hello there again guys and welcome back to another paleo profile today we've got an all-time favorite in the paleo community that was made famous by its appearance in The Walking with beasts documentary series the weird giant predatory mammal that really can't be compared to anything still alive today Andrew Sarkis during the 1920s the American Natural History Museum funded several expeditions into the Mongolian desert to search for fossilized remains the expedition was headed by the famous paleontologists Henry F augsburg Discoverer of everything from Tyrannosaurus Rex to Velociraptor Osbourne went into the desert finding many strange and large bas alized organisms but probably the most bizarre and memorable the entire expedition was the discovery of a single skull without a lower jaw the skull was filled with sharp teeth and was vaguely canine in shape such a find likely wouldn't have been of any importance if not for the fact it was massive over twice the size of that an Alaskan brown bear the skull alone was about the length of a human arm almost three feet in length it's warped the skulls of any modern predator Osborn gave the Beast the name Andrew Sarkis after famous adventurer archaeologists and paleontologists and colleague to Osborn Roy Chapman Andrews a real-life Indiana Jones who discovered the first dinosaur eggs upon returning to civilization Osborn found Andrew Sark is extremely difficult to classify as all he had collected of the creature and all we have today was the single skull and nothing else the very superficially canine or wolf like appearance of the skull Osborn found was misleading as upon further examination it was very clear this wasn't a wolf nor closely related to them he concluded that the jaw and tooth structure of Andrew Sarkis was most similar to that of Masonic an extinct group of mammals that are ungulates the group that includes horses deer rhinos hippos and many other who of herbivores the only thing was is that these animals weren't herbivores but clearly were predators and ferocious ones of that it looked like wolves and likely acted like wolves but had hooves like pigs or horses a bizarre bunch indeed Osborn used the more complete fossils of what he considered to be a small relative of Andrew Sarkis musics to estimate its size by scaling up the proportions to find Andrew Sarkis odds blowing speculate that Andrew Sarkis would have been the largest terrestrial predator ever since the extinction of the dinosaurs this led many to believe Andrew Sarkis was the Prius Joerg monster a huge and hulking wolf-like creature such an interpretation was depicted commonly in media and most famously in walking with beef however subsequent studies have found that Osborne's original Masonic mega wolf interpretation of Andrew Sarkis was wrong it was still an uncle it but not the type first expected a 2010 study found that Andrew circuses closest relatives were in Teledyne hippos and whales which all belonged to the group set a kodanda Morpha this makes a lot of sense considering how much a resemblance Andrew Sarkis pays to early whale footage am to a fetus and basilosaurus in their skulls and the intelidox also known as hell pigs or terminator pigs which are not in fact related to pigs man taxonomy is done sometimes we know now that long ago before the ancestors of whales and hippos took to the waters they shared a common ancestor with weird terrestrial hoofed predators with massive skulls and powerful jaws capable of crushing bone these relatives were Andrew Sarkis and Kelly danse which broke off from their common ancestors with hippos and whales and became fast and strong predators as a result of this classification Andrew Sarkis original speculative size based on news onyx was greatly reduced as we now know that Andrew Sarkis likely would have paid a closer resemblance to the hulking and tank-like intelligence the intelligent proportions might have shrunken the animal down but nonetheless Andrew Sarkis was still a formidable and mysterious creature this animal a bit like a hippo a bit like a wolf and a bit like a helping must have been extremely interesting creature to look at it ran on hooves and grabbed and crushed prey with powerful jaws I think these two images are my favorite depictions of the animals the best capsulate the strangely alien myths of this creature simply put there's nothing like it alive today Andrew Sarkis live during the Eocene period about 45 and 30 million years ago it likely was a result of the subsequent diversification that occurred after the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum an extreme climate warming event at the time when the planet was virtually ice-free our first primate ancestors began to evolve around the time Andrew Sarkis roamed Eocene Asia was especially hot and Andrew Sarkis as habitat was mainly along the close line of an ancient sea he likely was an opportunist innate whatever could get its jaws around from small reptiles to fish to carcasses that washed up on the shoreline at this same time the strange Rhino Lake branagh fears were widespread in early forms of modern animals like bats and elephants were starting to evolve in the ocean the sea serpent like relatives of Andrew Sarkis such as bachelor Soros swam about the ocean with elongate bodies it was a strange time where animals like we know them today didn't exist only their primitive and unfamiliar relatives wandered the earth Andrew Sarkis and similar animals likely became extinct as a result of the indian sub-continent crashing into asia and forming the himalayan mountains the rising of these mountains caused andrew circuses environment to become increasingly drier and arid Andrew Sarkis would later be replaced by a stronger jaw and Teledyne relatives in hyah Dawn's during the Oligocene and even longer afterwards we strange hoofed predators would be entirely replaced by canines and felines leaving only a single skull from a single individual as its legacy you .
Video Description:
A new short paleo profile talking about the mysterious and bizarre hoofed predator, Andrewsarchus. We learn about what its relatives were and what exactly it was. Hope you enjoy!
Sources:
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