destroyed in a bombing run during World War II, but detailed drawings of the fragments did survive along with photos of the display.

A land dwelling prehistoric relative of modern day crocodiles described scientifically in 1959, head to tail it measured some 23 feet in length and weighed over 1,000 pounds. It roamed what would eventually become known by humans as North Western Argentina, and it shared its environment with a wide variety of other creatures, such as early dinosaurs like Herrerasaurus and Eoraptor, as well as massive dicynodonts like Ischigualastia, Pound for pound it appears to have been the largest predator in the region it inhabited, but this weight and its likely cold-blooded metabolism likely slowed it down. Despite this it was more than fast enough to catch up with prey of that era.

In the Late Cretaceous (83.5 to 78 million years ago) on the sun soaked shores of the Western Interior Seaway, a large body of water that ran along the interior of the North American Continent, a colony of large flightless birds bask on the rock strewn coastline of what humans would later call Kansas. Much like modern loons their legs are sufficiently powerful tools that allow them to not only paddle on the surface of the water but dive beneath its surface to catch fish in their tooth-filled beak, but also like loons their legs were likely not well adapted for land. It is thought that they likely pushed themselves around on on their bellies similar to modern pinnipeds like seals and walruses.

Baryonyx walkeri was theropod dinosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous period in what is now Surrey, England. At nearly 30 feet in length and weighing in at around 1.9 tons it was a big animal, but despite its size fossil evidence of fish scales in its abdominal cavity suggest that rather than going after large prey items on land it most likely relied on fish for the bulk of its diet. This and other anatomical evidence actually made it the first theropod dinosaur ever known to have relied on a primarily ichthyophagous diet.

Weighing in at around 7.9 tons and measuing up to around 40 feet in length, Tyrannosaurus rex was a carnivorous powerhouse. With teeth the size of your average banana and a jaw wrapped in powerful muscle, recent studies have estimated it was capable of exerting a bit force of around 12,000 pounds, making it easily capable of ripping the flesh and absolutely pulverizing the bones of any Cretaceous animal unlucky enough to cross it’s path.

B. excelsus was first described by O.C. Marsh in 1879, for a century its name stood among the likes of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops horridus as a quintessential example of what the world thinks of when they hear the word “Dinosaur.” Although there has been some confusion among the public as new studies come out and names have been changed and now changed back, and possibly changed again, the silhouette of Brontosaurus is still what people think of when they conjure up images of long necked giants knocking down trees in a prehistoric forest looking for plants to eat like some sort of giant reptilian cow. B. excelsus lived some 156.3 to 146.8 MYA during the Late Jurassic. It was roughly 72 feet in length and weighed around 17 tons.

Storm clouds roll in over a beach on the coast of Jurassic (152 million years ago) Tanzania. A single Kentrosaur wanders alone in search of food, it grows apprehensive as the thunder rolls over the horizon. Kentrosaurus weighed in at around 1.7 tons, reaching about 18 feet in length. Though it wasn’t the biggest member of the Stegosauridae family it made up for it by having an exaggerated set of weaponry, including spikes measuring almost 2.5 feet in length running from the tip of its tale to just behind its pelvis; couple that with a tale capable of an almost 90 mile per hour swing and it would have surely been an intimidating prospect for any predator to take on.

Nothosaurus mirabilis was a species of early marine reptile that lived during the Triassic, 240 to 210 million years ago. It measured around 16 to 23 feet in length and possessed a set of distinctive interlocking teeth, most likely a means to catch fish and other soft bodied prey. It has been theorized that one of their descendants or that of a related species may have evolved into the giant Pliosaurs that would eventually come to be in the Jurassic period.

First described in 1877 at the height of the “Bone Wars” by Othneil Charles Marsh, Allosaurus was one of the most successful and wide spread predators of the Late Jurassic Period (approximately 155-150 million years ago) with most of it’s remains being found the Morrison Formation in Western North America and related specimens having been found as far away as Portugal, and possibly as far off as Tanzania. Allosaurus was named from the Greek for “different lizard” because of a trait found in the central parts of it’s vertebrae which had a concave cup-like shape on the back end of it’s surface.

Dilophosaurus wetherelli was well known thanks to it’s notable appearance in a certain blockbuster movie, but was not as well known to science until very recently. A new study has been published that revealed that the animal, once thought to possess a bite not suitable for holding onto large prey, not only reached sizes larger than previously thought, but it also possessed a very strong might with it’s jaw being revealed to be much more robust than previous studies had concluded. It also has been shown to have a much larger crest and that it’s crest and skeletal system had honeycombed airsacs that helped it regulate weight as well as air flow.

The coolest wild felid nerdy t-shirt to wear

Megalograptus welchi was a member of a now extinct group of marine arthropods called Eurypterids, it lived during the Late Ordovician period around 449.5 to 443.8 million years ago. Compared to modern ocean dwelling arthropods, M. welchi was rather large, measuring around 1.2 meters in length, not including the large spiny appendages on the front of it's body; speaking of those spines, while it's pretty likely it used them to hunt for prey, science has yet to determine just how they were used or what type of prey it might have been hunting.

Plesiosaurus (or “Near to lizard,” a reference to it’s closeness to modern reptiles) was not a dinosaur but a marine reptile that swam in the oceans of the Early Jurassic Period, about 199.6 to 175.6 million years ago. It and other members of it’s family were often distinguished by their long necks with some later related species having necks longer than their bodies. It is thought that they used their necks to catch fish and other prey items by snaking their relatively small neck through the water to snag an unsuspecting meal, because the distance of their larger bodies would obscure their real size and not panic the prey as much, this might explain why later species had much longer necks.