Happy New Year everyone! this will be my first review for 2019!
Back in the late Eocene, the world’s oceans were a much warmer, shallower than they are today. If you took a stroll along the beach back then, you may think that you have stepped into some hidden tropical paradise somewhere in the tropical pacific.
When anatomist Richard Harlan was presented with the fossil remains of a huge marine creature in 1834, he thought it must have been a reptile like Plesiosaurus or Mosasaurus, and therefore bestowed upon it the name Basilosaurus, “king lizard.” But when Sir Richard Owen later examined the teeth, he noted their double-rooted nature, which is a signature of mammals.
If you’ve ever wanted to build a diorama with your megalodon toys, you’ve probably noticed that there aren’t many other Miocene sea monster toys to pair them up with, although luckily plenty of the fish, turtles, and invertebrates alive then were very similar to modern ones.
Review and photographs by Loon, edited by Suspsy.
It may seem odd to think that whales are artiodactyls, or even-toed ungulates, the group of mammals that includes hippos, pigs, antelopes, deer, giraffes, sheep, goats, and cows. Obviously, modern whales don’t walk around on land, but, around 50 million years ago, their ancestors did.
