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Extinct Animal Questions
Topic Started: Nov 26 2013, 10:24 PM (193,335 Views)
VitreousPit4953
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What kind of plants did mastodons eat, more specifically would they have eaten pine needles or plants similar to that?
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babehunter1324
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Seems like redwood, pine and aquatic plants (probably in a seasonal manner as with modern Moose) were an important part of their diet.
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Incinerox
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Āeksiot Zaldrīzoti

VitreousPit4953
Dec 8 2015, 05:03 PM
What kind of plants did mastodons eat, more specifically would they have eaten pine needles or plants similar to that?
"Most accounts of gut contents have identified coniferous twigs as the dominant element in their diet. Other accounts (Burning tree mastodon) have reported no coniferous content and suggest selective feeding on low, herbaceous vegetation, implying a mixed browsing and grazing diet, with evidence provided by studies of isotopic bone chemistry indicating a seasonal preference for browsing."

~ Wikipedia, 5th November, 2015.
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Furka
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Can we have an idea of the niche partitioning among the large carnivores inte La Brea ecosystem ?
Because I'm still baffled by the amount of top predators that thrived there:

Arctodus simus (short-faced bear)
†Canis dirus (dire wolf)
†Canis latrans orcutti (Pleistocene coyote)
Canis lupus (gray wolf)
†Homotherium serum (scimitar cat)
†Miracinonyx inexpectatus (American cheetah)
†Panthera leo atrox (American lion)
†Panthera onca augusta (Pleistocene North American jaguar)
Puma concolor (cougar)
Ursus americanus (American black bear)
Ursus arctos horribilis (grizzly bear)
†Smilodon fatalis (sabre-toothed cat)

And that's not counting the small predators like bobcats.
I'm trying to get an idea based on modern predators, contemporary prey species and habitat preference, but it's quite hard for me (especially since I barely know what La Brea looked like back then).
Edited by Furka, Dec 9 2015, 07:28 AM.
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Paleodude
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ex-Krampus

From what I know La Brea had a few different environments, most of them where colder but mostly dry. Plains and grasslands were mostly inhabited by horse and bison where fast animals or animals with lots of stamina lived and hunted like Arctodus and the several wolf species. While stockier predators like the big cats and other bears hunted mammoths and other stock. The reason we have so many predators was because the tar pits themselves were predator traps, one big struggling herbivore would attract some 20 predators wanting a free meal. There was probably a lot more herbivores than we know. We can must likely say that Arctodus and Smilodon were apex predators with wolf packs coming in at close second. Sorry if I didn't explain it the best I tried at least.
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BossMan, Jake
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Son of God

What would have been the largest ground sloth encountered by humans in Western N.America.

Could humans have encountered/coexisted with Terror birds (specifically Titanis) back in the Pleistocene?
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heliosphoros
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Rudyn
Dec 6 2015, 05:24 PM
Are Lavocatavis and Eleutherornis really African and European memebers of Phorusrhacoidea family or convergent evolution?

Probably they're true phorrusrhacids, but many people forget that there were other groups of flightless seriema relatives like the bathornithids (which lasted as recently as the Miocene in North America), so the chances that they're an independently flightless group are high.
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VitreousPit4953
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what kinds of wild horses lived in North America during the Pleistocene? :candycane:
Edited by VitreousPit4953, Dec 10 2015, 08:23 PM.
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Paleop
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Paleopterix

Posted Image
or
Posted Image
witch is more accurate?
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CyborgIguana
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Scott Hartman in general REALLY knows his stuff, so his is probably the safer bet IMO. Still, it's from 2013 so I'm not positive it's absolutely up-to-date.
Edited by CyborgIguana, Dec 14 2015, 11:49 PM.
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BossMan, Jake
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Son of God

Where there any other kinds of woolly rhinos living in Eurasia during the last ice age besides Elasmotherium, or Coelodonta?
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Joe99
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could Megalancosaurus and kin catch flying insects and reptiles like a praying mantis ( I was thinking this because The orbits were directed anteriorly, suggesting that Megalancosaurus had good binocular vision for catching animals on the wing)
Edited by Joe99, Dec 15 2015, 01:27 AM.
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babehunter1324
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BossMan, Jake
Dec 14 2015, 08:30 PM
Where there any other kinds of woolly rhinos living in Eurasia during the last ice age besides Elasmotherium, or Coelodonta?
Stephanorhinus sp. (also known as Merck's Rhinoceros) was likely somewhat woolly (it was closselly related to the Sumatran Rhinoceros after all). However by the last ice age it's distribution was very reduced survivng mainly in the Southern most parts of Europe (particullary Spain), it's extinction seems to had took place more or less at the same time as the extinction of the last continental Europe relict populations of Paleoloxodon...

And that was around 35,000 years ago just slightly after the beggining of the glaciar maximum and the arrival of Homo sapiens to Spain... What a happy coincidence, isn't it?
Edited by babehunter1324, Dec 15 2015, 05:52 AM.
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Incinerox
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Āeksiot Zaldrīzoti

babehunter1324
Dec 15 2015, 05:41 AM
BossMan, Jake
Dec 14 2015, 08:30 PM
Where there any other kinds of woolly rhinos living in Eurasia during the last ice age besides Elasmotherium, or Coelodonta?
Stephanorhinus sp. (also known as Merck's Rhinoceros) was likely somewhat woolly (it was closselly related to the Sumatran Rhinoceros after all). However by the last ice age it's distribution was very reduced survivng mainly in the Southern most parts of Europe (particullary Spain), it's extinction seems to had took place more or less at the same time as the extinction of the last continental Europe relict populations of Paleoloxodon....

And that was around 35,000 years ago just slightly after the beggining of the glaciar maximum and the arrival of Homo sapiens to Spain... What a happy coincidence, isn't it?


Noting as well that Stephanorhinus had several species under its name, the two relevant ones here (one of the known species was a direct ancestor of these two, and the others are unconfirmed taxonomically) are the Merck's Rhino as you pointed out, and the Narrow Nosed Rhino. While sister species genetically, they were likely divided ecologically in the same way modern black and white rhinos are, with the narrow nosed rhino browsing, and the Merck's rhino grazing. They both seem to have died out at more or less the same time towards the end of the last glacial maximum, as you said.

Joe99
Dec 15 2015, 01:22 AM
could Megalancosaurus and kin catch flying insects and reptiles like a praying mantis ( I was thinking this because The orbits were directed anteriorly, suggesting that Megalancosaurus had good binocular vision for catching animals on the wing)


I'm not entirely sold on this. Mostly because the only two ways they'd be able to catch prey in that manner would be to hang from a tree and use its arms, which didn't really have that good a reach, or use its head, which was narrow and pointed, and basically the wrong shape for increasing chances of capturing flying insects.

Instead, I have another hypothesis - it used its narrow, pointed, wedge shaped skull, in tandem with their strong front claws to eat insects that lived underneath tree bark, using its hind limbs and prehensile tail for grip while its hands and jaws did all the digging.

That being said, it does raise the question of "why would it need binocular vision, then?", which brings me to an alternative hypothesis.

What if it really was like a Triassic chameleon? Literally everything else about it was chameleon-like. Why not its tongue too?
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Admiral General Aladeen
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It's claws and fingers don't really work for grabbing onto something small and moving like an insect not to mention of course it can't really latch onto anything that's more than a foot away with that method.

What's to say it ate flying insects ate all? There are plenty of insects that live in trees their whole lives, not limited to grubs and such under the bark. Pretty much all the Draco species subsist solely on ants.
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