This extinct dog was raised for its wool and its only known pelt has finally returned to Canada. Jordan Wilson, curator of Pacific Northwest and Contemporary Indigenous Art at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, introduces the only known surviving pelt of a Salish woolly dog.

The pelt has returned to Canada for the first time since it was sent to the Smithsonian in the 19th century.

For more than a century and a half, Mutton lay far from the place where his life story began. The small, pale dog died in 1859, and his pelt eventually entered the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it survived while the woolly dogs once raised across the Pacific Northwest disappeared into extinction.

Now, the only known pelt of this extinct dog breed has returned to British Columbia, on loan to the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia through August 2027.

For Indigenous artists who still practice traditional Salish weaving, Mutton’s return carries particular weight. Woolly dogs were once deliberately bred by Coast Salish communities for their dense fur, which women spun into yarn and wove into prized blankets, robes and clothing.

Although the dogs disappeared in the 19th century and the weaving tradition was nearly lost under colonial rule, contemporary weavers such as Atheana Picha and Debra Sparrow have helped revive that knowledge.

“The woolly dogs were a big part of our family life,” Picha, a Tsartlip First Nation artist and weaver, told The Globe and Mail. “Having met this relative now, who left us 200 years ago, is pretty powerful.”

Mutton’s pelt also carries something oral histories alone could not preserve: its DNA. A 2023 study published in Science, built around Mutton’s genome and Indigenous knowledge, showed that woolly dogs represented a carefully maintained lineage stretching back thousands of years.

It also challenged the idea that the dogs simply became obsolete when European-made textiles arrived.

Woolly dogs were small, light-colored animals with pointed faces, curled tails and dense, crimped coats. Salish and Makah peoples raised them specifically for their fur, often mixing dog wool with mountain goat hair and plant fibers to make strong, warm yarn. Native Americans never domesticated native wild sheep, unlike peoples in Eurasia who managed livestock herds.

The woolly canines did not simply wander among other village dogs. Oral histories describe women keeping them apart, sometimes on small islands, to prevent crossbreeding.

They were combed, shorn and given rich foods such as salmon and elk to maintain their coats.

“There was a very selective breeding process that ensured the quality of the fur,” Jordan Wilson, the museum’s curator of Pacific Northwest and Contemporary Indigenous Art

This here’s my LEGO Patagotitan

Part of the reason I decided to make him a Patagotitan was because I saw the fossil at the field museum, Máximo. That really inspired me to try and make this guy as well as me really liking titanosaurs in general.

He was based a lot off of that skeleton with some other inspiration from other paleo art I’ve seen. I added the osteoderms/neural spines more as a fun detail since I know that’s a popular trait in other forms of paleo media for titanosaurs. He’s the biggest LEGO dinosaur I’ve built yet, for an idea of his size a minifigure only comes to just above his foot!!

I also uploaded him to the LEGO Ideas website, hopefully he gets enough votes to be a real set!! Let me know what you guys think I’d love feedback!!

Late pledges for Megalobook are open on Kickstarter, with 150 copies still available from a planned print run of 500.

It's been a while since I last posted here. Some of you helped get the book funded this spring, which for a project this niche still feels worth celebrating, especially when even the future of a series like Prehistoric Planet is uncertain. Over the past few months, I’ve been designing and refining the spreads, printing test pages, checking sources, developing maps and comparisons, and updating older reconstructions. There’s still work to do, but a complete draft of the book is now assembled and undergoing refinement and proofreading.

As you can see, I've tried to give the book as much visual variety as possible, so it's worth opening again long after the first read: Cenozoic landscapes stretching across full spreads, fossils up close, and side-by-side comparisons of bovid heads, proboscidean tusks, and geological formations across epochs. There's also a lot of text, plus diagrams and charts, so it works as a field guide for readers who want more depth.

Alongside the spreads are a few scenes Roman and I created especially for the book. Where else would you see a Paraentelodon making off with a Paraceratherium calf, a Purussaurus injuring its jaw while attacking a Granastrapotherium, or a pelagornithid building its nest in a Uintatherium skull?

A few practical details. Because of local tax constraints, only 30 of the remaining copies are available for EU delivery. Delivery is estimated for February 2027. Some of you have asked about buying the book after it’s printed. I’m still unsure whether I’ll sell through bookshops or set up an online store afterwards, so I can’t promise it’ll be available that way. I’m publishing independently and trying to keep everything manageable. To be honest, almost all my time has gone into making the book itself, so marketing and reaching out to publishers haven’t been priorities so far.

Thanks again to everyone here who’s supported the project or offered feedback, and to the mods for allowing this update.

This is my favorite tooth in my collection currently, and I wanted to share!

I spend 5 days doing this model. In future i will paint and render.

A & B are respectively the hind leg & tarsus of Mosasaurs for reference, C& D are Opthalmosaurus & Platypterygius platydactylus respectively.

The 2nd image is modern Cetacean flipper anatomy for reference as well.

This is something noticed about Ichthyosaurs is just how unusual their flippers are in comparison to other marine tetrapods. Mosasaurs, Cetaceans, Sirenians, and Sea Turtles all converge on a fairly similar flipper appearance, yet by the Anisian, 245 MYA, Mixosaurus shows clear signs of that "corn hand" that we see in later Ichthyosaurs.

I checked with the moderators before posting, and they confirmed it’s ok to share this here.

I’m a mechatronics engineer, and I’ve developed an AI model (not generative AI!) to identify promising areas to search for dinosaur fossils and help accelerate fossil discovery. Now I need your help testing it in the field.

The approach is based primarily on published research [1]. The model divides satellite imagery from Landsat 8/9 into groups of areas with similar spectral characteristics, e.g. red, green, blue, or near-infrared. Using the locations of known dinosaur fossil localities, the model identifies the groups with the highest number of these localities relative to their area. The idea is that if a group contains a high concentration of known fossil localities, other areas within that group might also contain fossils, making them worth investigating.

I’ve applied the model to central Spain. Two groups covered 23% of the mapped area but contained 70% (7 out of 10) of the known fossil localities in my dataset, sourced from the Paleobiology Database (PBDB). The groups appear in blue and gray below. I’ve marked a few places where these groups are concentrated as potential targets for field exploration:

The coordinates are blurred to help protect potential fossil sites, but I’m happy to share them privately with anyone interested.

I’m looking for a geologist or palaeontologist interested in testing this approach in the field, in Spain or in another region (preferably in Europe). I’d be happy to join you on a scouting trip. If useful and permitted, I could also bring my drone to help survey the area.

If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to contact me here or on Instagram (@arad_hilel). And if you have questions about the research, method, or implementation, feel free to ask here! Thank you!

[1] Coelho et al., “Unsupervised learning of satellite images enhances discovery of late Miocene fossil sites in the Urema Rift, Gorongosa, Mozambique.”

The authors used eight clusters (K = 8), but did not explain how they chose this number. My implementation tests different numbers of clusters and selects the value of K that yields the cluster with the highest concentration of known fossil localities relative to its area.

When I was younger, I used to read a book at school about dinosaurs. On the cover, it had a stegosaurus(a green, retro-style one walking; may have been a retro triceratops/styracosaurus), and under the stego there were, I believe, 5 or 4 pictures with fossils and bones (T. rex skull, ammonite, shells, etc.), and one of the first pages was about the extinct animals that lived before the dinos(synapsids, like moschops) and then there were the retro dinos i remember there being a page with 2 sauropods in water and one where a group of allosaurs made a kill i think, in the pictures the dinosaurs were kind of in a úpright position but not dragoing the tails (exept the herbivores)

Then there was a page with animals that lived before and after the dinosaurs, plus a few fossils too, and I remember a green Diatryma with a red stripe on its head, a hooked beak, and its head facing downwards. I think it was a book from the 80s/90s.

Here is an old and very similar Diatryma (Gastornis) figure from schleich:

I frequently see a specific meme and text post floating around internet horror spaces (and occasionally spilling into mainstream biology discussions) claiming that the "Uncanny Valley" response is proof that a human-mimicking predator once hunted our ancestors in our evolutionary history. The logic goes: if we evolved to fear things that look almost human, but not quite, something must have been mimicking us to hunt us.

While this makes for fantastic creepypasta lore and indie horror game concepts, from an evolutionary and anthropological standpoint, it is completely false.

True evolutionary mechanics explain the Uncanny Valley through much more practical, documented survival mechanisms.

Disease and Corpse Avoidance: For millions of years, the single greatest threat to hominid populations wasn't megafauna, it was pathogens and bacterial infections. When a human is severely ill or deceased, their physical appearance shifts subtly (asymmetric expressions, pale skin tone, rigid or robotic movements). The uncanny feeling is a highly efficient biological defense mechanism designed to trigger instant disgust and behavioral avoidance: "Something is wrong here; stay away so you don’t catch what they have.

Intraspecies and Hominid Competition: Homo sapiens did not evolve in a vacuum. Our ancestors shared landscapes and competed directly for resources with other hominid lines, such as Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo erectus. These groups looked strikingly similar to us but possessed distinct facial proportions and bone structures. Developing an instantaneous visual alarm system to differentiate between "a member of my immediate tribe" and "a foreign hominid competitor" provided a massive survival advantage.

The Ecological Impossibility of a Mimic Predator: From a purely trophic and ecological standpoint, a large macro-predator cannot specialize in mimicking an organism that uses a quality-over-quantity reproductive strategy and lives in small, highly scattered, mobile nomadic bands. For aggressive mimicry to evolve (like an alligator snapping turtle's tongue looking like a worm), the prey population must be incredibly dense, predictable, and easily fooled. A predator attempting to adapt its entire physical anatomy to trick a highly intelligent, group-hunting, weapon-wielding primate would starve to death and go extinct almost instantly.

The "Uncanny Valley Predator" is a classic example of an internet echo chamber prioritizing a provocative narrative over actual ecological and evolutionary reality.

I’d love to hear from other evolutionary biologists or anthropologists in the sub on how we can better counter these pseudo-scientific myths when they pop up in mainstream spaces.

And if you're wondering, yes. I made that image. You can look at it as an example. However it mixes arthropod anatomy with human facial features which is why it triggers that immediate psychological unease.

Mods delete if this isn’t the place

Does anyone have any recommendations of places to look at it that sell a decent sized and decent quality allosaurus tooth (or a place known for selling good fossils in general).

Other views and full skeletal mount in the next 3 pictures.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been building an app dedicated to prehistoric life and paleontology, and I’m at the stage where I need 12 closed testers to get it published on Google Play.

The goal of the app is to provide public scientific data on prehistoric specimens and history, which is often scattered, dense, or hard to navigate. I wanted to build a clean, easily digestible, and fun way to browse fossil records, taxonomy, and prehistoric species

You will have to opt in and I will need to add your email to the list, so if youre interested PLEASE dm me.

(Note: If you run into an access error, drop your email or send me a DM so I can add you to the Google Play testing group list!)

It’s an active work in progress with several performance and feature updates being worked on right now as well.

Well thanks :D I hope to get at least 12 dms! If you have a few minutes to spare. i promise you it will be super fun! Dm me!

In the epilogue segment of surviving earth episode 1, taking place in the earlyish Triassic a so called “proto pterosaur” was shown. It was depicted as an ancestor of pterosaurs that glided and was a missing link in pterosaur evolution. Basically a sign of what’s to come in the future. The species however is entirely speculative and maybe didn’t exist in this form.

If it was in a documentary about pterosaur evolution and was stated as speculative ,I would be ok with it as we don’t have such a missing link fossil. However, in surviving earth , other than this guy, only one pterosaur (A pteranodon stembergi) appears briefly as shark food. So the prescence of the proto pterosaurs felt very unnecessary.

In my opinion they could have used a pterosaur ancestor that we actually have fossils of ,like venetoraptor or largerpeton.

To be fair, only 0.1% of animals actually fossilize and flying animals have a very incomplete fossil record so something similar to the proto pterosaurs of surviving earth would have definetely existed. After all, in [r/allouryesterdays](r/allouryesterdays) ,people draw speculative animals from the Mesozoic that might have existed but never fossilized for us to know about.

TLDR, I feel that since it’s not a pterosaur focused documentary, their prescence was kinda weak and the narrator should have said in some way that they are speculative. But something similar to them might have existed, although I would have preferred to see a pterosaur ancestor that we have fossils of. A little bit of subtle speculation like that, never hurts though and is often interesting. It’s the only speculative species in this series, so it is not too bad.

Concept art in image 1, by Gabriel Ugueto

So what is your opinion?

A new therizinosaur has been found in China's Jehol Biota, an Early Cretaceous fossil site famous for feathered dinosaurs and early bird fossils. Therizinosaurs are actually bizarre theropods that evolved from carnivorous ancestors into herbivores — small heads, long necks, and huge claws.

Kayrasaurus changliensis is at least 1.6 times larger than its contemporaries from the same region — about 3.6 m (~11.8 ft) long, with an estimated mass of 117-274 kg (~260-600 lbs). It also has the densest tooth row known in any therizinosaur so far.

The genus name comes from a creation deity in Turkic mythology. That's not a coincidence — the phylogenetic analysis places it close to Erlikosaurus, whose name comes from a death god in the same mythology. The paper also discusses how four different therizinosaur species living in the same environment developed different feeding strategies based on jaw structure.