From Dragon to Cave Bear

In 1675, German physician Johann Paterson Hain published a detailed description of the bones of what he believed to have been a dragon. Such bones had been unearthed from German caves for centuries and identified as belonging to various mythical creatures, with unicorns perhaps the most popular - likely since one could sell supposed unicorn horns for their magical healing properties. Fortunately for us, his illustrations were highly accurate and we can identify them for what they really are.

Indeed, while naturalists continued describing such bones as belonging to fantastical animals into the 18th century, physician and rationalist Gregor Horst had beaten them to the punch, pointing out as early as 1656 that bones recovered from Unicorn Cave (yes, that is its actual name) looked remarkably like those of "bears, lions, and humans". Today, we can look at Paterson Hain's original illustrations and confirm that he had produced the first known published drawings of the bones of a cave bear.

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2017

Albertocetus meffordorum, the post-cranial anatomy of which
was described for the first time this year.

At the end of each year, I do a slightly different post to wrap up the blog for the season. The format of these has changed over the years, and this year, again, it's time to do something slightly different from previous occasions. Not that there haven't been some interesting new species discovered this last year, with, to my mind, the Skywalker gibbon (Hoolock tianxing) being the stand-out example. This was announced early in the year, having been discovered in the Chinese/Myamar border region by a group of researchers who were fans of a certain science fiction franchise ("tianxing" literally translates to "sky-walker" in Standard Chinese), and is likely already endangered.

But this year, instead of discussing just how many new kinds of bat we discovered in the last twelve months, I'm going to note that my posts on fossil mammals tend to be more popular than those on the living sort, and take a look at a partial assortment of scientific papers published on this subject in the last year that, for various reasons, didn't end up in my regular blog posts. So here goes.

Pleistocene (Pt 6): Lions, Hyenas, and Bears, oh my

Cave lions
(original artist unknown, c. 33,000 BC)

The iconic Ice Age carnivore is, of course, the sabretooth cat. However, as I mentioned when discussing the Mid Pleistocene, sabretooth cats when extinct in Europe well before the Last Ice Age. (Well, maybe not... but at any rate, they seem to have been very rare). So what were the dominant predators in Europe during that final, and most extreme, period of intense cold?

It probably depends on how small a predator you're willing to count. Animals like weasels, stoats, and shrews were presumably very numerous, even if their skeletons are often too delicate to preserve well. Moving up the scale, the most numerous carnivoran fossils from the time belong to foxes. Both the modern red fox and the Arctic fox were widespread in central Europe at the time, although the latter was presumably more comfortable.

Another modern animal that we wouldn't be surprised to find among the snowy forests and open tundra was the grey wolf. Indeed, grey wolves may well have originated in Europe from an American ancestor, before heading back over the Bering land bridge. If so, they were probably quite quick about it, since they are found across the Arctic on both sides of the Pacific from an early date.

All of these are creatures that are still found in Europe today, although not necessarily in large numbers - wolves are more common in the wilds of Asia and North America than they are in densely settled Europe. But I've been harping on through this series about how "African" European wildlife looked at the time, and that's as true of the big carnivores as it is of herbivores such as elephants/mammoths and rhinos. One of the clearest instances of this is the presence in Pleistocene Europe of lions.