10: The Styracosaurus The styracosaurus is one of the more unusual
dinosaurs that ever lived. Its name translates roughly to spiked lizard. It had an extremely
impressive crown on its head of spikes. Picture a triceratops except with significantly more horns.
In fact, the styracosaurus is a relative of the triceratops, with both of them
coming from a family of creatures known as ceratopsian, or horned/frilled dinosaurs.
But out of all the ceratopsian monsters, the styracosaurus was by far the one with the most
distinctive skull. It had an extremely long horn over two feet long that stuck out of its nose,
and its frill (the great plate rising above its eyes) had anywhere from four to six extra horns.
It was a lot of horns for just one animal, with the experts saying it probably had something to
do with attracting mates. The dinosaurs with the more impressive head displays had a better
chance of pairing up with a female. Besides just having a lot of horns,
the styracosaurus was a heavy beast. It weighed up to 6000 pounds, though that made it kind of
small compared to the triceratops, which weighed up to 26,000 pounds. This makes sense considering
the styracosaurus lived on Earth about 10 million years before the frilled dinosaurs most people are
familiar with, about 75 million years ago. This means it evolved into the more famous triceratops,
heavier and meaner, right before the triceratops was annihilated by the great asteroid.
9: Longisquama The Longisquama
insignis is one of the strangest reptiles that has ever been discovered by scientists.
Even after they found it, they couldn't agree on what kind of creature it was. They first
thought it was some kind of animal that lived in the trees, perhaps related to the earliest
birds. The reason it's so unique is that it has strange skin appendages on its back that almost
look like feathers but aren't actually feathers. After quite a bit of research, scientists were
able to identify the Longisquama as a type of reptile. It lived in the Mid-Triassic, 235 million
years before today. Its fossils have been found only in the Madygen Formation, which is located in
the country of Kyrgyzstan. The remote and secluded location has made it difficult for paleontologists
to do much research. However, the creatures they have found here, at least the ones that
have been identified and put in the fossil record, have mostly been bizarre reptiles and fish from
the Triassic. The entire area was probably a lush forest, but today it's little more than a desert.
As for the weird appendages on this strange reptile, they made it look
like any ordinary lizard you would see in the jungle today, except with six or seven massive
feather-like structures sticking out of its back. They looked like mini hockey sticks,
and scientists still can't figure out what they were used for. Modern paleontologists believe
the structures could be some kind of bizarre missing link connecting birds and reptiles,
but for now it’s kind of a mystery!! 8: Carnotaurus
The Carnotaurus was a very strange type of dinosaur known as a theropod, and believe
it or not, there has only been one specimen uncovered anywhere on the planet. But despite
there only being a single skeleton ever found of this creature, it was discovered in such great
condition that scientists were able to basically recreate what it looked like. Scientists even know
that it had scaly skin and absolutely no feathers. The weirdest part about the Carnotaurus is that it
had teeny tiny forelimbs. Think about the T. rex and it's alleged tiny little arms…
well, the Carnotaurus’s arms were even tinier. They were literally useless, like if your hands
grew out of your armpits with nothing in the middle. It could use them for pretty much nothing,
which has boggled scientists who can't figure out why it had arms at all if it couldn't use them.
The single specimen of the Carnotaurus had some of its skin still preserved,
and with it, scientists were able to find out a lot about the monster. Doctor Phil Bell from the
University of New England likened the creature’s flesh to that of the thorny devil in Australia.
It was completely covered in scales, with small conical studs. It would have been extremely bumpy
to touch, and may even have cut your hand. And finally, the Carnotaurus had one
more exceptional characteristic. It had a single horn sticking out of its forehead,
looking like some kind of dinosaur/unicorn hybrid. It probably used its horn to battle other males
when it came to mating season. 7: Eternal Sleeping Dinosaur
125 million years ago, a pair of dinosaurs fell asleep inside of an underground burrow.
They fell asleep and never woke up, as they were buried alive after a volcanic eruption!
They then remained undiscovered, sleeping peacefully until paleontologists in China
dug them up. They found these two creatures in pristine condition, with each dino being about
four feet long. They were given an extremely long name in Chinese (Changmiania liaoningensis), and
it translates roughly to “the eternal sleeper.” The two specimens can be found today at the
Paleontological Museum of Liaoning, in the same province where they were originally discovered.
A team of researchers from Argentina and Belgium recently took great interest in the eternal
sleepers and did a bit of investigating. As it turned out, they were very unique in the world
of dinosaurs. They may have been an early type of herbivore that walked on two legs, ran extremely
quickly, and burrowed deep in the earth. This is strange because most dinosaurs weren’t really
burrowing animals. They preferred to lumber around on land, throwing their weight around. These
critters were quite different. Senior researcher Pascal Godefroit even compared them to rabbits.
But perhaps what's really interesting is that there may have been significantly more
critters just like these, it’s just their fossils have never been found. Because of
the rare circumstance in which the two dinos were preserved in their underground nests,
they’ve been some of the only burrowing creatures ever uncovered from the days of the dinosaurs.
6: Erythrosuchus The Erythrosuchus was one of the biggest predators
in South Africa during the Middle Triassic. And while this creature is certainly related
to the dinosaurs, it was its own unique type of animal called an archosauriform reptile. It was
a carnivore that could grow 15 feet long, huge and powerful but quite slow and cumbersome. It
had thick muscles, thick bones, and trudged slowly over land. It couldn't even walk very fast. But
this wasn't a big problem millions of years ago because the herbivores couldn't move very quickly
either. It was basically a bunch of oversized carnivores hobbling after oversized plant eaters.
Perhaps the weirdest part about the Erythrosuchus is simply the way it looked.
Imagine a huge crocodile except with the head of a dinosaur. That's basically what we're talking
about here, a freak of nature with dinosaur teeth and an enormous body of a huge reptile.
Unfortunately, not much is known about the behavior of this huge beast. Only a handful of
skeletons have been found, and none of them have been complete. The best guess scientists have is
that it ambushed its prey. It probably hung out near rivers and in the bushes, where it could
chomp on other animals when they strolled by. What’s your favorite dinosaur?? Do you wish
that they were still around?? Let me know in the comments below and be sure
to subscribe if you haven’t already for more videos about prehistoric creatures!!
5: Hongyu Chowi The bizarre fossil of the
prehistoric fish called Hongyu Chowi may just be changing our understanding of how creatures
moved from the sea to the land. This curious fish is one of the only fish ever discovered
that shares several key features with land animals. And yet all the same, scientists
say it's only slightly related to land animals – and so it still doesn't paint a complete picture.
As you may already know, it was about 360 million years ago when a group of fish flopped out of the
water, grew four legs, and started wandering around on land. These four-legged fish turned
into reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and ultimately humans. But there are some serious links missing
between fish and reptile, and the Hongyu Chowi is just one piece of a larger puzzle.
First of all, this fish lived somewhere between 370 and 360 million years ago. It was discovered
in 2002 in China by researchers with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.
Ever since, researchers have been trying to figure out where the fish fits into the family tree.
The problem is that the fish had some strange features, such as a shoulder girdle, something
some of the earliest land animals had. It also had special gill support, a biological feature
of animals as they transitioned away from using gills. Still, the fish didn’t actually have any
legs. Scientists have still never found the exact animal that was in the middle of the transition,
sprouting legs to crawl out of the water. 4: The Pentaceratops
The Pentaceratops was kind of like the Triceratops. Its name means “five-horned face,”
whereas the Triceratops means “three-horned face.” The weirdest part is that both creatures really
only had three main horns. Each prehistoric beast had a pair of horns over its eyes,
with a smaller one on the end of its nose. In the case of the Pentaceratops, it had two very
small outgrowths on its cheekbones, technically meaning it had five horns instead of three.
But the biggest difference between the Pentaceratops and the other dinosaurs of
its kind was just how massive its head was. It had one of the largest skulls of any dinosaur that has
ever lived on the planet. Get ready to have your mind blown, because the Pentaceratops had a head,
on average, of 10 feet in length. Its head was absolutely gigantic.
It also ruled the area of what is today New Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous period,
about 75 million years ago. There were other types of horn-faced dinosaurs in Mexico,
but the Pentaceratops was so big and so menacing that it ruled most of the American Southwest.
If you want to know why this dinosaur had such a huge head, scientists say it probably
had something to do with sexual selection. At some point, the ornaments (meaning horns) on
their heads became so attractive to females that dinosaurs with the bigger heads and more shapely
horns simply bred far more often. This meant that the males with the larger heads had babies
with equally large heads, passing the gene along until all of them had ridiculously large noggins.
3: The Crab Platypus One of the weirdest things that ever existed
is something called a crab platypus. It was a horrible thing with a hodgepodge of seemingly
random body parts – and yet despite this, it was only the size of a quarter. It was absolutely
tiny, and technically a crab. But it lived 95 million years before today and was on an offshoot
branch stemming from the crab family tree. In other words, it was an outcast. Javier Luque
from Yale University called its discovery one of the most exciting fossil finds of the past decade!
The crab platypus was found in Colombia in 2005, but others have since been dug up in places like
Wyoming and Morocco. The little crab lived all over the world. And here’s why it was so weird.
It had giant eyes but no eye sockets. It had bent claws, mouth parts that looked like shrimp legs,
and finally, a tail just about as long as its body. To the casual observer,
it wasn’t much of a crab at all. Scientists still don’t know what happened to it or why
it deviated so far from the rest of the crabs, like the ones we still have today.
2: Dollocaris The Dollocaris was an invertebrate that
lived during the Jurassic period. It also happened to look like a miniature alien spacecraft. It had
a small body, giant eyeballs, and weird grappling appendages that you’d expect to see drooping from
some kind of alien vessel floating through space. But the biggest mystery is that scientists can't
properly identify it. Some say it’s closely related to the mantis shrimp, some say it’s
related to worm-like crustaceans that live in aquatic caves – but nobody really knows the truth.
Let's talk about its huge eyes for a minute. The Dollocaris had eyes that took up about a quarter
of its body length. Researchers say each eyeball probably had about 18,000 lenses. It was able to
see extraordinary well, which probably would have made it an apex predator. It could have
easily watched for any kind of movement going on around it, then flung out its long appendages to
snag prey. This means the Dollocaris most likely spent the majority of its time floating through
the darkest parts of the ocean, using its huge eyeballs to constantly search for food.
1: The Albertosaurus The Albertosaurus is the lesser-known cousin of
the T. rex, a truly strange and monstrous creature that has an extensive fossil record. It's not as
popular as the T. rex, but so many bones have been found in the Canadian province of Alberta
belonging to this ancient beast that scientists know almost everything there is to know about it.
First of all, it was a type of tyrannosaur, just like the T. rex. But it was half of the more
popular dino’s size, coming in at only 30 feet from the top of its head to the tip of its tail.
It also only weighed about 4000 pounds. But even though the Albertosaurus was so small,
it was still a killing machine. What it lacked in size it made up with in speed and agility.
It was way faster than the T. rex – plus, it may have hunted in packs. Since paleontologists have
discovered so many specimens in the same spot, they believe the Albertosaurus probably lived in
small groups as social animals. The Albertosaurus was the prehistoric version of the modern wolf.
So, what exactly did these dinosaurs hunt while they were marauding across the
Canadian countryside in packs? Their favorite animals to eat were duck-billed dinosaurs,
such as the Edmontosaurus (named after the city of Edmonton) and the Lambeosaurus. Their
hunting was actually great for the ecosystem, since they chose the most vulnerable animals,
getting rid of sick, old, and juvenile dinosaurs. Which of these freaky prehistoric beasts is
your favorite? Let me know in the comments and thank you for watching. If you haven’t
already, don’t forget to hit subscribe for more awesome videos from the channel!