Creatures evolved into all the wild and wacky forms we know today for many reasons. These included alterations of ecosystems, changing food supplies, and the appearance of new niches that were opened by the deaths of predators or competitors.

Sometimes, however, Mother Nature got day-drunk and cooked up something really weird, even according to those scientists who uncover strange old things for a living.

10 Amazing Evolutionary Discoveries In Prehistoric Creatures

10 The Tooth-Beaked Dinosaur-Bird

Birds are basically dinosaurs. But the transition between the two happened in such a gradual, piecemeal way that sorting it out is a huge headache.

A new creature has been discovered from this headache-inducing period of animal evolution: the Ichthyornis dispar. It’s a missing link–type animal known as a “stem bird” because it straddles the line (and weirdly) between dinosaur and bird.

It occupied Kansas 100 million years ago—in the days when Kansas was an inland sea. And even though it had a long beak, I. dispar hadn’t yet lost its dinosaurian teeth.

Instead, it combined the best of both worlds to terrorize ancient sea life. It pinched fish from the water with its birdly pincer beak and then crushed its prey into a delicious paste with its well-muscled dinosaurian jaw.^[1]

What’s inside its head is just as important. I. dispar had a surprisingly large brain to go with its imposing beak. This doesn’t agree with hypotheses which argue that jaw muscles should shrink as skulls (and brains) grow more massive.

It’s no wonder that the smart and deadly I. dispar and its ilk had a bright future.

9 The 1,000-Kilogram (2,200 lb) Guinea Pig That Stabbed Enemies With Its Massive Tusks

Three million years ago, prehistoric rodents packed serious muscle. The Uruguayan Josephoartigasia monesi was the mightiest, with a hulking 1,000-kilogram (2,200 lb) body that could stand shoulder to shoulder with a bull.

Of all the rodents’ distinctive features, oversized front teeth are the most obvious. The maxed-out guinea pig J. monesi was a king among beasts in dental regards as well, with 30-centimeter (12 in) incisors that resembled tusks more than rodent teeth.

Just seeing these teeth wasn’t enough for scientists, who wanted to know how they handled. Using CT scans, virtual reconstructions, and computer simulations, researchers recreated J. monesi’s bite and found it was capable of delivering a bite about as strong as a tiger’s—even though J. monesi’s chompers could bear forces three times as great.^[2]

That’s probably because it did more than bite. J. monesi probably used its tusklike incisors to gore anything that ticked it off. The creature also used its teeth to root about the ground and dig up hidden foodstuffs like an elephant would. Overall, very impressive for the cousin of the guinea pig.

8 The Amazing Pig-Nosed Turtle

Turtles are among the planet’s oldest creatures, having graced Earth for more than 250 million years. However, despite sizing disagreements, nature has been fairly conservative with prehistoric turtle design.

The exception?

A slight evolutionary hiccup 76 million years ago which produced the goofy, pig-nosed Arvinachelys goldeni.

The turtle inhabited Utah way back in the day when North America was a big island known as Laramidia. Utah itself also looked radically different during the Cretaceous. Its deserts were replaced by hot and humid swamps which extended into floodplains, bayous, and rivers for the pig-snouted turtle to splash in.^[3]

A. goldeni deepens an existing evolutionary enigma from Laramidia. Creatures from the north and south ended up looking too different. This showcased an unexpected level of differentiation, especially with the lack of obvious factors separating the two populations. This mystery was not at all cleared up by the appearance of the pig-turtle.

7 The Pug-Faced Mega-Hyena

Pachycrocuta brevirostris is known as the “short-faced hyena” thanks to its snub-nosed pug face. But don’t let the goofy visage fool you. P. brevirostris is the baddest hyena to ever walk the Earth.

It’s a hyena with the mass of a lion. And all that hateful mass is packed into a body no taller than that of today’s spotted hyena. P. brevirostris‘s dense, chunky body, stout limbs, and jaw were built for scavenging supremacy.

Its low, stooping stature gave it excellent leverage to tear slabs of meat from large, meaty carcasses. Then P. brevirostris dragged its meal away to eat in peace and safety before repeating the hit-and-run maneuver.^[4]

P. brevirostris forced its way onto the evolutionary scene about three million years ago in Africa and Asia. Then it sauntered into Europe about a million years later.

Unfortunately, that coincides with similarly minded migrations undertaken by our ancestors. There’s evidence that early man and hyena inhabited the same places. This wasn’t so great for our side, according to mangled Homo erectus remains from the Dragon Bone Hill site in China.

6 The Dolphin That Thought It Was A Swordfish

Scores of strange creatures appear and disappear every time the oceans warm and cool. Among the weirdest of these animals was a dolphin that attacked prey with a swordlike nose—like a swordfish.

The longest-snouted mammal of all time, Zarhachis flagellator arrived at the evolutionary party 20 million years ago during the Neogene Period. This creature sported a schnoz five times longer than its skull. This Pinocchio nose of a snout was more than 1 meter (3 ft) long, and it swept through the water as Z. flagellator searched for prey. Once it locked onto an unfortunate meal, Z. flagellator clubbed its victim silly with its weaponized snout.

Scientists know this after studying the structure of the snout to estimate the forces it could withstand. Researchers also compared Z. flagellator‘s physiology to similar prehistoric dolphins as well as modern marlins.^[5]

But the climate eventually snuffed out Z. flagellator around the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch. A brutal glaciation period altered the creatures’ habitat and food supply, wiping out the long-snouts by 2.5 million years ago.

15 Unusual Prehistoric Creatures

5 The Cold-Blooded Goat

Myotragus balearicus, a 46-centimeter-tall (18 in) dwarf goat from the Balearic Islands, survived millions of years by adopting a strategy from the reptilian evolutionary playbook: cold-bloodedness.

Its ancient goat bones stunned scientists, who had never expected to find the treelike growth rings within. Since warm-blooded creatures are continually building their bones, they don’t exhibit this skeletal quirk. But cold-blooded animals grow their bones in spurts when resources allow.

Those resources didn’t allow much wiggle room on the barren, unfruitful island of Majorca. So the Balearic goat became smaller and borrowed some reptilian biology. Now it could laze around in the sun all day and not constantly worry about food.

However, its reduced size and metabolic rate came with a drawback: M. balearicus couldn’t fight or even effectively run away from its predators. Luckily for the goat, it didn’t have any predators on the little island.^[6]

So this puny, defenseless, nonathletic goat enjoyed its Mediterranean paradise for 5.2 million years; that’s twice the average reign of mammal species. M. balearicus was eventually killed off 3,000 years ago when humans arrived.

4 The Walking Crocodilian

Dinosaur lore is full of mysteries. For example, how did dinosaurs survive their reptilian competitors, the proto-crocodilian-like rauisuchians?

Unlike crocodiles with their splayed limbs, rauisuchians (related to a predecessor of crocodiles) held their legs straight below their bodies. The more upright orientation would have made walking easier and faster while traveling on four feet as rauisuchians were apparently wont to do.

This quadrupedal bias was one of the reasons that dinosaurs outlived their Triassic fellows. It seemed that dinosaurs had the advantage of bipedalism, which is a faster and more efficient form of locomotion. But science has found out that at least some of the rauisuchians also walked on two feet. One specimen that did so is the dinosaur-impostor Poposaurus gracilis.

The 225-million-year-old P. gracilis was approximately 4 meters (13 ft) long with a mouthful of backward-curved teeth to shred its prey. It had comically small arms but made up for them with a long, tapered tail which allowed the creature to walk and run upright like its more resilient dinosaurian counterparts.

Thanks to P. gracilis, the mystery of dinosauric dominance is reignited.^[7]

3 The Ferociously Vegetarian Cave Bear

The European cave bear, so-called for its fondness of caves, weighed up to 500 kilograms (1,100 lb) and rivaled the largest living bears. But unlike modern omnivorous, picnic basket–snatching bears, the ancient variant was “exclusively herbivorous.”

These bears roamed Europe and Asia from 300,000 to 25,000 years ago, dying out around the Last Glacial Maximum. Even though its environment was dry and cold, Ursus spelaeus managed to forage for enough vegetation to support its large, 3.5-meter-long (11.5 ft) frame on salad.

How do scientists know?

They analyzed the bones—some of which date back to nearly 50,000 years ago—of six bears discovered at three cave sites in Romania. Scientists zoomed in on the fossilized collagen within the skeletal remains and compared it to bone collagen from carnivores, herbivores, and cave bears from other parts of Europe.

Based on the ratio of different types of nitrogen in the amino acids within the collagen, researchers concluded that U. spelaeus was a strict vegetarian.^[8]

2 The Armored Basking Fish

The armored fish (placoderm) Titanichthys was one of the largest sea dwellers of the Devonian Period 380 million years ago. Titanichthys grew to more than 5 meters (16 ft) in length and boasted a 1-meter-long (3 ft) jaw. But that jaw was a surprisingly weak and toothless one with no cutting edge.

So, if its jaw wasn’t built for combat or ripping bloody chunks out of its prey, what was it designed for? It turns out that this fearsome fish wasn’t so terrifying after all. Instead, it made its living as a “suspension” feeder, like a basking shark.

For all its apparent ferocity, Titanichthys employed a lazy (but efficient) feeding method called “continuous ram feeding.” It just floated about with its mouth gaping open, scooping up the tiny critters that inhabited an ancient sea that is now the Moroccan Sahara Desert.^[9]

The trendsetting Titanichthys is the earliest known species to “bask,” preempting the more famous basking animals, like baleen whales, by a whopping 350 million years.

1 The Anchovy With A Sabertooth

Fossils sometimes sit in museums for many years before being properly described. Two such fossils sat on a shelf for 20 years before recently revealing that anchovies weren’t always the little chumps they are today. While modern anchovies eat plankton and grow to about 15 centimeters (6 in) long, the prehistoric Monosmilus chureloides was about 1 meter (3 ft) long and ate other fish.

It also had a sabertooth—as in a single sabertooth poking from its upper jaw to complement a row of sharp fangs on its lower jaw. That’s right, M. chureloides was a predatory anchovy that impaled its prey.^[10]

The 45-million-year-old M. chureloides hails from the Paleogene when a surprising number of fish transformed into ruthless killers. The niche for ferocious fishes opened up when larger sea terrors were killed off by the dinosaur-obliterating asteroid 66 million years ago.

Like its brethren species, the ancient anchovy from the Eocene Epoch evolved into a beast to fill that niche and feast on lesser fishes.

10 Strange Features Recently Discovered In Prehistoric Creatures

About The Author: Ivan writes things for the Internet. You can contact him at [email protected]

In addition to the previous list on 10 Mysterious Prehistoric Sites in the British Isles, there hundreds of mysterious locations spanning the entire globe.  Some are similar to the ones we’ve mentioned already, featuring stone circles and other megalithic structures—and others are entirely unique.  All of them are ancient—and they hint at the strong possibility that we don’t know anywhere near as much about our distant past as we think we do.

The Carnac stones are a dense collection of more than three thousand standing stones around the French village of Carnac—the largest such collection in the world.  The stones were erected between 4500 and 3300 B.C.

There is a variety of theories as to the purpose of the stones. Some claim that the stones are aligned astronomically, with the intention of creating an observatory or a calendar system.  Others believe that they were actually used as primitive seismic instruments, with the balanced stones acting as earthquake detectors.  The Carnac site is also thought to support the controversial idea of the “megalithic yard”, a theoretical common unit of measurement that was used to build most megalithic sites.

In the ancient quarries near Aswan, Egypt, lies a gigantic piece of stone which was intended to be erected as an obelisk.  The obelisk was never finished, likely due to cracks which formed in the stone during the quarrying (although some believe the builders may have been violently interrupted).  

The sheer size of this object is what makes it remarkable. It would have been a full third larger than any other ancient obelisk known to us.  Standing 137 feet (42m) tall and weighing 1200 tons, this single piece of rock would have been taller than a ten-storey building.  There are very few modern cranes that could move such a massive object—so how exactly did the ancient Egyptians plan on transporting and erecting it?

The three most important dolmens (or passage mounds) in Spain—Cueva de Menga, Cueva de Viera, and the Tholos of El Romeral—are some of the largest in the world.  The largest stones used in their construction weigh one hundred and eighty tons, and were transported from at least a mile away.  The sites, which are located near the town of Antequera, are believed to have been established around 3700 B.C.—making them a contemporary of many famous megalithic sites such as Stonehenge.

Many of the walls feature anthropomorphic illustrations.  Menga is aligned with the summer solstice, and El Romeral shares several traits and characteristics with tholos dolmens discovered on Crete, which suggests contact with the Minoan civilization.

Ggantija is a complex of two megalithic temples on the Maltese island of Gozo.  The stone temples were constructed around 3600 B.C., making them the second-oldest religious structures ever found, just behind Gobekli Tepe.  For a little context, it’s worth remembering that this was a time when metal tools were not available to the natives of the Maltese islands, and the wheel had not yet been invented.  

It is believed that Ggantija may have been the site of a fertility cult, as figurines and statuettes associated with fertility have been discovered there.  Small spherical stones have also been discovered, which archeologists believe may have been used as ball bearings in the transport of the massive stone blocks which make up the temples.  All that being said, we still don’t know how or why the temples were built.

Ranging in size from a few centimeters to more than two meters in diameter, and weighing fifteen tons, a collection of over two hundred stone spheres has been found in Costa Rica. The spheres are believed to have been carved between 1500 and 500 B.C. by a civilization long since disappeared, although exact dating is impossible.  

There are numerous myths and legends relating to the spheres, with some claiming that they are relics of Atlantis, and others claiming that the builders possessed a potion which softened rock.  Although the stones have been weathered, damaged, and eroded over the centuries, some believe they were originally carved into perfect spheres. Once again, we still don’t know what purpose was served by these stones.

The Olmec heads are a collection of seventeen colossal heads, carved from stone.  The heads date from 1500–1000 B.C., and weigh between six and fifty tons.  Each head is carved with a unique headdress, leading some to believe that they were meant to be representations of powerful Olmec rulers.  Others claim that the face structure featured on the heads resembles that of an African male, suggesting that this might be evidence of an advanced African civilization visiting the Americas in prehistoric times.

In 1987, a group of strange formations was found underwater off the coast of Yonaguni Island.  These formations feature flat parallel edges, right angles, sharp edges, pillars, and columns—leading many to believe that the site could be man-made.  

The last time this area would have been dry land was eight to ten thousand years ago, during the most recent ice age—and so if Yonaguni really was constructed by humans, it would be one of the oldest structures on Earth, and would drastically change what we think we know of prehistory.

In 2001, evidence of a sunken city was found off the coast of India, in the Gulf of Cambay.  Several manmade structures have been identified using sonar, including large buildings and canals.  Artifacts such as pottery shards and hearth materials have been dredged up from the bottom.

The scale of the city is quite large, especially considering the fact that one piece of wood has been dated from as early as 9500 BC.  If it really existed back then, the city would be thousands of years older than the previous oldest city found in India, and would have existed thousands of years before humans were thought to be building cities of this size.  

There are some people who scoff at the suggested date, saying that the carbon-dated wood proves nothing—but all the same, there is enough evidence to make this site one of the most intriguing in the world.

On Easter Island—one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth—lies one of the world’s most famous mysteries.  The giant stone statues (Moai) of Easter Island are a favorite of tourists—but little is actually known about them.  Although it was thought at first that the statues were merely heads, excavation has shown almost all of them to have bodies.   Very few of the statues were ever actually erected; most were left in quarries, or abandoned during transport.  

Archeologists don’t know why the statues were built, what they signified, how they were transported and erected, or why they were abandoned unfinished.  There is a form of hieroglyphic writing on some of the statues, which nobody has been able to translate.  The people of Easter Island themselves are something of a mystery; it remains unclear where they originally came from.  

One of the wildest theories about Easter Island has it that the island is actually the peak of an underwater mountain—and all that remains of the lost civilization of Mu.

Gobekli Tepe is generally considered to be the oldest religious structure ever found.  Radiocarbon dating puts the site at between 10,000 and 9000 B.C. To put this age in perspective, more time passed between the building of Gobekli Tepe and the building of Stonehenge than between the building of Stonehenge and present day.

The site contains stone structures and stone pillars which feature carvings of various predatory animals. The stone pillars—some of them reaching nearly twenty tons in weight—date to a time when humans were thought to be simple hunter-gatherers. Gobekli Tepe seems to have been built before the advent of agriculture, religion, written language, the wheel, pottery, the domestication of animals, and the use of anything other than simple stone tools.  

How were these structures built at a time when humans are basically thought have been cavemen?  How did they quarry huge pieces of stone, and cut them to size with no metal tools?  What was the purpose of such a site, before religion was thought to have been established?  The discovery and ongoing excavation of Gobekli Tepe could eventually change our conception of prehistory forever.

Mark Thompson is an animal lover from Canada who wishes he was an animal lover from somewhere warmer.