Top 10 Prehistoric Creatures pictured accidentally

You know, it’s easy to see how we’ve misinterpreted fossils.  It’s difficult for any part of an animal to fossilize, so complete specimens are rare and really special.  So inaccurate palaeoart is inevitable, and really not surprising at all.  Then there are the times when reconstructions accidentally depict a different animal entirely unintentionally. We all know about how Tyrannosaurus was originally reconstructed on Allosaurus and Apatosaurus on Camarosaurus, but they’re not alone. Sometimes it’s because of misidentification, and sometimes it’s simply due to laziness in paleontological reconstructions.  Here are the top 10 Prehistoric Animals people picture when they try to picture a different animal (there has to be a specific word for this phenomenon. I’m sure there’s one in German or something).

Species That Don't Get Enough Publicity #6: Moropus

The thing about the featured animal today is you’ve probably seen it before. There’s a lot of museums with it-the Harvard museum, Yale Peabody museum, Field Museum, Denver museum, Smithsonian National Museum, Carnegie museum, and American museum each have a mount of it. There are multiple mounts at the place of its discovery, the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument in Nebraska. I’m sure most of you have seen this one and wandered past it, thinking it a horse or a big bizarre mammal. It is a big, bizarre mammal, but it’s one that’s one of my favorites. This is Moropus, 5 species of a large, successful mammal that roamed the American west.

April 1

Well, I know all the real blogs are doing elaborate April Fool's gags, but I'm going to save that for next year. Still, I want to entertain, so today we're doing do an MST3k-style commentary track for the Korean dinosaur movie Tarbosaurus aka Speckles The Tarbosaurus.