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endless night

#penguin

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I had a dream that I went to a video rental store (???) and they had a gundam manga where everything was the same except the entire cast was cambrian creatures (?????)

#cambrian

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cambrian seas

#pokemon

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Sapien boy and neanderthal girl doze in the springtime, finally together again

#paleoart #prehistoric humans #neanderthals #fave

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i love when animals just really really fuck up scientific data by just doing natural behaviours. the only remains we have of gigantopithecus (absolutely giant prehistoric hominid that went extinct somewhere around 300 tya) are teeth and a couple mandibles. because porcupines ate ALL of the skeletons

#gigantopithecus

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It me

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Whoa. What in God's name is the Great Dying? That sounds horrifying.

the Great Dying is the colloquial name for the End-Permian mass extinction event, which separates the Permian from the Triassic in the geological record.

and it's called that for a reason, because the Great Dying killed, no joke, 90% of all animals on planet Earth in the worst mass extinction of all time! the Earth before the Great Dying was an alien land full of crocodile relatives, mammal ancestors, and more weird fish than you could shake a reasonably-sized stick at.

<art src: Julius T. Csotonyi>

the world after the Great Dying was a blasted hellscape, with few survivors either in the sea or on land.

<art src: Julius T. Csotonyi>

one of those land-bound survivors was the ancestor of all mammals, and another was the first of the dinosaurs! the next geologic age, the Triassic, would see the rise of dinosaurs and pterosaurs and even seagoing ichthyosaurs to replace the multitude of lineages that fell during the Great Dying.

but what caused this chaotic event?

the death of a supercontinent, no joke.

Pangea was very much a thing at the time, but plate tectonics were starting to literally rip it apart at the seams. and when the seams split, a volcanic hellstorm was unleashed that hurled lava MILES into the air and covered the land in lava beds over a mile thick, releasing gigantic stores of carbon dioxide that dwarf the maximum amount humans could ever release by an order of magnitude! and also poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas. that will be important later.

so what happened next was runaway global warming that rapidly turned the entire planet except for the poles completely uninhabitable. the ocean got so warm that it was as hot as a hot tub at the equator, which made the water unable to hold dissolved gases and sent the breathable oxygen levels in the ocean plummeting worldwide, suffocating basically everything in it. the land was covered in a haze of highly toxic gas and punishing heat that poisoned and baked animals alive, while the hot ocean waters may have fueled hurricanes the size of entire continents that ravaged both earth and sea down to the bedrock!

the whole fucking planet looked more like Venus than anything we'd recognize today.

so basically, this was the lowest point of animal life on Earth. it took many millions of years for our planet to recover, and we all should be thankful that, whatever humanity unleashes in the future, at least it won't be as bad as the Great Dying.

#end permian extinction event

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Nature, 252 mya: LYSTROSAURUS SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

#lystrosaurus

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Okay. Opposing creationism is not "Culturally Christian." The world is not 6000 years old. This is not an idealogical position. We measured.

#creationism isnt a religious disagreement. its fundamentally rooted in science denialism #you can’t treat it as a difference of opinion

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Baby albino changyuraptor spooked by her own reflection, realizing that she's not like her other siblings.

#changyuraptor #paleoart

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Crinoid fossils or star stones aka fairy coins

#fossils

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isnt the world so beautiful....all the little ways we're immortal...71 million years later they still sleep like you

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paleo museum sketches from january :)

#paleoart #fossils

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Limelight

Fingerpainted Ibispaint X,

Thur 21 Dec 2023

A lone megapterygius (newly discovered mosasaur) basks in the limelight while exploring an underwater cavern. A quick concept that I decided to blotch out for fun, I may attempt it again in the future

#megapterygius #paleoart #mosasaurs

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Members of carnivora paired with their common ancestor, a miacid. 

#paleoart #miacids #evolution