Tag Archives: Miocene

G(e)nomic Wisdom

Posted on December 4, 2020 by twilightbeasts

When I first started doing ancient DNA way back in two thousand and [polite cough], every base pair was a win. Nature papers were published with less sequence than you’d now expect a fresher to produce in their first lab … Continue reading →

Posted in American Lion, Cave Lion, Cheetah, DNA, European Jaguar, Leopard, Lynx, Sabre tooth Cat | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Small but mighty

Posted on April 27, 2016 by twilightbeasts

Our planet’s climate fluctuations move to the slow, almost imperceptible dance steps of tilts in our axis and wobbles in our precession around the star we call the Sun. These movements which cause natural global-scale climate changes are known as … Continue reading →

Posted in Horned Gopher | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

America’s original razorbacks

Posted on July 12, 2014 by twilightbeasts

Peccaries are a family of superficially pig-like artiodactyls, sometimes erroneously called “wild pigs” or “New World pigs”. Both pigs (Suidae) and peccaries (Tayassuidae) have relatively large heads with a cartilaginous disc at the tip of the rostrum and tough, leathery … Continue reading →

Posted in Peccary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Galloping across the steppes

Posted on May 21, 2014 by twilightbeasts

Around 50 million years ago, long before the Epoch of the Twilight Beasts, a little mammal, Eohippus, scurried about in the forests of North America. This creature, about the size of an average dog, was the ancestor of the magnificent … Continue reading →

Posted in Horse | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 51 Comments