#torotix | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

a-dinosaur-a-day · 6 years

Text

Torotix clemensi

By Scott Reid on @drawingwithdinosaurs

PLEASE SUPPORT US ON PATREON. EACH and EVERY DONATION helps to keep this blog running! Any amount, even ONE DOLLAR is APPRECIATED! IF YOU ENJOY THIS CONTENT, please CONSIDER DONATING!

Name: Torotix clemensi

Status: Extinct

First Described: 1963

Described By: Brodkorb

Classification: Dinosauria, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Paraves, Eumaniraptora, Averaptora, Avialae, Euavialae, Avebrevicauda, Pygostylia, Ornithothoraces, Euornithes, Ornithuromorpha, Ornithurae, Neornithes?

Torotix is a potentially aquatic Neornithean from the Western Interior Seaway, living in the Lance Formation of Wyoming, about 66 million years ago in the Maastrichtian age of the Late Cretaceous. Torotix is thought to have been similar to a modern Pelican, within the. family of these animals, but it. is only known from part of the upper arm bone, so to be honest I somewhat doubt this assessment. It is, of course, possible, and regardless of what sort of bird it was, it probably was some sort of aquatic-typed Ornithuran, based on its location and resemblance to modern aquatic birds enough to assign it to one of their groups in the first place.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torotix

40 notes · View notes

jurassicsunsets · 4 years

Note

I have a dumb question, feel free to ignore. So documentaries about dinosaurs often say that non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, I was wondering which species of avian dinosaurs we know survived.

Hey! That’s not a dumb question at all - it’s a very smart one. After all, since birds are here now, and birds were around during the mesozoic, some birds had to have lived through the extinction and not died. So which ones were they?

Well...that’s not really an easy question to answer, unfortunately. The fossil record is incomplete. Really really incomplete. Really really really really incomplete. It’s as incomplete as this sentence: s ea c t . It’s that incomplete.

It’s incomplete because in order to get into the fossil record, something has to die in the right place to buried, and then it has to not get eaten or decomposed or smashed or eroded or stepped on or used as a home for little tiny mice before it gets buried, and then the stuff it gets buried in has to get turned into rocks, and then those rocks have to avoid getting shoved under a continent or melted by lava, and THEN those rocks have to come to the surface, and THEN some farmer has to notice the bones before they are eroded, and noticing bones really can be quite difficult to do when you’re on a horse going 30km/hr chasing a runaway piglet.

And it’s especially hard for birds to get into the fossil record, because they tend to be little, and have small fragile bones, and are easy to overlook when one is in hot pursuit of a bolting swine. When they are found, they tend to be really incomplete, because birds get smashed up pretty easily, a fact you know if you live in a house with large windows and have elected not to put little stickers up to make sure birds don’t smack into them and get smashed up. So when we do find bird fossils they kinda tend to be crappy.

In fact, we only have one really definite “birdy” bird fossil from the mesozoic - that is, a crown bird, or one that is descended from the common ancestor of all living birds.

(The alternative is being a “stem-bird”, which is all extinct species outside of this crown bird group, but who are closer relatives of birds than to anything else alive. T. rex, Triceratops, and Pteranodon are all stem-birds)

That one definite mesozoic bird is Vegavis iaai, a bird from Antarctica whose closest modern relatives are ducks and geese. We don’t have a skull of it, but it probably looked something like this:

(Image: An illustration of Vegavis. It looks, uh, kinda like a duck or goose. Image by Jack Wood @thewoodparable - give him a follow!)

Vegavis lived right around the end of the mesozoic era, around 66 million years ago. We don’t have evidence of it right after the K-Pg extinction, but it’s not impossible for it to have survived. Oh, and it’s worth noting that Antarctica was not all icy yet - that only really happened around 30 million years ago, when it became totally cut off from the rest of the world and the circum-polar current formed, making all the cold water circulate and just stay there instead of going elsewhere to warm up.

However, there are several other animals from around the same time that may be relatives of Vegavis. They include animals like Polarornis (also from the latest Cretaceous, and also from Antarctica) and Australornis, from New Zealand, along with a few other bits and scraps of things. What’s interesting about Australornis, however, is that it is known only from after the extinction. If it is indeed a relative of Vegavis, it would mean that this group survived the K-Pg extinction!

The placement of these genera is not certain, though, and there’s debate over whether they should be included together, or whether they are even really duck relatives. If they are, the evolutionary position of ducks would indicate that the ancestors of ratites (ostriches and friends), galliforms (chickens and friends), and neoavians (any other living bird you think of) would have had to also be around somewhere.

This would be in rough agreement with molecular clocks — which are another story - long story short, DNA evidence of modern species are used to find the differences between them, these are time-calibrated using fossils, and this lets us make an estimate of when groups diverged based on differences over time. There’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s what you need to know for now — but this would be in rough agreement with molecular clocks that give an estimate of the origin of modern birds around the Late Cretaceous.

There are some other bits and scraps of purported crown birds from the Mesozoic — a few things are claimed to be loons/divers, Graculavus has been claimed to be a shorebird/wader, Austinornis has been claimed to be a galliform, Lonchodytes has been claimed to be an albatross relative, Torotix has been claimed to be a pelican relative, and so on. I don’t find any of these especially convincing, but they are things that are out there. There’s more, too; I encourage you to check out the Theropod Database if you want to really dig into the world of Mesozoic crown-birds (or any theropods, really!).

To make a long story short - We don’t know, unfortunately, because the fossil record is really poor, and is especially poor for these animals. We have some hints as to what kinds of things might have survived, though!

#palaeoblr #dinosaur #bird #vegavis #paleontology #palaeontology

645 notes · View notes

daily-batty-dose · 7 years

Photo

Your Daily Batty Dose

♪ Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday batty blog! ♪ IT’S THE BLOG’S FIRST BIRTHDAY EVERYONE!

Bat With A Party Hat by Torotix

#bats #happy birthday #one year!!!#bats in hats #cute drawings #not mine #cute bats

133 notes · View notes

phuijl · 7 years

Text

dinosorted replied to your photo “EXCITE EXCITE!!!!!!! I’m heading to Melbourne, Australia next week...”

Oh wow you’ll be in my city >:) East or West Melbourne tho?

To be honest i’m not entirely sure, i never been there. @ashethehedgehog will be driving me to places to visit :>

#dinosorted #reply #hey torotix! been a while #i remember you from dA and i hope you've been well!

0 notes

ladynavigation · 10 years

Text

torotix replied to your photoset:So my bag arrived!! It’s a big outdoor backpack...

jeesh how much did one of those set you back? I remember all these nice Jojo products being hella expensive x-x

On the linked page you can see the bag itself was close to $100 itself and then I had to pay the shopping service to get it for me--so yeah, a bit costly.

That being said I've never shied away from spending money on something I know I will literally use until it falls apart. I might hesitate at figurines because they only stand on a shelf and look pretty, but for bags and clothes which I know I'll get a lot of use from I'm happy to go for it.

Plus, this was a collaboration with a legit outdoor products company so I know I'm getting a legit product with a decent life span.

#torotix

0 notes

albertonykus · 3 years

Note

Re Cretaceous penguins: aren’t there plausible Cretaceous aequornitheans (Torotix, Novacaesareala, Tytthostonyx, etc.)?

I wouldn’t consider any of those be clear evidence of Cretaceous neoavians. They’re all known only from fragmentary specimens, and even most of the authors who have identified them as potential neoavians did so only tentatively. (Torotix has apparently also been suggested to have been a presbyornithid instead in Thomas Stidham’s unpublished thesis.) In addition, Novacaesareala and Tytthostonyx are from the Hornerstown Formation, which could very well represent a similar deposit to the Takatika Grit (having formed in the Paleocene but preserving some reworked Cretaceous fossils), so it is not clear that they really are Cretaceous in age.

Could they be Cretaceous aequornitheans? Maybe, and I said as much. But with the material we have to work with, I’m not at all confident that they are aequornitheans, and in the case of Novacaesareala and Tytthostonyx, I’m not at all confident that they are from the Cretaceous either. I certainly wouldn’t use any of them as fossil calibrations for divergence time studies.

1 note · View note