Two Million Years of Llamas

The camel family is one of the smaller mammal families in the present day, containing just seven species, four of which are domesticated. Thus, if you don't consider, say, dogs to be distinct from wolves at the species level, one could reasonably argue that there are only four. Although these are all considered to belong to the same subfamily (with all the other subfamilies being extinct), they still fall into two branches: the 'true' camels in the Old World, and their counterparts in the Americas.

It should come as no surprise that members of the family are noted for their ability to survive in arid environments with minimal water. They are, for example, more efficient at absorbing water from their stomach than ruminants such as cattle and deer, and genetically resistant to heat stress and ultraviolet radiation. Nonetheless, while the word "camel" doubtless conjures up an image of one or more of the three Old World species (that is, the dromedary and the wild and domesticated versions of the Bactrian camel), the family also includes those four American species.

Oligocene (Pt 6): Devil's Corkscrews and the Grasseater That Wasn't

Leptomeryx

The Grande Coupure was, strictly defined, an event unique to Europe, caused by the drying up of the water channels separating it from Asia. However, it was compounded by a dramatic worldwide cooling event, and, if the Coupure itself didn't affect more distant lands, the climate changes certainly did. Due to some particularly well-preserved geological deposits of the right age, as well as the obvious convenience for Western researchers, this is particularly well-studied in North America.

Deposits across the continent show a sudden change in the climate at around the dawn of the Oligocene. By 'sudden' in this context, we mean over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, so it's hardly something you would have noticed had you been there at the time, but it's still rapid as such things go. The exact nature of the changes, and the speed at which they appear to have happened, depend on which part of the continent we're talking about, but nowhere was unaffected.

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2020

The largest known Oligocene whale was
moved into the new genus Ankylorhiza
this year

Well, that year was... different. Fortunately, it didn't stop me posting and, indeed, a cancelled summer break meant that you got one more post than anticipated you lucky people, you. But as 2020 finally passes into the history books where it can bloody well stay, it's time for the end-of-year roundup of paleontological discoveries that didn't make the regular blog. As always, no theme, just a random assortment of journal papers that may, for all I know, be thoroughly contradicted by this time next year. But this is a collection of things that some scientist, somewhere, thinks that they demonstrated in 2020:

Miocene (Pt 16): Giant Camels and High Llamas

One group of animals that you might expect to have done reasonably well as the climate dried out in the later stages of the Miocene epoch were the camels. Camels, of course, are not found wild in North America these days, but, back in the Miocene, it was the only place that they were found, having first evolved on that continent millions of years before.

Indeed, camels had been diverse in the Early and Middle Miocene, inhabiting a number of habitats that we would not associate with the animals today. Once those habitats changed with the shift into the Late Miocene, however, many of them failed to adapt, and a number of earlier forms died out. These included the stenomyline "gazelle-camels", the short-legged miolabines, and the floridatragulines, which had been adapted to the subtropical forests of the southern coasts.

Miocene (Pt 10): The Beasts with Three Horns

Syndyoceras

At the dawn of the Miocene, 23 million years ago, North America was, in many respects, quite different from the way it is today. It was, at the time, separated from South America by a wide expanse of sea, and, perhaps more significantly, the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountain ranges, which today run from southern British Columbia down into Mexico, did not yet exist as any more than a series of particularly high hills. While the Rockies were already mountainous, so that there was at least some rain shadow, in general, the continent was wetter and more forested than today, lacking the great grassy prairies that are so dominant today.

As the climate warmed, sea levels rose, flooding low-lying coastal regions and turning major valleys into bays. For much of the epoch, for instance, Florida was almost entirely underwater. Further north, however, it was still connected to Asia (and Greenland, although that's less significant in the grand scheme of things). Perhaps because the land bridge was both far to the north and relatively mountainous, not many animals seem to have crossed it, but that changed in the Early Miocene as the climate began to improve, and only increased as the epoch wore on. And, for whatever reason, most of them were heading east - into America.

Miocene (Pt 6): The Coming of the Mice

Palaeotragus

The Early and Mid parts of the Miocene epoch were, for the most part, times when the world was much warmer than it is today. It wasn't a steady pattern, however, and I've already described how the fluctuations in climate, over the course of many millions of years, affected the rodents of Europe. It was a time when the most common small mammals in Europe were not mice and voles, but dormice, accompanied by early hamsters, squirrels, and the gliding eomyids.

By 10 million years ago, however, the colder, drier climate had become locked in for the long term. We know that the forests of Europe changed dramatically at this time, the old subtropical trees, such as figs and palms, being replaced by oak, alder, and elm. Likely as a result of this change in the available food supply, most of the dormice died out, leaving only a few close relatives of the relatively small number of species we have today.

Pliocene (Pt 8): Long-Tusked Elephants and Giant Camels

Cuvieronius

America today is not a place you associate with herds of wild elephants. Go back just a few tens of thousands of years, though, and it would have been quite a different story. The "elephants" of the time were, of course, mammoths, and they were accompanied by mastodons, animals that were not actually members of the elephant family, but which, from a modern perspective, have a pretty strong resemblance to them.

Mammoths first entered North America during the early Pleistocene, not long before the Ice Ages proper got going. They were, in their origin, Asian animals, but the mastodons were a different matter. Mastodons were already in North America when the mammoths arrived, and they had been there for a very long time indeed. For millions of years, America really was a place with herds of well... things that looked a lot like elephants, at any rate.

The creature that the American mammoths would have encountered was the American mastodon (Mammut americanum), an animal that first appeared close to the end of the Pliocene. But this was the last survivor of a much longer lineage, and there had been many more kinds of American proboscidean that lived before it, often alongside one another. In fact, only a minority of them were really mastodons, including the immediate predecessors of the American mastodon, such as Mammut raki, and the somewhat older Zygolophodon. The latter also lived in the Old World, and was likely the first mastodon to reach North America, shortly before the dawn of the Pliocene. Nonetheless, one of the best skulls we have of the animal was unearthed in California, and later mastodons of the continent are likely descended from something much like them.