I'm sure the same applies to animals.
Therefore I bring you the Nerd Fact Of The Time Period! This time celebrating Awesome-Things-That-Were-Super-Awesome-But-Not-Awesome-Enough-To-Not-Be-Extinct.
Now I know you all love dinosaurs (If you don't love dinosaurs, please leave) but everyone knows about them. This wouldn't be an awesome nerdfact if I didn't attempt to find some new unknown awesome things. I have not made any of these up!
1. Name: Leedsicthys
Reason for awesomeness: Imagine a sardine....
Just a pretty boring little silver fish, swimming along with its mouth open trying to filter out some tiny morsels of food.
Now imagine a sardine THE SIZE OF A WHALE! and with a Yorkshire accent!
That's right folks. Before there were whales there were other things that do the same things as whales do.... it just happens that they were gigantic fish.
Leedsicthys was the largest of these, with sensible estimates of size ranging from 9-16m in length (a similar size to the Humpback Whale). It swam the seas during the Jurassic period and was discovered first in Leeds! Take that American giant dinosaur fossils... we have a giant sardine!
(Not actually a sardine, Leedsicthys was too awesome to leave any close relatives alive whatsoever)
2. Name: Odobenocetops
Reason for awesomeness: You look at a Walrus and you say "tusks are pretty damn awesome, if only more animals had giant walrus tusks"
And then you run through all the coolest options like a tiny frog with giant walrus tusks, or an angry badger with giant walrus tusks, or a deadly snake with giant walrus fangs.
Well there wasn't any of those... and I'm not even going to say an elephant either... that would be anti-climactic.
It was a FREAKING WHALE!
I literally know nothing more or this animal other than it lived 5-11 million years ago and was awesome enough to sleep with all of your mums.
3. Name: Lystrosaurus
Reason for awesomeness: Around 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian era, there was an event colloquially known as 'The Great Dying'. It's a pretty apt name as 70% of all land vertebrates went extinct (worse than the dinosaur extinction event) and this essentially wiped the slate for the dinosaurs to rise to dominate the land.
But the Dinosaurs weren't the first to take advantage of the open world, that title goes to Lystrosaurus. Yes not even a group of animals like the dinosaurs, but just Lystrosaurus... on its own. Lystrosaurus spread so successfully that it is estimated that at its peak, 95% of all land vertebrates across the entire globe were Lystrosaurus! Imagine that!
Person 1: "We just went on a safari holiday to Africa!"
Person 2: "Sweet, what did you see?"
Person 1: "Mainly Lystrosurus....."
Person 2: "Isn't that the same as my European road-trip nature tour?"
Person 1: "Why what was that like?"
Person 2: "Mainly Lystrosaurus...."
Person 1: "Then yes"
Despite the 'Saurus' ending, Lystrosaurus was a Dicynodont, a link between early amniotes (reptiley-type-things) and mammals. It was these proto-mammals that dominated the land before the 'Great Dying' and were reduced to scraping a living and hiding until the dinosaurs finally snuffed it (except birds) 65 million years ago.
Lystrosaurus gets my awesome stamp by using the 'Great Dying' to be an enterprising motherfucker and become its own global super franchise!
4. Name: Opabinia
Reason for awesomeness: No-one know what the fuck it is! I'm not talking about regular folks who have never heard of it. But Paleontologists are genuinely rather baffled.
Opabinia is old.... very very old. It comes from a time known as the Cambrian when complex life was only just starting out and evolution was just throwing ridiculous designs at the wall to see if they would stick. Opabinia was one of these.
It has five eyes, a mouth that faces backwards, seems to swim with the use of strange fleshy lobes and has a long protrusion at the front reminiscent of "the claaaaaaaw" from Toy Story.
Awesome stamp for being a damn maverick!
5. Name: Therizinosaurus
Reason for awesomeness: Ok this one actually is a dinosaur. But on a scale of one to awesome, this one is at least a 17!
Therizinosaurus gets the awesome stamp for having the largest claws of anything ever! Whilst also being covered in feathers, having a pot belly and eating mainly plants.
Yep the most bad-ass daggers in natural history belong to a fat herbivore. This animal lived 70 million years ago in Mongolia and its remains were first thought to be that of a turtle.
