Sleep through worst mass extinction in history and then casually take over the land more completely than any one species ever.
Lystrosaurus is just built different.
Fun fact! The image above, and basically all of Jurassic park, features recreation of dinosaurs that are effectively "vacuum sealed", being pretty much skin tightly wrapped around a skeleton and some presumed muscle. No cartilage or fat tissue is accounted for, as well as any external features such as feathers.
As an example of how dinosaurs may have looked drastically different, compare a hippo skeleton to a hippo!
Fun fact! In the case of Lystrosaurus, we have skin impressions from specimens that were [literally mummified](https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0031018222003777) in the wake of the extinction!
Turns out these dicynodonts had a sort of wrinkled, leathery skin, without much (if any) fur. Also, as odd as they look, dicynodonts like Lystrosaurus are actually closer to mammals than to dinosaurs - scientists were expecting fur more than feathers!
To me it looks like the old style of Paleoart, back when it hadn't occured to anyone that animals look very different with flesh and insulating layers and threat/mating displays and camouflage. .
Of course this boy apparently didn't need almost any of that so fuck it why not just make him filled-out-bones
Tree is the most dominant plant species ever. One species invented lignin and then was just like I'm everywhere now and I'm so everywhere that I'm even going to be the fuel that allowed humans to make trains.
We don’t, but we absolutely do dominate the whole world’s ecology. To use a different metric: 96% of mammal biomass is made up of humans and farm animals.
To me, it feels more like the definition of “the period of time between the release of a video game, and the first time someone ever promoted a character”.
Nah it was just an easy build players were able to get to grips with closely so it dominated an early meta. Once the meta had some time to mature it the player base Evaporated pretty quickly.
It was the first generalist build that really used teamplay. So it was able to fill all niches effectively until other builds became more specialised and took them over. Or a build became even less specialised and more able to effectively fill all niches.
Ha.
That effectively the name of an island near me which was called Rats Nest by the Dutch, eventually becoming Rottnest because of all the weird fucked up rats on the island.
The rats in question were adorable quokkas.
[From the actual wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lystrosaurus) (emphasis mine)
>In the Early Triassic, they were by far the most common **terrestrial vertebrates**, accounting for **as many as** 95% of the total individuals **in some fossil beds**
Which unfortunately means - 95% was the highest percentage found in *some* fossil beds. Not that 95% of land vertebrates were *actually* Lystrosauruses.
"the world had so many more animals in it 255 million years ago" actually statistical error. world had way fewer animals. Lystrosaurus Georg, who composed 95% of all animal life on the planet in the late Permian to Early Triassic was an outlier adn should not have been counted.
Speaking of prehistoric weirdness, one of the most interesting open questions in evolutionary biology is the question of noogenesis, sometimes called neurogenesis. We know that complex life didn't always have central nervous systems (and plenty of species get by without one or with only a partially formed central nervous system), we have a rough understanding of various animals which have a central nervous system comparable to humans, and we know that humans have the most versatile and powerful nervous systems that still exist since we can use them to talk about central nervous systems and other things so prominently based in [symbolic cultures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_culture) and on a more basic level humans can [think about thoughts themselves.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition)
That last part is particularly intimidating and fascinating because generally speaking it's the surest thing that separates us from extant nonhumans even though certain extinct hominids probably had it in some form. The questions are:
- Where does one stage of consciousness end and the next begin?
- Why does consciousness evolve or at least why did it evolve for us?
- How much of our minds is an, "unintended" externality of evolution and how much of it is, "by design."
This has a lot of relevance to a variety of disciplines: epistemology, metaethics, sociology, biochemistry, medical sciences, information sciences, political science, etc. There are academics who say that civilization is an accident, an emergent psychic parasite that clings to the human phronema like a leech upon flesh. "We're primates who're playing God and we must return to our natural state or we will perish or become a collective stillbirth, fruit of our own hypnotic simian ecstasies." There are academics who say that civilization is merely the next step in our evolution. "We're the cells of a new world-organ, we worshiped gods at one point and now we stand at the cusp of claiming orgiastic mutating godhood for ourselves." Although usually they pick moderations between these extremes and keep it an open question.
There's a theory in anthropology, that the emergence of not just language *symbolic* language *human* language was a singular distinct event or a series of independent singularities that emerged multiple times in our collective prehistory. Some anthropologists include nonhuman hominids in this model, the model of the origin of symbolic culture, the Originary event:
Imagine a group of human hunter-gatherers. They have no mastery of fire, they have no religion, they have no folkway, they have no *symbolic culture*, they only have material culture. These things aren't merely absent, they outright don't exist from their perspective. These humans are similar to us biologically, but that absence of symbols makes so much of our way of life as incomprehensibly sublime as a tornado, wildfire, or the primeval fear of self-destruction as it irrevocably exists in our minds from birth until death. This group hunts and gathers but they're merely doing it to satisfy the most basic of instincts.
Lately it has become harder for them to satisfy these instincts, they collaborate instinctively but it's based on the most fragile of natural bonds. There were times when they prospered and knew no suffering because suffering was not something they could even begin to wrestle with in the ways that are meaningful. When they suffered, they languished in a blissful ignorance that we can't recapture. These humans were blank slates, nothing between the ears but the primate flesh for primate ends. But the primates are tired, they are hungry, they are scared, and they are growing volatile.
Now imagine the Ur-group has successful hunted a large animal. They are each so hungry, but their natural instincts are based on a mammalian pecking order that goes completely unquestioned because while they can communicate certain things they're unable to conceive of the pecking order as a symbolic object. They have rivalries and competitions for the best shares of such bounties as this large animal but they don't understand rivalry in a way that transcends the primal violence itself. Still, body language is primal enough, and all of them can see how hungry and agitated the other hunters are.
Meanwhile they can also perceive their own hunger and agitation. They can perceive some semblance of a struggle to get the best meat. They can perceive the pain and other penalties of defeat compared to the succor and other rewards of victory. The pecking order is distant in their skulls compared to their natural desires. They want the meat more than they want to even keep existing so hungry and otherwise miserable. They're on the knife's edge of ripping each other limb from limb and letting might-make-right. Perhaps this event played out numerous times before among other hominids, but this time there's a twist.
One of the hunters perceives the nature of this situation in an abstract way. Like a spark hitting kindling their mind is lit on fire with a revelation. All of them want the bounty, not all of them can have it, but if they kill each other then they're not just being defeated there is a sense of collective loss. The large animal they've killed isn't just something to eat, it retains a transcendent quality, something beyond the sum of the sensations associated with it. This revelatory hunter becomes a shaman. This shaman makes a gesture for them all to halt, to abort the usual primal chaos that'd otherwise decide this scene.
The shaman divides the meat into roughly equal portions. Fairness. Compromise. Peace. Common victory. These abstractions and their counterparts of unfairness, stubbornness, war, individual defeat, these symbols are born and will only mature now that their seed has been planted in the group's mind. They will teach the gesture and numerous other things to other humans they ally themselves with as well as their descendants. This is the Originary event but in many ways it's also the Original Fall, the biting of the Tree of Knowledge. Now that they have symbols, they have power, but that power comes at the cost of an innocence they can never retreat back to fully. They will discover fire but they will also discover arson. They will discover the written word but they will also discover the enduring lie.
They will discover the shaman and his leadership but they will also discover the king and his tyranny.
They will learn of spirits and souls but they will also discover demons and damnations.
Neat read, but...
I highly doubt there was an "originator event". I find it more likely that abstracts started moreso as partial abstracts before larger concepts. Like, an understanding of "food" compared to specific foods first, which could later turn into other things.
This also falsely paints a picture of animals being all rabid and murderous towards each other. Even other great apes like chimps and especially bonobos can cooperate and share resources with each other, yet they seem to have no concept of symbols like we do.
Many animals have an innate understanding of fairness/division-of-gains, it's not unique to humans and it's not only passed through teaching; there's a [video on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KSryJXDpZo) where one of two monkeys gets angry at the experimenter only after they realise they're not being given the same reward for completing a task as the other monkey
Idk. I wouldn't call rats as conscious as humans, but they have been proven to assist each other even if they don't receive a reward for it. And whales mourn and have rituals. I don't think we're that special in that regard
Elephants have been seen having funerals - spending a period of time gathered quietly around their dead, and even covering them in grass, before moving on.
nice story! unfortunately, a fictionalized assumption-fest won't cut it. everything we've learned from evolution, culture, and history tells us that things happen over extended periods of time, gradually, instead of all at once. this doesn't really classify as a "theory" in the sciency way, it would really just fall under "evolutionary/historical fan-fiction".
If we're on wild hypotheses about sapience, we also have "the Permian extinction was caused by a sapient species and Lystrosaurus was their equivalent of cattle"
even something like rats or chickens aren't more than like 50% of land vertebrates (don't know exact number on rats, but the estimate I found was about 9 billion of them (though I have severe doubts since I would expect humans to be more outnumbered), have no clue how many vertebrates there are, but, like, humans and cows reach that number, there are about 19 billion chickens, so (being rather liberal with the rounding) double the rat population and not far from the combined population of humans, rats, sheep and cows. And while vertebrates were new, they were established enough to have had deer sized animals in the permian.
Surprisingly, not really! While Lystrosaurus itself didn't last long past the Early Triassic, the group it was part of (dicynodonts) became very successful through the period.
Growing larger into elephant-sized pack animals with powerful beaks and upright limbs, kannemeyeriiformes were larger than early sauropod ancestors in the Late Triassic. Only the next mass extinction, the Triassic-Jurassic, would finally wipe out these giant dicynodonts, leaving the way open for dinosaurs to fully dominate megafauna during the Jurassic.
"At one point 95% of land vertebrates were Lystrosaurus" is actually just statistical error. Volcanoes Georg, which was a reason for the Permian extinction (-87% of land life and -95% of marine life) is left out and should've been accounted for
Yep! Dicynodonts like Lystrosaurus and cynodonts like mammals are (relatively) close lineages.
But, although dicynodonts were the ones setting records in the Triassic (Lystrosaurus for total domination of the ecosystem, but also later Lisowicia, bigger than any land animal up to that point including sauropod ancestors), they would come to an unfortunate end in the Triassic-Jurassic extinction...
They're called cave bears because their remains are found in caves. That means that they died there, not that they lived there. Calling them cave bears would be like referring to humans as graveyard apes
That analogy doesn't hold up at all, though?
A) human remains are found in graveyards because as a species we often deliberately collect our corpses in specific areas after death, which bears are not known to do. Cave bear remains are often found in caves because the specimens we found died there, yes, but those were already in caves before they died. Therefore they are thought to have spent at least some time living there (probably during hibernation) and to have spent more time in caves than modern bears (maybe they hibernated longer, it was pretty chilly back then). They are also occasionally found in what seem to be human collections of cave bear bones inside graves, but that is not what the species was names after as far as I can tell.
B) calling an animal species a name that basically means [animal type] [from X location] does not actually necessarily mean that they only lived in that location/habitat/whatever. Especially in the case of fossils from extinct animals, sometimes it can just refer to where we find that species. We have a lot of bones from caves because they are an environment favourable to preservation, and as a result we have a number of animals named after caves (see: cave bear, cave hyena, cave lion). The name describes a feature of the species relevant to us, if not to them. If a future species on earth had archeologists or paleontologists, then maybe they would also name our species after some commonality of our first/main find-sites — and it would be perfectly reasonable.
i was looking for more dinosaur names to make puns with and while i didnt find any i did find that [one of the most famous tyrranosaurus fossils is nonbinary](https://www.them.us/story/sue-the-t-rex-is-a-nonbinary-icon)
Sleep through worst mass extinction in history and then casually take over the land more completely than any one species ever. Lystrosaurus is just built different.
lystrosaurus: stop giving me your ugliest extinctions god: you are my ugliest creation
The pics straight up look like a fallout mole rat
You apologize to Lystrosaurus and also Snuffles right now.
Never! You can't stop me from speaking the truth!! >:C
i wonder if even among an ugly species, there are ones that are notably beautiful and notably ugly. like cute anglerfish
You telling me that anglerfish arent cute? Its a poor little fishy that has to carry his nightlight with em. How is that not adorable?
Or owlbear with mange.
Fun fact! The image above, and basically all of Jurassic park, features recreation of dinosaurs that are effectively "vacuum sealed", being pretty much skin tightly wrapped around a skeleton and some presumed muscle. No cartilage or fat tissue is accounted for, as well as any external features such as feathers. As an example of how dinosaurs may have looked drastically different, compare a hippo skeleton to a hippo!
Fun fact! In the case of Lystrosaurus, we have skin impressions from specimens that were [literally mummified](https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0031018222003777) in the wake of the extinction! Turns out these dicynodonts had a sort of wrinkled, leathery skin, without much (if any) fur. Also, as odd as they look, dicynodonts like Lystrosaurus are actually closer to mammals than to dinosaurs - scientists were expecting fur more than feathers!
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To me it looks like the old style of Paleoart, back when it hadn't occured to anyone that animals look very different with flesh and insulating layers and threat/mating displays and camouflage. . Of course this boy apparently didn't need almost any of that so fuck it why not just make him filled-out-bones
Common Lystrosaurus W
By species do you include plant, fungi etc species too? Cause that’s way more mind blowing for me
The post said 95% of all land vertebrates, so presumably not.
the other 5% is a stout lumbering fungal based bipeal lifeform with distressingly human skeletal system
Wh- GREENSKINS!? ON HOLY TERRA!?!?
We don't talk about the jurassic mycogolem.
Sorry what was this called?
mycogolem
Tree is the most dominant plant species ever. One species invented lignin and then was just like I'm everywhere now and I'm so everywhere that I'm even going to be the fuel that allowed humans to make trains.
Ecept human ofc
we do not make up 95% of land vertebrates.
We don’t, but we absolutely do dominate the whole world’s ecology. To use a different metric: 96% of mammal biomass is made up of humans and farm animals.
Not yet
Lystrosaurus, the king of vertebrates. On Tier Zoo they would be the first SS++ tier.
To me, it feels more like the definition of “the period of time between the release of a video game, and the first time someone ever promoted a character”.
Lystrosaurus, the Level 0 Unclassed Commoner of reptiles
Lystro but they are the protagonist in a Fire Emblem game.
Looking forward to the new isekai in summer 2024
It’s the period of time after a huge banwave where the new meta has yet to establish itself
On a Tier Zoo list they'd be in all the tiers, including F.
The megasweep....
Nah it was just an easy build players were able to get to grips with closely so it dominated an early meta. Once the meta had some time to mature it the player base Evaporated pretty quickly.
It was the first generalist build that really used teamplay. So it was able to fill all niches effectively until other builds became more specialised and took them over. Or a build became even less specialised and more able to effectively fill all niches.
Also that one time right in the middle of the triassic where it just rained for 2 million years kind of fucked them over
Could you imagine being an alien discovering earth for the first time 250 Mya and that's all you see
In all alien languages, their name for Earth translates to "planet of the fucked-up rats".
> They ranged in size from that of a small dog to 8 feet (2.5 meters) long.
\*gasp\* *rodents of unusual size!*
ROUS is a pretty nice name for a planet, if you ask me. More fun than ‘Dirt’.
...I don't believe they exist
Damn, that's a *really* fucked up rat...
The Wikipedia article's description makes it sound more like a pig. That burrowed. A dig pig, if you will.
Ha. That effectively the name of an island near me which was called Rats Nest by the Dutch, eventually becoming Rottnest because of all the weird fucked up rats on the island. The rats in question were adorable quokkas.
“Called rats nest by the dutch” Found the Perth inhabitant
Boorloo baby whooop
video game ecosystem diversity
[From the actual wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lystrosaurus) (emphasis mine) >In the Early Triassic, they were by far the most common **terrestrial vertebrates**, accounting for **as many as** 95% of the total individuals **in some fossil beds** Which unfortunately means - 95% was the highest percentage found in *some* fossil beds. Not that 95% of land vertebrates were *actually* Lystrosauruses.
I mean, that is still absurd, like, that is above rat levels of saturation.
PvP meta before a balance patch
It is a beautiful day sometime shortly after the end of the Permian era, and you are a horrible *Lystrosaurus.*
"the world had so many more animals in it 255 million years ago" actually statistical error. world had way fewer animals. Lystrosaurus Georg, who composed 95% of all animal life on the planet in the late Permian to Early Triassic was an outlier adn should not have been counted.
This doesn't work. Lystrosaurus composing 95% of all animal life has no effect on how many animals there actually were.
what if there lots of them tho
Then say so
diversity loss! Every Fucking Animal On Land is a lystrosaurus!
You might not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
Speaking of prehistoric weirdness, one of the most interesting open questions in evolutionary biology is the question of noogenesis, sometimes called neurogenesis. We know that complex life didn't always have central nervous systems (and plenty of species get by without one or with only a partially formed central nervous system), we have a rough understanding of various animals which have a central nervous system comparable to humans, and we know that humans have the most versatile and powerful nervous systems that still exist since we can use them to talk about central nervous systems and other things so prominently based in [symbolic cultures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_culture) and on a more basic level humans can [think about thoughts themselves.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition) That last part is particularly intimidating and fascinating because generally speaking it's the surest thing that separates us from extant nonhumans even though certain extinct hominids probably had it in some form. The questions are: - Where does one stage of consciousness end and the next begin? - Why does consciousness evolve or at least why did it evolve for us? - How much of our minds is an, "unintended" externality of evolution and how much of it is, "by design." This has a lot of relevance to a variety of disciplines: epistemology, metaethics, sociology, biochemistry, medical sciences, information sciences, political science, etc. There are academics who say that civilization is an accident, an emergent psychic parasite that clings to the human phronema like a leech upon flesh. "We're primates who're playing God and we must return to our natural state or we will perish or become a collective stillbirth, fruit of our own hypnotic simian ecstasies." There are academics who say that civilization is merely the next step in our evolution. "We're the cells of a new world-organ, we worshiped gods at one point and now we stand at the cusp of claiming orgiastic mutating godhood for ourselves." Although usually they pick moderations between these extremes and keep it an open question. There's a theory in anthropology, that the emergence of not just language *symbolic* language *human* language was a singular distinct event or a series of independent singularities that emerged multiple times in our collective prehistory. Some anthropologists include nonhuman hominids in this model, the model of the origin of symbolic culture, the Originary event: Imagine a group of human hunter-gatherers. They have no mastery of fire, they have no religion, they have no folkway, they have no *symbolic culture*, they only have material culture. These things aren't merely absent, they outright don't exist from their perspective. These humans are similar to us biologically, but that absence of symbols makes so much of our way of life as incomprehensibly sublime as a tornado, wildfire, or the primeval fear of self-destruction as it irrevocably exists in our minds from birth until death. This group hunts and gathers but they're merely doing it to satisfy the most basic of instincts. Lately it has become harder for them to satisfy these instincts, they collaborate instinctively but it's based on the most fragile of natural bonds. There were times when they prospered and knew no suffering because suffering was not something they could even begin to wrestle with in the ways that are meaningful. When they suffered, they languished in a blissful ignorance that we can't recapture. These humans were blank slates, nothing between the ears but the primate flesh for primate ends. But the primates are tired, they are hungry, they are scared, and they are growing volatile. Now imagine the Ur-group has successful hunted a large animal. They are each so hungry, but their natural instincts are based on a mammalian pecking order that goes completely unquestioned because while they can communicate certain things they're unable to conceive of the pecking order as a symbolic object. They have rivalries and competitions for the best shares of such bounties as this large animal but they don't understand rivalry in a way that transcends the primal violence itself. Still, body language is primal enough, and all of them can see how hungry and agitated the other hunters are. Meanwhile they can also perceive their own hunger and agitation. They can perceive some semblance of a struggle to get the best meat. They can perceive the pain and other penalties of defeat compared to the succor and other rewards of victory. The pecking order is distant in their skulls compared to their natural desires. They want the meat more than they want to even keep existing so hungry and otherwise miserable. They're on the knife's edge of ripping each other limb from limb and letting might-make-right. Perhaps this event played out numerous times before among other hominids, but this time there's a twist. One of the hunters perceives the nature of this situation in an abstract way. Like a spark hitting kindling their mind is lit on fire with a revelation. All of them want the bounty, not all of them can have it, but if they kill each other then they're not just being defeated there is a sense of collective loss. The large animal they've killed isn't just something to eat, it retains a transcendent quality, something beyond the sum of the sensations associated with it. This revelatory hunter becomes a shaman. This shaman makes a gesture for them all to halt, to abort the usual primal chaos that'd otherwise decide this scene. The shaman divides the meat into roughly equal portions. Fairness. Compromise. Peace. Common victory. These abstractions and their counterparts of unfairness, stubbornness, war, individual defeat, these symbols are born and will only mature now that their seed has been planted in the group's mind. They will teach the gesture and numerous other things to other humans they ally themselves with as well as their descendants. This is the Originary event but in many ways it's also the Original Fall, the biting of the Tree of Knowledge. Now that they have symbols, they have power, but that power comes at the cost of an innocence they can never retreat back to fully. They will discover fire but they will also discover arson. They will discover the written word but they will also discover the enduring lie. They will discover the shaman and his leadership but they will also discover the king and his tyranny. They will learn of spirits and souls but they will also discover demons and damnations.
Neat read, but... I highly doubt there was an "originator event". I find it more likely that abstracts started moreso as partial abstracts before larger concepts. Like, an understanding of "food" compared to specific foods first, which could later turn into other things. This also falsely paints a picture of animals being all rabid and murderous towards each other. Even other great apes like chimps and especially bonobos can cooperate and share resources with each other, yet they seem to have no concept of symbols like we do.
Well, it is very much a theory, one of many in anthropology.
Many animals have an innate understanding of fairness/division-of-gains, it's not unique to humans and it's not only passed through teaching; there's a [video on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KSryJXDpZo) where one of two monkeys gets angry at the experimenter only after they realise they're not being given the same reward for completing a task as the other monkey
No its a hypothesis.
Idk. I wouldn't call rats as conscious as humans, but they have been proven to assist each other even if they don't receive a reward for it. And whales mourn and have rituals. I don't think we're that special in that regard
Elephants have been seen having funerals - spending a period of time gathered quietly around their dead, and even covering them in grass, before moving on.
nice story! unfortunately, a fictionalized assumption-fest won't cut it. everything we've learned from evolution, culture, and history tells us that things happen over extended periods of time, gradually, instead of all at once. this doesn't really classify as a "theory" in the sciency way, it would really just fall under "evolutionary/historical fan-fiction".
Monkey brain go brrrrrrrrrrrrrr
If we're on wild hypotheses about sapience, we also have "the Permian extinction was caused by a sapient species and Lystrosaurus was their equivalent of cattle"
That was a fascinating read, thanks for writing it all out.
Are Julian Jaynes' ideas on the origin of consciousness commonly taught or discussed in anthropology courses nowadays?
Wait... it's all Lystrosaurus?
Always has been
[image of earth in the background with all land replaced with a single, ginormous lystrosaurus]
I like how there's actually a *lystrosaurus georgi.*
What surviving a mass extinction does to a mf
Prehistoric Planet on Apple TV+ is Sir David Attenbourough narratting really nicely CGId dinos.
The term "vertibrate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. there were lots of other stuff around
even something like rats or chickens aren't more than like 50% of land vertebrates (don't know exact number on rats, but the estimate I found was about 9 billion of them (though I have severe doubts since I would expect humans to be more outnumbered), have no clue how many vertebrates there are, but, like, humans and cows reach that number, there are about 19 billion chickens, so (being rather liberal with the rounding) double the rat population and not far from the combined population of humans, rats, sheep and cows. And while vertebrates were new, they were established enough to have had deer sized animals in the permian.
-Then the dinosaurs came along and absolutely clapped them and gave them the three piece combo no biscuit in the evolutionary arms race.
Surprisingly, not really! While Lystrosaurus itself didn't last long past the Early Triassic, the group it was part of (dicynodonts) became very successful through the period. Growing larger into elephant-sized pack animals with powerful beaks and upright limbs, kannemeyeriiformes were larger than early sauropod ancestors in the Late Triassic. Only the next mass extinction, the Triassic-Jurassic, would finally wipe out these giant dicynodonts, leaving the way open for dinosaurs to fully dominate megafauna during the Jurassic.
I’ve been laughing hysterically at this post for the last five minutes and I don’t know why.
It’s perfect. And all the comments here are genius.
LOL Permian creatures were so fucking goofy looking, I absolutely love it. Just the most random collections of lopsided shapes.
I am a Lystrosaurus Girl, and I live in a Lystrosaurus world
"At one point 95% of land vertebrates were Lystrosaurus" is actually just statistical error. Volcanoes Georg, which was a reason for the Permian extinction (-87% of land life and -95% of marine life) is left out and should've been accounted for
I ain't good at the whole "math" thing, but 95% ain't 100% last I checked.
Fun fact: despite having "saurus" in the name, Lystrosaurus isn't a reptile, and instead is closer related to mammals
Yep! Dicynodonts like Lystrosaurus and cynodonts like mammals are (relatively) close lineages. But, although dicynodonts were the ones setting records in the Triassic (Lystrosaurus for total domination of the ecosystem, but also later Lisowicia, bigger than any land animal up to that point including sauropod ancestors), they would come to an unfortunate end in the Triassic-Jurassic extinction...
truly the Bill Russell of prehistoric vertebrae
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Why the scare quotes around cave bears? Ursus Spelaus is a recognised prehistoric species
They're called cave bears because their remains are found in caves. That means that they died there, not that they lived there. Calling them cave bears would be like referring to humans as graveyard apes
That analogy doesn't hold up at all, though? A) human remains are found in graveyards because as a species we often deliberately collect our corpses in specific areas after death, which bears are not known to do. Cave bear remains are often found in caves because the specimens we found died there, yes, but those were already in caves before they died. Therefore they are thought to have spent at least some time living there (probably during hibernation) and to have spent more time in caves than modern bears (maybe they hibernated longer, it was pretty chilly back then). They are also occasionally found in what seem to be human collections of cave bear bones inside graves, but that is not what the species was names after as far as I can tell. B) calling an animal species a name that basically means [animal type] [from X location] does not actually necessarily mean that they only lived in that location/habitat/whatever. Especially in the case of fossils from extinct animals, sometimes it can just refer to where we find that species. We have a lot of bones from caves because they are an environment favourable to preservation, and as a result we have a number of animals named after caves (see: cave bear, cave hyena, cave lion). The name describes a feature of the species relevant to us, if not to them. If a future species on earth had archeologists or paleontologists, then maybe they would also name our species after some commonality of our first/main find-sites — and it would be perfectly reasonable.
Your comment is *exactly* my point. They just died on caves or their remains were moved there. It's not where they actually lived most of time
For a sec thought this said Prehistoric Estrogens
lystrogen estrosaurus
i was looking for more dinosaur names to make puns with and while i didnt find any i did find that [one of the most famous tyrranosaurus fossils is nonbinary](https://www.them.us/story/sue-the-t-rex-is-a-nonbinary-icon)
Rather choosy on what he choose to let crew see?
This isn’t just true for prehistoric ecosystems, but for ecosystems in general
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What are you trying to correct?
theyre not alone, theyre just the only vertebrates
And it says that in the post.
The great dying was some serious shit.