Great Dying Survivor

To my fellow South Koreans who demonize wildlife as evil monsters to be exterminated while protecting feral cats, read this. 야생동물을 악마화하며 혐오하고 생태계교란종인 길냥이를 보호하는 한국인들운 이걸 깨달아야 한다

Trans ppl have been using the bathroom of their choosing *forever* and it's never been a problem. The current hysteria is a totally manufactured moral panic.

Trail camera footage of a cougar sneaking up on a herd of elk. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFPY...

quite a good article and summation of synapsid restoration by Manospondylus! www.manospondylus.com/2026/10/prot...

Don't support Prehistoric Emergence either: it falsely portrays recently extinct Pleistocene megafauna that coexisted with extant species as destructive invasive species (even though them coming back would benefit the modern ecosystems they once lived in).

#FossilFriday While the recently extinct thylacine was deliberately and falsely claimed to be the size of a wolf as part of pro-extermination propaganda, the much more ancient, Late Miocene Thylacinus potens genuinely was the size of a wolf and an apex predator of the time.

In the Sansan locality of France, a notable proportion of Micromeryx heel bones show a pattern of carnivore bite marks on the heel bones (astragalus and calcaneus). These were interpreted as bite marks made by predatory mustelids in attempts to immobilize the prey. #FossilFriday

I find it incredibly fascinating how raptors punch above their weight just by having mean weaponry. You don't see a lot of predators in the same size range with the same capabilities.

I just wanted to show a pic I recently took of a Haast’s eagle foot reproduction I bought a while ago. Directly below it are real skulls of a coyote and bobcat.

Today was a good day. Happiest I’ve felt in a couple months.

Trying to re-evolve into Macroeuphractus

Now that I think about it, given that bears (especially brown and black) prey more commonly, and sometimes almost always on ungulate neonates, has anyone ever thought more or less the same for Arctodus and Arctotherium? Art by Beth Zaiken

Don't support Prehistoric Emergence either: it falsely portrays recently extinct Pleistocene megafauna that coexisted with extant species as destructive invasive species (even though them coming back would benefit the modern ecosystems they once lived in).

A professor’s perspective on undergrads

Source for Smilodon benefitting from interglacials: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24779050/

Red-tailed hawk that appears to have successfully preyed on a striped skunk.

I did some art of the newly described Invictibellatrix recently! I ended up leaving the label for this one more generic though, as realistically this illustration can comfortably represent pretty much any early megaraptoran. #sciart #paleoart

Some native plants and pollinators. American beauty berry with an (invasive) honeybee. Bee balm with a wasp. In fact, "bee balm" seems like a misnomer since it seems to only attract wasps.

Common sneezeweed and an invasive European honeybee Hawthorn Hollow, Kenosha, WI #nativeplants #insects #bees #wisconsin

The problem with the vast majority of these videos is that, instead of having fun with a popular subject and using it for light, informative scicomm... They're just clickbaity sloppy lists of personal opinions, often riddled with inconsistencies if not outright misinformation.

Bad enough to have your skull bashed in by a sharp implement, but then your killer shits all over your corpse.

LEGENDARY EPIC PREDATOR VS DANGEROUS PREY RELATIONSHIPS: - ALLOSAURUS VS STEGOSAURUS - T. REX VS TRICERATOPS - SIBERIAN TIGER VS USSURI WILD BOAR - SEA KRAIT VS MORAY EEL - ...ferret vs prairie dog...with no more irony than the examples above

I suspect that if the true origin of birds was properly understood from the start (which could have been the case if not for Owen), the Mesozoic would forever have been ingrained in popular culture as "When eagles had teeth", not as an Age of Reptiles.

Imagine explaining the concept of deep time to medieval people. "Birds are the last survivors of a line of gigantic flesh-eating monsters that lived a time long before mankind ever existed. And before those flesh-eating monsters became gigantic, Earth was ruled by various kinds of dragons."

I like this art piece of Arctodus simus by Kelly Taylor. It's old, but I love the interaction between one of the largest (land) carnivorans and one of the smallest.

I found a really interesting video about an experiment where dead alligators were sent to the deep sea to see what ate them. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDs4...

I know I say this quite a lot, but imagine explaining this to your medieval ancestors. "So they took three dead dragons, dropped them down to the deep ocean, and they watched them get eaten by giant bug things, bone-eating worms, and some mystery creature."

I find the urge of Western creature designers to make hunchback gorilla/bear monsters fascinating.

Dinosaurs got smaller, but not any less vicious.

Need to get in my first post of the day! It's just more passerine violence. Apparently, house sparrows will kill eastern bluebirds.

From top to bottom: Smilodon gracilis, T. rex, Spinosaurus, Giganotosaurus

Here's a series of photos of an adult female great tit killing another adult female, and photos of the victim. The attacker pecked the victim's abdomen, plucked feathers out of its body, and even *stuck its beak into its eyes*.

Just do a search nuke -ai -generated -prompt -chatgpt -sora -openai -grok -craiyon Usually it gets rid of most AI dogshit in the search results. -anything helps out a lot with narrowing searches, I usually do it with instagram and tiktok along with any other annoying websites or phrases.

Not only genAI does this bs, but if clickbaity publications like the one mentioned above were already damaging before, genAI is now sure to boost them even further. So it's both wrong AND pushes for potential misinformation. Just great.

Cited in this study is a 20-year nest box study of starlings in New Zealand. Starlings fought each other (all between the same sex), sometimes killing each other by grasping the opponent's head such that the claws *penetrated the brain through the eye socket*.

The herbivorous therapsid Kayentatherium wellesi that has very large incisors like a Rodent of Unusual Size! #FossilFriday ⚒️🧪

#FossilFriday Known from multiple specimens ranging from the Early Paleocene to the Early Eocene, the possible meridiungulate Carodnia is the oldest large South American mammal and one of the first megafaunal herbivorous mammals.

Eurypterus remipes in the fossil collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences. #FossilFriday Save the Academy. Eurypterids in, dragons out.

The holotype of Dubreuillosaurus is being put up for auction. sigh… www.millon.com/actualites/u...

I wouldn't be surprised if they got more often even above ~500kg, before intense human hunting. After all, reduced observed size after human hunting is a real thing in crocs, and both these species were massacred by us.

The holotype of Dubreuillosaurus is being auctioned, likely to be forever lost to researchers. This is not just wrong, but outright ILLEGAL (holotypes are prevented from commercial use). www.millon.com/actualites/u...

Turns out crashing onto a quadrupedal horned tank as a bipedal predator isn't the best idea, when you have just the right tool to handle it in a gigantic mouth full of railroad spikes.

To the people who asked "why did they need to write a paper on why colliding chest-first into a Triceratops is a dangerous hunting method?": because there was a paper that kind of proposed just that, and this new paper is a (highly) belated response to it.

Once again, we're so incapable of comprehending the scale of Mesozoic dinosaurs, that we feel the urge of scaling down their capabilities to fit our modern ecological "hierarchies". It's hard to accept that our extant apex predators wouldn't be anywhere close to the top of the Mesozoic food chains.

I think it's cool that Pleistocene South America (the northern part at least) would have been home to two species of crocodile that could get within the body size range of Smilodon populator (>300-400 kg to the best of my knowledge). And they're both still alive.