EXTINCT MANIACS }.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), also called the tundra mammoth, is an extinct species of mammoth. This animal is known from bones and frozen carcasses from northern North America and northern Eurasia with the best preserved carcasses in Siberia.
This mammoth species was first recorded in (possibly 150,000 years old) deposits of the second last glaciation in Eurasia. They were derived from steppe mammoths (Mammuthus trogontherii).
It disappeared from most of its range at the end of the Pleistocene, with a dwarfed race still living on Wrangel Island until roughly 1700 BC.
Adaptations
Woolly mammoths lived in two groups (maybe subspecies). One group stayed in the middle of the high Arctic, while the other group had a much wider range.
Woolly mammoths had a number of adaptations to the cold, most famously the thick layer of shaggy hair, up to 90 cm (35 in) long with a fine underwool, for which the woolly mammoth is named. The coats were similar to those of Muskoxen and it is likely Mammoths moulted in summer. They also had far smaller ears than modern elephants; the largest mammoth ear found so far was only 30 cm (12 in) long, compared to 180 cm (71 in) for an African elephant. Other characteristic features included a high, peaked head that appears knob-like in many cave paintings and a high shoulder hump resulting from long spines on the neck vertebrae that probably carried fat deposits. Another feature at times found in cave paintings was confirmed by the discovery of the nearly intact remains of a baby Mammoth named "Dima". Unlike the trunk lobes of living elephants, Dima's upper lip at the tip of the trunk had a broad lobe feature, while the lower lip had a broad, squarish flap.
Their teeth were also adapted to their diet of coarse tundra grasses, with more plates and a higher crown than their southern relatives. Their skin was no thicker than that of present-day elephants, but unlike elephants they had numerous sebaceous glands in their skin which secreted greasy fat into their hair, improving its insulating qualities. They had a layer of fat up to 8 cm (3.1 in) thick under the skin which, like the blubber of whales, helped to keep them warm.
Woolly mammoths had extremely long tusks — up to 5 m (16 ft) long — which were markedly curved, to a much greater extent than those of elephants. It is not clear whether the tusks were a specific adaptation to their environment, but it has been suggested that mammoths may have used their tusks as shovels to clear snow from the ground and reach the vegetation buried below. This is evidenced by flat sections on the ventral surface of some tusks. It has also been observed in many specimens that there may be an amount of wear on top of the tusk that would suggests some animals had a preference as to which tusk it rested its trunk on.

Extinction

Mammuthus primigenius skull replica in Czech National Museum in Prague
Until recently it was generally assumed that the last woolly mammoths vanished from Europe and Southern Siberia about 10,000 BC, but new findings show that some were still present here about 8,000 BC. Only slightly later the wooly mammoths also disappeared from continental Northern Siberia. Woolly mammoths as well as columbian mammoths dissapeared also from the North American continent at the end of the ice age. A small population of woolly mammoths survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska, up until 6000 BC, while another remained on Wrangel Island, located in the Arctic Ocean, up until 1700 BC. Possibly due to their limited food supply, these animals were a dwarf variety, thus much smaller than the original Pleistocene woolly mammoth. However, the Wrangel Island mammoths should not be confused with the Channel Islands Pygmy Mammoth, Mammuthus exilis, which was a different species.
Most woolly mammoths died out at the end of the Pleistocene, as a result of climate change and a shift in man's hunting patterns. In 2008 a study conducted by the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Spain determined that warming temperatures had reduced mammoth habitat to only a fraction of what it once was, putting the woolly mammoth population in sharp decline before the introduction of humans into the territory. Glacial retreat shrunk mammoth habitat from 7,700,000 km² (2,970,000 sq mi) 42,000 years ago to 800,000 km² (310,000 sq mi) 6,000 years ago. Although a similarly drastic loss of habitat occurred at the end of the Saale glaciation 125,000 years ago, human pressure during the later warming period was sufficient to push the mammoth over the brink. The study employed the use of climate models and fossil remains to make these determinations.
The Earth today has no environment similar to the habitat that sustained mammoths. In 1989 the North East science station at Cherskii in Russia began a project to recreate the steppe grassland habitat of the Pleistocene through the introduction of Yakutian horses, Bison and other steppe species. Additional to other research planned, scientists hope to clone woolly mammoths, and then re-introduce them to what is now called Pleistocene Park.

Japanese Sea Lion (Zalophus japonicus) is thought to have become extinct in the 1950s.
Prior to 2003 it was considered to be a subspecies of California Sea Lion as Zalophus californianus japonicus. However, it was subsequently reclassified as a separate species. Some taxonomists still consider it as a subspecies of the California Sea Lion. It has been argued that japonicus, californianus, and wollenbaeki are distinct species because of their distant habitation areas and behavioral differences.
They inhabited the Sea of Japan, especially around the coastal areas of the Japanese Archipelago and the Korean Peninsula. They generally bred on sandy beaches which were open and flat, but sometimes in rocky areas.
Currently, several stuffed specimens can be found in Japan and the National Museum of Natural History, Leiden, the Netherlands brought by Philipp Franz von Siebold. The British Museum possesses a pelt and 4 skull specimens.
Physical description
Male Japanese Sea Lions were dark grey and weighed up to 450 to 560 kg reaching lengths of 2.3 to 2.5 meters; these were larger than male California Sea Lions. Females were significantly smaller at 1.64 meters long with a lighter colour than the males. Their eyes are also very slanted compared to their North American counterparts.
Range and habitat
Japanese Sea Lions were primarily found in the Sea of Japan along the coastal areas of the Korean Peninsula, the mainlands of the Japanese Archipelago (the both sides on the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Japan), the Kuril islands, and southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Old Korean accounts also describe that the sea lion and Spotted Seal (Phoca largha) were found in broad area containing the Bo Hai, the Yellow Sea, and Sea of Japan. The sea lions and seals left a lot of relevant place names all over the coast line of Japan such as Ashika-iwa (アシカ岩, sea lion rock) and Inubosaki point (犬吠崎, lit. dog-barking point) because of the similarity of their howls.
Lifestyle and reproduction
They usually bred on flat, open and sandy beaches but rarely in rocky areas. Their preference was to rest in caves.

Extinction
Harvest records from Japanese commercial fishermen in the early 1900s show that as many as 3,200 sea lions were harvested at the turn of the century and overfishing caused harvest numbers to fall drastically to 300 sea lions by 1915 and to few dozen sea lions by the 1930s. Commercial harvest of Japanese sea lions ended in the 1940s when the species became virtually extinct. In total, Japanese trawlers harvested as many as 16,500 sea lions, enough to cause their extinction, it is even believed that submarine warfare during World War II contributed to their habitat destruction. The last colony of sea lions was allegedly sighted by Korean coast guards in the 1950s and the last confirmed record of a Z. japonicus in Japan was a juvenile, captured in 1974 off the coast of Rebun Island, northern Hokkaido. Other unconfirmed sightings exist but it is possible these were, however, escaped Z. californianus seals.

CAVE LION!

Skeleton of a cave lion from the Sloup Caves near Brno in the Czech Republic

The cave lion (Panthera leo spelaea) also known as the European or Eurasian cave lion, is an extinct subspecies of lion known from fossils and multiple examples of prehistoric art.
This subspecies was one of the heaviest of the lions. The remains of an adult male, which was found in 1985 near Siegsdorf in Germany, had a shoulder height of around 1.2 m (4 feet) and a body length of 2.1 m (7 feet) without including the tail. This is similar to the size of a very large modern lion. The size of this male has been exceeded by other specimens of this subspecies. Therefore this cat may have been approximately 5-10% larger than modern lions, but it was smaller than the earlier cave lion subspecies, Panthera leo fossilis, and the even larger American lion, Panthera leo atrox.
The cave lion is known from Paleolithic cave paintings, ivory carvings, and clay figurines. These representations indicate that cave lions had rounded, protruding ears, tufted tails, perhaps, faint tiger-like stripes, and that at least some had a "ruff" or primitive mane around their neck, indicating males. Other archaeological artifacts indicate that they were featured in Paleolithic religious rituals.
Environment
They likely preyed upon the large, herbivorous animals of their time, including horses and bison. Some paintings of them in caves show several hunting together, which suggests the hunting strategy of contemporary lionesses.
Their extinction may have been related to the Holocene extinction event, which wiped out most of their megafauna prey in those regions.
Cave paintings and remains found in the refuse piles of ancient camp sites indicate that they were hunted by early humans, which also may have contributed to their demise.
Fossil footprints of lions, which were found together with those of reindeer, demonstrate that these cats once occurred even in subpolar climates.
Classification
The cave lion is normally considered a subspecies of lion, with the scientific name of Panthera leo spelaea (which means "cave lion" in Latin); but occasionally, it is considered a species in its own right, under the name Panthera spelaea. At least one authority, based on a comparison of skull shapes, considers the cave lion to be more closely related to the tiger, which would result in the formal name Panthera tigris spelaea (Groiss, 1996), however, recent genetic research (Burger 2004) shows that it was a close, but separate, relative of the modern lion.

SPECTACLED CORMORANT!

The Spectacled Cormorant or Pallas's Cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus) is an extinct marine bird of the cormorant family of seabirds that inhabited Bering Island and possibly other places in the Komandorski Islands. A presumed prehistoric record from Amchitka Island, Alaska (Siegel-Causey et al., 1991), is based on misidentification of Double-crested Cormorant remains (Olson, 2005).
The species was first identified by Georg Steller in 1741 on Vitus Bering's disastrous second Kamchatka expedition. He described the bird as large, clumsy and almost flightless - though it was probably rather reluctant to fly than physically unable -, and wrote "they weighed 12 – 14 pounds, so that one single bird was sufficient for three starving men." Though cormorants are normally notoriously bad-tasting, Steller says that this bird tasted delicious, particularly when it was cooked in the way of the native Kamtchadals, who encased the whole bird in clay and buried it and baked it in a heated pit.
Apart from the fact that it fed on fish, almost nothing else is known about this bird. The population declined quickly after further visitors to the area started collecting the birds for food and feathers, and their reports of profitable whaling grounds and large populations of Arctic Foxes and other animals with valuable pelts led to a massive influx of whalers and fur traders into the region; the last birds were reported to have lived around 1850 on Ariy Rock (Russian: Арий Камень) islet, off the northwestern tip of Bering Island.

STELLER'S SEA COW (Hydrodamalis gigas) is an extinct, large sirenian mammal formerly found near the Asiatic coast of the Bering Sea. It was discovered in the Commander Islands in 1741 by the German naturalist Georg Steller, who was traveling with the explorer Vitus Bering. A small population lived in the Arctic waters around Bering Island and nearby Copper Island. However, prior to the arrival of humans they lived all along the North Pacific coast.

Description!

Drawing of Steller's sea cow, by Georg Steller.

The sea cow grew up to 7.9 meters (25.9 ft) long and weighed up to three tons, much larger than the manatee or dugong. Steller's work contains two contradictory weights: 4 and 24.3 tons. The true value may lie between these figures. It looked somewhat like a large seal, but had two stout forelimbs and a whale-like tail. According to Steller, "The animal never comes out on shore, but always lives in the water. Its skin is black and thick, like the bark of an old oak..., its head in proportion to the body is small..., it has no teeth, but only two flat white bones—one above, the other below". It was completely tame, according to Steller. They fed on a variety of kelp. Wherever sea cows had been feeding, heaps of stalks and roots of kelp were washed ashore. The sea cow was also a poor swimmer and is not believed to have been able to dive.

BALI TIGER!;

The Bali tiger (Panthera tigris balica), also called the Balinese tiger, is an extinct subspecies of tiger found solely on the small Indonesian island of Bali. The tiger was one of three sub-species of tiger found in Indonesia along with the Javan tiger (also extinct) and Sumatran tiger (severely endangered).
It was the smallest of the tiger sub-species; the last tiger to be shot was in 1925, and the sub-species was declared extinct on September 27, 1937. Given the small size of the island, and limited forest cover, the original population could never have been large, and it is considered unlikely that any survive today.
The subspecies became extinct due to habitat loss and hunting.
Characteristics!
Weight:
The weight of a male tiger was usually 90-100 kg (198-221 pounds).
Females weighed in at 65-80 kg (142-175 pounds).
Length:
A male Bali tiger's length was around 7'-4" to 7'-7".
A female's length would have been 6'-3" to 6'-5".

Appearance!
Bali tigers had short fur that was deep orange colored and darker, fewer stripes than other tiger sub-species. Occasionally, between the stripes, there were small black spots. Bali tigers also had unusual bar-shaped patterns on the head.
Life!
Balinese tigers lived up to approximently 8-10 years of age.
Prey/Predators!
The only known predators of Bali tigers were humans. Like all tigers, the Bali tigers were carnivore/carnivorous. The Bali tigers preyed upon most mammals that lived within their habitat.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

ANDALGALORNIS ; big bill

This animal belongs to a family of birds known as the Phorusrachids,a group of Cenozoic aves that grew to massive proportions. Andalgalornis is one of the better known examples of these birds and hails from Argentina.

Another larger Terror Bird, as they have come to be called, was found in North America. Titanis walleri was the first of these animals to be found with an intact wing. Instead of the extensively fused carpus of most modern day birds Titanis had a mobile thumb with a large claw at it's tip.This may have helped the bird subdue it's prey.

The Phorusrachids are believed to have been predators of the South American pampas.They would have used their massive blade like beaks to slice though the flesh and bone of the hoofed prey animals. They used their clawed wings and powerful legs to help them hold those animals down. Some Terror birds also had a modified inner toe similar to the type found in Dromaeosaurids.

Although it lacked the ability to flex strongly upward it could have conceivably been used to subdue mammalian prey. Terror birds such as Andalgalornis went extinct shortly after the Panamanian land bridge linked North and South America 2.5 million years ago. The last Phorusrachid known is Titanis of the southeastern United States.

And what we think...

It might be the ancestor of ostriches and most larger species of birds that exists today.

Ostriches--- long necks!

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Tyrannosaurus Rex

•Type: Prehistoric
•Diet: Carnivore
•Size: 40 ft (12 m) long; 15 to 20 ft (4.6 to 6 m) tall
•Did you know that "Tyrannosaurus Rex" means "tyrant lizard"?
•Extinct more than 65 million years ago
•Size relative to a bus:

A tyrannosaurus rex can measured up to 43.3 feet long, 16.6 ft tall and has an estimated mass of 7 tons.
Tyrannosaurus Rex was a bipedal carnivore with a massive skull balanced by a long, heavy tail. Relative to the large and powerful hind limbs, Tyrannosaurus forelimbs were small.Fossils of it have been found in North American rock formations during the last three million years of the Cretaceous Period at the end of the Maastrichtian stage, approximately 68.5 to 65.5 million years ago.
it was among the last dinosaurs to exist prior to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event. Till now, more than 30 specimens of rex have been identified.

The Quagga: half zebra, half horse (extinct since 1883)

As one of Africa's most famous extinct animals, the quagga was a subspecies of the plains zebra, which was once found in great numbers in South Africa's Cape Province and the southern part of the Orange Free State. It was distinguished from other zebras by having the usual vivid marks on the front part of the body only. In the mid-section, the stripes faded and the dark, inter-stripe spaces became wider, and the hindquarters were a plain brown.
The name "Quagga" comes from a Khoikhoi word for zebra and is onomatopoeic, being said to resemble the quagga's call. The quagga was originally classified as an individual species, Equus quagga, in 1788. Over the next fifty years or so, many other zebras were described by naturalists and explorers. Because of the great variation in coat patterns (no two zebras are alike), taxonomists were left with a great number of described "species", and no easy way to tell which of these were true species, which were subspecies, and which were simply natural variants. Long before this confusion was sorted out, the quagga had been hunted to extinction for meat, hides, and to preserve feed for domesticated stock.
The last wild quagga was probably shot in the late 1870s, and the last specimen in captivity died on August 12, 1883 at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam. Because of the great confusion between different zebra species, particularly among the general public, the quagga had become extinct before it was realized that it appeared to be a separate species. The quagga was the first extinct creature to have its DNA studied. Recent genetic research at the Smithsonian Institution has demonstrated that the quagga was in fact not a separate species at all, but diverged from the extremely variable plains zebra.

PREHISTORIC ANIMALS

•Prehistoric animals are organisms that walked, swam, crawled, slithered, or flew on Earth.
•more than 5,500 years ago.
•The earliest known remains date to the Cambrian era, about 600 million years ago.
•There are a few of the hundreds of millions of prehistoric animals that once lived on Earth:
- Crustaceans
- Flying reptiles
- Dinosaurs
- Wooly mammoths
- Saber-toothed tigers
•Paleontologists know about these animals by studying fossils, animal remains that have been preserved in rock.
And in our project, we will be telling you about prehistoric animals, including the andalgalornis, known as Big Bill in the story we read and more....