The mysterious creature with bizarre anatomy that once roamed Australia

December 4, 2023 4:49 PM

The mysterious creature with bizarre anatomy that once roamed Australia. Palorchestes was an ancient sharp-toothed animal that also boasted an elephant-like trunk. It lived for millions of years in pockets of Australia, but its fossils are extremely rare.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (9 comments total)

I love it! It's wild to me that there was a giant poorly-sighted wombat/tapir/elephant creature that overlapped chronologically with the first native Australians. I also like that the artist's depiction looks like it would be right at home in a children's book.
posted by blueskies at 6:09 PM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

I also like that the artist's depiction looks like it would be right at home in a children's book.
I thought O'Reilly need to invent a computer related book title just to put that guy on the cover. I see this one is already taken.
posted by rongorongo at 11:23 PM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

"Mysterious creature with bizarre anatomy"

Isn;t that default for all Australian animals though? Especially the extinct ones.
posted by Fuchsoid at 2:51 AM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mysterious creature with bizarre anatomy

“A being with a strong sense of privacy and a perfectly normal analogy, you bipedal freak,” I think they might say.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:52 AM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

The mysterious creature with bizarre anatomy that once roamed Australia

This is a lot of people I’ve worked with, to be fair
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:08 AM on December 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Note that should be “anatomy” not “analogy.” This creature should be happy it never shared the Earth with autocorrect.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:28 AM on December 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yes, but the really important question to which we will probably never know the answer is: was it venomous?
posted by cstross at 5:49 AM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

yes, the atyle of that art had me thinking of Where the Wild Things Are.
which, as chariot pulled by cassowaries keeps showing us, is entirely appropriate. :)
posted by martin q blank at 12:43 PM on December 5, 2023

"It does have ancestors, and it seems that those ancestors descended from creatures that are related to wombats.

"But it, itself, is not a wombat."

As always it's wombats all the way down.
posted by y2karl at 4:42 PM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]