T U R K E Y L U R K E Y
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Sunday, August 16, 2026
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Triassic
S A U R I C H T H Y S
The Triassic Period began roughly 250 million years ago,
amidst the ruin left by the mass extinction that occurred
at the end of the Permian. Most of this planet's species
gone forever. Others survived. Their offspring, born into
a chaos that lasted the next few million years, the time
it took for life on Earth to recover.
M A S T O D O N T O S A U R U S
The world's biggest amphibian of all time.
A two ton salamander just crawled out of your lake.
The animal was aquatic, living its life mostly submerged.
What's the tip off? We've got a four thousand pound
pickled piece of luggage being paddled up an incline,
on four puny legs. It's a squirmy snail's pace, at best.
Nonetheless, the animal was a hall of famer of its day.
Our mastodon had a fishlike lateral line system,
sensitive to vibration and water pressure changes.
This enabled the animal to stalk its prey even in
the murkiest of waters.
T R I A D O B A T R A C H U S
Madagascar, 250 million years ago.
Here is our ancestor to the frog.
A diamond in the rough.
It has that flat, broad frog head.
The hind legs have that unique frog stance.
The forearms are ready to buffer a hard landing.
But you're not going to get an explosive spring
from these sadly undersized legs.
And the torso is too big. It's a salamander
with fourteen vertebrae versus as few as
four in the modern, compact frog.
The Triassic frog is still a generic.
Its simple philosophy:
stay hydrated.
L Y S T R O S A U R U S
Plant eater. Mammal-like reptile. Resilient.
Survivor of the Permian mass extinction.
The legs sprawl like most any primitive vertebrate.
The Triassic climate can be both extreme and
volatile. This animal burrows to escape the heat.
It has barrel-chested lung capacity in order
to survive low oxygen situations.
The environment was high mortality.
The favored biological response to this
adversity is to grow up fast and breed early.
There are no individual star performances here.
Its a numbers game with this population.
Make sure you've punched your ticket before
you leave.
C Y N O G N A T H U S
The Middle Triassic apex predator. Wolf size.
Does that skull not remind you of a mammal?
Here is our first look at a future dog or lion's head.
Get a load of those legs. Nearly directly under
the body. Built for speed and power.
Fossil hunters have found this animal's identical
remains in both South Africa and South America.
They were the identical terrestrial species and
yet they were separated by three thousand miles
of the Atlantic. Continental drift supplied the
explanation.
The Earth's crust is not static.
The continents sit atop large plates that collide,
reform and intermingle over the hundreds of
millions of years, a process normally too slow
for us to take notice. Mount Everest grows
about an inch higher every year because
India is slowly colliding into Asia.
Come on. Who would believe that?
D I A D E M O D O N
This guy is about our oldest ancestral mammal,
the stepping stone separating reptiles from mammals.
It eats most anything edible. Your dental work
comes with incisors, two pair of canines, and now with
premolars for slicing and crushing. And they fit
perfectly when you close your mouth. With
the needle teeth of reptiles it is sometimes
hit or miss whether you can close your mouth,
at all. Imagine. Now you can chew the toughest
plants or crunch the biggest bone, thanks to your
massive, powerful jaws and state of the art dentures.
The Diademodon comes complete with an opposing
first digit for better grasping, a highly sensitized nose
and a sophisticated middle ear for excellent hearing.
The animal is the first step in moving from primitive
reptile into the path towards becoming a mammal.
Still, the success of this mammalian progress
was pushed from center stage by an even
bigger story - the dramatic rise of the reptile.
The Triassic would launch entire new branches
of animals into extravagant variations.
It would be a time of behemoths and powered
flight. Cunning would become a predator's tool.
Here would be the introduction into the
Age of Dinosaurs.
* * * * *
© Tom Taylor
OVER EASY
Sunday, August 9, 2026
Saturday, August 8, 2026
Permian
D I M E T R O D E N
The creature with the vertebrate sail is a
reptilian ancestor to modern day mammals and
preceded the dinosaurs by about 40 million years.
Ancient mammals came to dominate the Permian,
a fifty million year stretch that would lead into
the Triassic era and the Age of Dinosaurs.
E R Y O P S
Every bit a reptile except it doesn't lay shelled eggs.
Its legs extended from the side of the body, its belly
nearly dragging the ground, much like the modern
day crocodile does when walking across the land.
This large, ungainly amphibian was also a poor swimmer.
Unable to run down its prey on both land or water
the animal relied upon ambush to capture its meal,
as does the crocodile. They each sport a snout
long enough to contain a very large mouth,
lined with teeth - the better to grab you with
from out of nowhere.
G O R G O N O P S I A N
Here was the apex predator of the middle to
late Permian. This was the Sabertoothed Tiger
of its time, able to run down its prey using
powerful legs that dropped nearly straight
down from its body. Finally, an animal built
to run.
The Gorgonopsian, (Gorgon - a dreaded monster
from Greek mythology) had a mammalian mouth
with various teeth for specific tasks - incisors for
cutting, canines for piercing and molar-like teeth
for crushing. Despite this sophisticated dental work,
the animal was forced to swallow its food whole
because it lacked a secondary palette, a boney
structure that separated the breathing passages
from the mouth. The animal could not breath
while chewing or even just holding its food
in its mouth.
P A N G E A
The various landmasses of the Earth collected into
one supercontinent that stretched from the pole
in the north to the one in the south. The planet was
now divided into one land, surrounded by one ocean.
The interior of this enormous landmass baked
under constant sun, as it was outside the reach
of rains coming off the ocean.
The supercontinent Pangea began breaking
apart during the latter part of the Permian.
This period ended with countless volcanic
eruptions that resulted in a cataclysmic
global impact.
Lava covered the land for thousands of miles.
Volcanic ash and toxic gases filled the Earth's
atmosphere, spawning a global warming.
Acid rain poisoned the water. Marine life
suffocated as oceans lost oxygen.
Of the planet's five mass extinctions, this one,
the Great Dying, was the worst.
Ninety percent of the ocean's species gone.
Seventy percent of terrestrial life disappeared.
Ancient mammals no longer dominated the land.
The way was clear for the Age of Dinosaurs.
G Y M N O S P E R M
The facts of life... birds, bees and the telling
of plant sex. The male plant generates
pollen grains that are distributed by wind
to the flowers of female plants.
Egg and pollen merge, forming an embryo
containing the genetic instructions supplied
by its two parent plants. A new edition of life
is developing within its protective shell.
We have a seed.
S U M I N I A
That looks like fur growing from this animal.
Now it's beginning to look like a mammal.
What about hearing? Terrestrial animals
retain their fish style of hearing. No ears.
Not yet a priority.
The animal above looks like a beginner at tree climbing.
Its claws lack the length needed to dig into bark.
The feet have digits long like fingers but they show
little evidence of having the power to grip.
Balance may be the one climbing characteristic
it has already reasonably accomplished.
It has the teeth of a predator but how capable
is it for hunting prey out on a limb?
* * * * *
© Tom Taylor
OVER EASY
Sunday, August 2, 2026
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Carboniferous
M A S S I V E I N S E C T S
The Carboniferous Period transformed the Earth
into a planet somewhat resembling the world
we live in today. Except, of course, for the insects
which sometimes grew as big as the household cat.
Everything about this age had a bigger than life
quality as new organisms flooded the scene with
spectacular innovations that would change the
course of nature.
R A C E F O R S U N L I G H T
The land of the globe's two supercontinents
would soon be covered in vegetation
wherever a plant could sink its roots.
Trees towering more than a hundred feet
made forests of the vast tropical wetlands.
Plants created wood before microorganisms had
developed the ability to break the wood down.
No termite microbes existed to aid digestion.
Trees died but they wouldn't rot.
The wood accumulated over the eons,
slowly transforming themselves into
a dense peat.
Millions of years of pressure and intense heat
cooked this layered peat into coal beds
that became thousands of feet thick.
Coal was a readily available source of energy,
compressed and easily transported.
It provided the inexpensive fuel necessary
to power the Industrial Revolution.
E I G H T F O O T M I L L I P E D E
Dragonflies that can barely fit through your
bedroom door. A millipede the length of a
hallway throw rug. Turn on the kitchen light
and, suddenly, you are confronted by a
two foot long scorpion.
Today's atmosphere contains about half
the oxygen ancient insects inhaled when
they breathed the Carboniferous air.
Insect respiration relies on surface pores
to provide oxygen where needed.
This method of diffusion does not supply
an animal's deep tissue, such as organs
centered in the body. The animal's size
was severely limited by this absence
of an internal circulatory system.
Oxygen-enriched air overcame this size
limitation to some degree. However
insects, spiders and scorpions will
never reach anything approaching
horror movie size.
E V E R Y H A B I T A T C O V E R E D W I T H L I F E
Life above the water's surface. Organisms
breathing air and naked to the sun. Brave new
world. The promise of opportunity everywhere
one looks.
Life takes on all challenges, even the most
foolhardy. Every organism alive is based
upon the dispassionate probe of possibilities.
We look under the rock because it is there
for the finding.
It is in our DNA.
F O U R L E G G E D V E R T E B R A T E
Land animals begin taking on recognizable forms.
There is a skull at the front end of the animal
with eyes, mouth and a brain. A trailing flat tail
provides both propulsion and steering in water.
Jointed legs provide mobility on land.
Five digits for grasping at legs' end.
What makes five the optimal number?
A more robust method of creation came about
during the Carboniferous period and it changed
the course of both plant and animal development.
The amniotic egg suspended the embryo in a
nourishing fluid that was contained in a protective shell.
The animal's eggs no longer needed a watery nursery
to survive. From this the reptile was born.
For plants the seed replaced the spore.
The advantages enjoyed by egg laying reptiles
were shared with plants encasing their embryos
within a seed. This innovation improved the
odds of reproductive success, with it soon
becoming the dominant method for reproduction
in both plant and animal.
C O N T I N E N T S C O L L I D E
Nearing the end of the Carboniferous Period,
the Earth's two supercontinents collided, creating
the new continent of Pangea.
The crushing force of this collision pushed
ancient coal beds upward into a range of mountains
known today as the Appalachians.
The above map shows the state of West Virginia
to be near the Atlas Mountains of North Africa
when this earth-crumpling event occurred.
Pangea disrupted the flow of equatorial ocean currents.
The repercussions were severe. The globe became
cooler, dryer. The Earth's southern pole experienced
endless cycles of glaciation. Drought dried up
tropical swamps. There was a collapse of rainforests.
Many amphibians and numerous other water dependent
organisms disappeared from the gene pool.
Drought resistant reptiles took center stage
and were crowned undisputed masters of the land.
* * * * *
© Tom Taylor
OVER EASY
Happy Birthday Marcela!
M I D N I G H T S U N
H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y !
M A R C E L A
😎 🎈
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Karen & Tom
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