What does it take to get the nickname "Demon Duck"? Just how ugly were real-life unicorns?
And which ancient animal was named after a Star Wars princess? Watch to find out.
Picture a gorilla. Now picture a horse. Now imagine them crossed with each other,
in some kind of horrific affront against God.
Congratulations, Doctor Frankenstein — you've just invented the chalicothere.
"It's alive, it's alive! It's alive!"
The chalicotheres were the ancient ancestors of horses. They had distinctly horse-like necks,
but also short hind legs and long front legs, that gave them a stance similar to that of
today's gorillas. The weirdness doesn't end there, either: some of the species within the
chalicothere family had massive, sharp claws. Wear patterns of their claws, coupled with the shape
of their teeth, seem to confirm that they were vegetarian grazers, just like horses. But some
species appear to have walked like gorillas, balanced on the knuckles of their "hands."
Scientists also believe that they tended to sit down as they ate, just like pandas.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, chalicothere remains kept the scientific community
confused for a very long time, and it wasn't until they started
playing mix-n-match with modern animals that anything about them started to make sense.
When you really think about it,
even normal kangaroos are pretty strange creatures. But the short-faced kangaroos,
which inhabited Australia about the time of the last Ice Age, really take the biscuit.
These creatures were around 6 feet tall, weighed about 400 pounds, and had faces that looked
alarmingly human. No, really. The members of the subfamily Sthenurinae had heads with flat-fronted
skulls, a distinct chin, wide foreheads, and eyes set in the front of the skull, rather than on
the side. They also had well-defined cheekbones, which had some researchers wondering, well… why?
D. Rex Mitchell of the University of Arkansas did some impressive work in trying to figure
this one out. Mitchell selected one version of the sthenurine family tree, the Simosthenurus
occidentalis. He found that the skull of the occidentalis allowed it to not only bite down
with incredible force, but with enough force that it could easily chew entire tree branches. That,
in turn, opened them up to a food source that other creatures wouldn't have been able to eat.
Get those muscles working regularly enough, and voila: you've got yourself a kangaroo supermodel.
In 2010, researchers made a shocking oceanic discovery in — of all places — the Peruvian
desert. These scientists found the fossilized remains of a creature they estimated to have
been about 60 feet long, with some of its teeth extending to a staggering 14 inches.
The verdict? A huge whale, worthy of a name of Biblical proportions.
The creature was named Livyatan melvillei. Livyatan, from the Bible creature better
known as Leviathan, and melvillei, from Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick.
While most of today's large whales are suction feeders,
these bad boys weren't content to just drift around and catch what came to them.
They were hunters that preyed on other massive whales — and they had the power to do it, too.
It's thought that they weighed somewhere around 50 tons, and while they likely preferred to eat
prehistoric dolphins, it's also probable that they tangled with another ancient monster:
the megalodon. You wouldn't wanna be out sailing while those two were going at it.
If there's anything that can be said about Charles Darwin, it's that he was
very talented at categorization. But there's always going to be one thing that doesn't
fit into any category, and for Darwin, that was the Macrauchenia patachonica.
This creature was one of a number of hoofed animals that once roamed South America,
having disappeared only about 10,000 years ago. Darwin discovered its fossils in
Argentina when he was on his world tour, and he had no idea what to make of them.
The animal had been about the size of a rhino, but had the teeth of a rodent,
a massive head, short legs, a long neck, and a nose that grew from right between the eyes.
At first, researchers decided that it must have been some sort of giant llama,
but no one was really convinced about this theory. Fortunately,
modern science has come to the rescue. In 2017, DNA from remains discovered in a Chilean cave
were analyzed by the American Museum of Natural History and Germany's University of Potsdam.
Surprisingly, they found that the creature is a distant relation of literally
none of the animals you'd expect. As it turns out, if you go back about 66 million years,
you'll find that Darwin's mystery creature sits on a branch of the early ancestors of the horse.
Apparently, a fair few paleontologists are Star Wars fans, because when it came
time for them to name a newly discovered, long-extinct, giraffe- and deer-like mammal,
they called it Xenokeryx amidalae. And they did this for one very good reason:
because it had some seriously goofy headgear.
"How rude."
The creature thrived around 16 million years ago in the area we now know as Spain, and went the
way of the Dodo about 4.9 million years ago. It is thought to have looked something like a
saber-toothed giraffe, with furry horns sticking out from over the eyes. It also sported another,
T-shaped horn straight up from the back of the skull. Think of it kinda like a reverse unicorn.
Funnily enough, this prehistoric giraffe is just one of an entire family of creatures
recognizable by their equally weird cranial decorations. The Naboo would be proud.
The best way to describe the Siberian unicorn would be by way of comparison.
Take the woolly mammoth, which you likely know as a hairier version of the elephant.
Now give it the horn of a rhino, protruding from the center of the skull. And, just for fun,
make it bigger — up to a weight of around 7,700 pounds. Hey presto: the Siberian unicorn.
For a long time, it was believed that this massive beast went extinct 100,000 years ago,
but more recent radiocarbon dating tests seem to suggest that they were still around just
39,000 years ago, and potentially as recently as 29,000 years ago. And that means it's entirely
possible our own ancestors existed at the same time as these ancient rhinos.
Sadly, the Siberian unicorns didn't have a pleasant end. About 40,000 years ago,
a mass extinction event killed some of the earth's other megafauna. It's now believed that
the Siberian unicorn died in the same event, which is today known as the Quaternary extinction event.
It's generally thought that this occurred as a result of both climate change and the rapid
spread of humanity. Over time, both of these factors contributed to the disappearance of
many animals' food sources, leading to the extinction of countless ancient megafauna.
It's easy to imagine the age of the dinosaurs as a genuinely terrifying time,
in which you'd inevitably run into some massive creature with deadly claws and bone-crushing jaws.
But here's some good news: this was also the age of the Nuralagus rex,
which was basically a prehistoric rabbit — and it wasn't terrifying in the slightest.
This critter was officially named in 2011, although its fossils had been found much earlier.
It lived on the island of Minorca, near Spain, around 4 million years ago, and is estimated to
have weighed around 26 pounds. It's classified as a rabbit because it shares a skull and teeth
with modern-day rabbits, but that doesn't mean you'd necessarily recognize it as such.
Brian Kraatz of the Western University of Health Sciences explains it like this:
"This is a rather typical rabbit head stuck on an atypical rabbit body."
Meaning? Well, for one thing, the creature's inflexible spine means it wouldn't be able to hop.
Examination of their skulls also suggest they had tiny eyes and short ears,
which is the opposite of what you might expect from a modern rabbit. Best of all,
however, these rabbits have been described as "roly-poly" — a physique they developed in part
due to a lack of predators and an abundance of food. Basically… They lived the good life.
The entelodont basically looks like a giant, angry pig with a head that seems way too big
for its matching body. Suitably, these creatures are widely known as "hell pigs" — even though they
weren't actually pigs, being more closely related to modern hippos. If there's any
prehistoric creature that looks like it might have come straight up from hell itself, it's this one.
Those giant heads could reach sizes of up to three feet long,
and they accounted for as much as 45 percent of the creature's entire body.
Those skulls were definitely powerful enough to crush bone,
but thankfully they have the teeth of animals that ate mostly plants, and only occasionally meat.
Fossilized remains of entelodonts suggest that a good portion of the bones that were crushed
in a hell pig's mouth would be the skulls of other hell pigs. This, as well as the scars that
are frequently found in entelodont bones, suggest that fights among the hell pigs were commonplace.
And maybe it's for the best that they disappeared around 19 million years ago, since they could
reach up to 2,000 pounds — which, for reference, is about the same size as a Clydesdale horse.
Here's a shocker for you: the creatures known as Demon Ducks lived in Australia.
The Dromornis planei belongs to an extinct family of birds that,
despite being flightless, have a lot in common with modern-day ducks.
They lived to terrorize Australia for a very long time indeed,
first showing up in the fossil record about 55 million years ago, and only disappearing
around 50,000 years ago. A ton of their fossils have since been discovered, but there's still a
lot that's not known about what they were — including whether or not they had wings.
The Demon Duck weighed on average about 600 pounds, and stood somewhere around eight
feet tall. Based on where the fossils have been found, they seem to have gravitated toward water
supplies such as rivers and floodplains. They also appear to have been one of the
favorite foods of crocodiles, which, as you may know, have been around pretty much forever.
There are actually a number of different species found within the group known as dromornithids,
and even today it's still not known what ultimately led to their extinction.
Considering the lives they lead, you've got to wonder how sloths have managed to survive at all.
The strangest thing is that they've been around for a shocking amount of time,
and there's at least one kind of sloth that was even lazier than the ones we have today.
Modern sloths spend the majority of their time in the trees, and only come down to the ground to see
what's what on very rare occasions. But rewind to between five and eight million years ago,
and a number of sloth species had a different perspective on life.
Researchers have confirmed that these ancient sloths were actually deep-diving swimmers.
While the bones of animals that live on land are filled with cavities, these sloth bones
were solid. They also sported beaver-like tails and leg bones that had adapted to swimming,
making it entirely possible that they spent much of their time at the bottom of the ocean,
grazing on vegetation. If that was the case, then it's likely they only
returned to land only to occasionally sun themselves. Not a bad life, don't you think?
Wombats stand about knee-high on a human, they weigh between 30 and 80 pounds,
and they basically spend their lives toddling around Australia.
But they looked pretty different 300,000 years ago. The ancient ancestor of today's wombat was
called Diprotodon, and this guy couldn't fit inside a pillowcase: it was about the size
of a rhino, weighed around 6,000 pounds, and was just as stocky as their modern-day counterparts.
Researchers from the University of Queensland were able to take 300,000-year-old teeth and
examine them for isotope signatures that might give some insight into just
what these massive creatures were eating. Curiously, they found cycles: each year,
the ancient wombat would travel in a pattern that covered about 125 miles. It seems as though they
were following both the rain and their food — making them the only marsupial known to migrate.
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