People usually say the Triassic animals were pretty weird, which is kinda true. However the Permian seems to have its share of animals with unusual head or bodyplans. There is even a clade of Permian synapsids called "terrible heads", difficult to get weirder than that.
The Triassic was very weird because it was sandwiched in between two extremely severe mass extinction events, making much of its biota unlike anything before or after. But the same can be said for the Permian, which saw two mass extinctions (end-Guadalupian and end-Permian) and a less severe extinction event (Olson’s extinction) all within close proximity to each other, creating the same “weirdosity” effect. Furthermore, at the beginning of the Permian, the world was at the peak of the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age and resembled the Last Glacial Maximum, but at its end was an extremely arid supergreenhouse more severe than even the Turonian and Early Eocene supergreenhouses. Additionally, during the beginning of the Permian, the Carboniferous-Earliest Permian Biodiversification Event was still ongoing in the seas. It truly was an incredibly dynamic and interesting period.
Permian animals are only weird by today's 🏙 standards. The Triassic animals were weird in general, because they had terribly adapted forms that only stuck around because of no competition or competent predators for them.
Amazing. I’ve read about these creatures just yesterday, on Wikipedia XD. I think it makes a lot of sense they lived a semiaquatic lifestyle. Excellent video
This find is incredible not just because it is a late-surviving caseid, but also because it is from France. Most Middle Permian terrestrial vertebrates are from Russia, China, and Africa.
They really remind me of elephant seals, I can imagine intraspecific fighting being equally bloody. It could be that they had really thick skin like the hippopotamus to help with potential buoyancy issues. As is often the case, an interesting and obscure beast brought to light for our viewing pleasure. Thanks and keep up the awesome work!
The answer to the question: how they lived? is evident through anatomy and environment. Like today's iguanas of Galapagos Islands. The water is great for escaping the heat and offers more plant food than land. For me the case is clear. This lifeform lived on coasts, rivers and islands and went into the water to eat. 🤓🤷🏽 Thanks for the amazing Content! 🦖
First of all -- I love this channel! Tor decades into the future this makes detailed knowledge accessible for folks that don't want to take a graduate course! Now for the bad news -- my own speculation! A huge animal like that could never sink. Its gut would be full of gas, and it was a floating island. The only alternative was if it ate huge quantities of rocks or sand to weigh it down, which seems unlikely, although some paleontological context might be helpful here. Those big forelimbs suggest to me it was digging through mangrove-like environments eating woody roots and letting its huge gut do the work of digestion, and maybe floating around the rest of the time. Maybe crawling on land to lay eggs at times. IMHO.
Great work as usual! Nice to learn more about both caseids and anteosaurs in the same video. Didn't know anteosaurs were, potentially, water-savvy creatures.
The study of Permian faunal isotopes mentioned in the video found Anteosaurus spent a notable amount of time in the water, likely because herbivorous dinocephalians spent an even greater amount of time there. Even though they were mostly terrestrial, anteosaurs were actually once perceived as crocodile analogues.
I say there are 4 rules in Evolution: - crab is best - Your ancestors were noodles, your descendants will be noodles - everything will try to fly, no matter how many limbs they have - since vertrebrates took over the land, there will always be hippos
Another awesome video! Chimerasuchus' production and this narrator go well together. I wonder if Lalieudorhynchus and other derived caseids could be better compared to beavers. Stocky animals with short necks that escape into water to avoid predators and sleep but forage on land. Perhaps the answer to the caseids odd anatomy could be found in the paleobotany of the time. Were they a perfect height to graze on groundcover cycads trunk crowns? Was there a large stalked herb like a large horsetail that, like a beaver processing a tree trunk, benefits a herbivore designed to sit in one place for an extended period? Probably should widen the search to caseid associated paleofloras in general and not just this one species
Turtles and tortuses also have tiny heads for their body size. Convergent evolution? The plump body is an advantage if they forage under water because a larger body mass means they cool down more slowly so can stay active under water for longer until they have to return to land to bask. I would compare it more to a crocodile lifestyle, alternating between periods of basking on the beach and getting food under water.
I was thinking the same about the turtle-like shape, but turtles usually have very long necks (even if they are retractable and may seem short when not extended)
Are you going to think of a suggestion making a RUclips Videos all about Geosaurus (A Marine Crocodile and/or A Sea Crocodile) on the Next Chimerasuchus Next Saturday coming up next?!👍👍👍👍👍⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
What is they were floaters? What if they slept by floating on the water, thus eliminating the problem of needing to surface to breath? They could have floated alone expending very minimal effort eating floating plants (such as water lilies) and plants growing in the shallows.
I was thinking, how possible is it that they were more manatee like? Except floating on the surface, rather than deeper into the water, because of their ectothermy. In this concept, they would feed on algae and plant matter floating on the surface. If they even leaned towards a detritivorous lifestyle, that could explain the purpose behind ridiculously large guts
Why does the depiction of lalieudorhynchus remind me of Tommy Boy? Kid in Bank: Hey, Mom! It's the guy who robbed the bank. Tommy: I didn't rob any bank. Kid in Bank: Oh, yeah, right. Like it was some other real fat guy with a tiny head. Tommy: I got a tiny head?
Even if it had the temperament of hippos, Lalieudorhynchus would have been slower, less active, and it had a less impressive arsenal. Although it would be far from harmless, the idea kind of reminds me of the Toaster from Fallout New Vegas.
What if it was a shore/bank feeder that just floated at the surface, with just it's back and head showing above the water, to safely feed along the shore? idk...
I had a thought, just like ducks are classified into dabblers and divers, maybe they fed more like dabblers at the top of the water, if they were semi aquatic. Maybe the specialized much like a koala on a specific species of water plant much like water Lillie's or duck weed, just a thought.
I’m envisioning these animals as FLOATING eating machines, not needing a long neck because of focussing on consuming massive amounts of vegetation on the water SURFACE. This is unlike hippos, which were bottom-walkers and ate land plants.
The common chuckwalla ( Sauromalus ater) of the American South West also has a very large body with small head, but is only about 16 inches long. It is slow moving and a vegetarian. The large body may be a selective advantage for digesting desert plants. If the chuckwalla is a product of convergent evolution, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Lalieudorhynchus to be aquatic.
So in Permian age we already had “alpha versions” of saber-toothed cats, marmots, lemurs and, apparently, hippos. It would be fun if someone discovered flying or fully aquatic synapsids similar to modern bats and whales.
What really grind me about paleontologists trying to explain the lifestyle of "tiny headed - large bodied animal", they often not consider possible physiology for such animals. (Thanks to minimally preserved fossils of internal organ to defend their argument). Physiologically, such head-body size ratio is necessary to achieve basic respiratory requirement for large-bodied animal. For breathing, intrathoracic pressure is always maintained negative compared to the atmosphere. To prevent to much air escape during normal breathing, as the lung size increase, smaller airway diameter is required to maintain intrathoracic pressure - basically if you have bigger trachea diameter, then you'll get the lungs to easily collapse. This is possibly logical in Lalieudorhynchus' case. But you can't evolve things by squeezing the airway diameter forever (the animal will be choked to death, duh). If you make the lungs size even bigger, you'll need way more "dead space" to buy time for air to not escape easily from lungs. The solution? Longer respiratory tract. Hence, the Sauropods can exist as very big, long-necked animals.. This happens too in highly-pressured environment e.g deep water. Hence, exist the Plesiosaurs Of course, this pattern won't happen to animals who possibly have higher metabolism rate and/or use loud sound as methods of communication (e.g Theropods, late dinosaurs), and adapt their lung physiology by other means (e.g Crocodylians, Ichtyosaurs, Pliosaurs) These, combined by behavioral adaptation, is truly a biological marvel.
Correction: Caseids are derived from Milleretta and had a synapsid-type temporal opening by convergence. You're not to blame for this mistake. This is a traditional myth that won't go away for several decades based on how long it took for paleontologists to realize birds ARE dinosaurs. Related taxa include Feeserpeton, Australothyris, Aclieistorhinus and Eunotosaurus. None of these are related to synapsids. You can test this hypothesis of interrelationships by including pertinent taxa. Google: the-case-for-cutting-caseasauria-out-of-the-synapsida/ for a 2011 blogpost on this topic.
Scientists seem to have regular difficulty in accepting semi-aquatic lifestyles in prehistoric animals. I think it's the western conceit of viewing things in a 'black & white' dichotomy.
They appear to me to be more adopted to eating plants on the surface of the water than anything else with the head being so far up on the body. Floating in the water and munching plants on the surface just seems right to me.
I don’t think that a large, stout ectotherm would have a significant issue staying active at night. Even today, with lower temperatures, large nocturnal ectotherms like constrictors and crocodilians exist. A large casseid that led a low energy lifestyle anyway could be fine. Also, even just before the ascendency of modern humans, slow and well defended animals like ground sloths and giant tortoises coexisted with some of the most powerful and intelligent Carnivoran mammals. Not even pack hunters could tip such tanks. This cotylorrynchus and relatives could have a tough skin, be able to swipe at potential predators with its hands, and may have had folds of skin to hide its head in. Probably it would be less agile than a modern tank, but predators of the time weren’t very diverse and didn’t hunt in packs either. Probably the minor mass extinction killed it. After all, very few cases of demonstrable outcompeting are proven. Most of the so-called advanced and derrived forms wouldn’t be here without external help, such as climatic changes..
![ATEEZ(에이티즈) - [GOLDEN HOUR : Part.2] Preview](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/X4PfgRPBUVo/mqdefault.jpg)
The narrator's ability to consistently pronounce "Lalieudorhynchus" correctly is something I can only dream of achieving in life.
i think he is a voiceover artist
Maybe it is the stardard American pronounciation, but it sounds quite bizarre when compared to a more Latin pronounciation.
@@khushalsaini2541even more impressive than just off the cuff?
I can't even read it let alone pronounce it 💀
La-loo-doe-rink-us I think that’s how you say but I’m not sure
People usually say the Triassic animals were pretty weird, which is kinda true. However the Permian seems to have its share of animals with unusual head or bodyplans.
There is even a clade of Permian synapsids called "terrible heads", difficult to get weirder than that.
There is a lot of weird stuff at every period in time really, even today. just look at the platypus
The Triassic was very weird because it was sandwiched in between two extremely severe mass extinction events, making much of its biota unlike anything before or after.
But the same can be said for the Permian, which saw two mass extinctions (end-Guadalupian and end-Permian) and a less severe extinction event (Olson’s extinction) all within close proximity to each other, creating the same “weirdosity” effect. Furthermore, at the beginning of the Permian, the world was at the peak of the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age and resembled the Last Glacial Maximum, but at its end was an extremely arid supergreenhouse more severe than even the Turonian and Early Eocene supergreenhouses. Additionally, during the beginning of the Permian, the Carboniferous-Earliest Permian Biodiversification Event was still ongoing in the seas. It truly was an incredibly dynamic and interesting period.
@@altanativeftw2625 thanks for the explanation
Permian animals are only weird by today's 🏙 standards.
The Triassic animals were weird in general, because they had terribly adapted forms that only stuck around because of no competition or competent predators for them.
@@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_CyavanaMany living animals are equally or even more weird if you think about it, just look at elephants and horses.
Amazing. I’ve read about these creatures just yesterday, on Wikipedia XD. I think it makes a lot of sense they lived a semiaquatic lifestyle. Excellent video
uh they are presumed or speculated to live a semi aquatic lifestyle. The topic itself is contested by paleontologists
@@retregratotherversrsentre7727 I’m aware, I’m just saying it makes sense :)
@@Randomrainfrog well same thing said for helzaraptor and spino so its kinda sus
Prehistoric Big chungus ? Prehistoric Big chungus!
Real!!?!
I mean, prehistoric rabbits are pretty big.
Real mature, Doruk, real mature
It's so cute
Big big chungus big chungus big big chungus big chungus
This find is incredible not just because it is a late-surviving caseid, but also because it is from France. Most Middle Permian terrestrial vertebrates are from Russia, China, and Africa.
Lalieudorhynchus when exiting the water be like: *I LIKE EM BIG! I LIKE EM CHUNKY!*
Wow named just last year? I love this hot off the press coverage of obscure animals that few know about.
I love this channel. Of all the paleo channels, this is the most informative and interesting without ridiculous fluff and agenda.
It's very rare that I subscribe after only seeing ONE only video. This one is great enough to convince me. Kudos.
Thank you so much for providing such a superfascinating paleo doku about animals I did always find astounding - made my evening!
ONCE AGAIN AMAZING VIDEO AS ALWAYS!!!!!
Wow another nice video but please can you make a video about rimasuchus or even the mighty purrassuarus
I am defiantly planning to make a video about Purussaurus, but I am trying to space about the videos about mega-crocs.
@@chimerasuchus thanks 👍 for the information I really like your channel
I LOVE the Permian!!!! Any more Permian videos you do will get likes from me!!
Arguably the goofiest looking group of animals, they're cool I guess
Definitely amazing video for sure
Have never heard of them, but they are fascinating! Thank you!
Hoping for a Dentaneosuchus video soon'ish!
They really remind me of elephant seals, I can imagine intraspecific fighting being equally bloody. It could be that they had really thick skin like the hippopotamus to help with potential buoyancy issues. As is often the case, an interesting and obscure beast brought to light for our viewing pleasure. Thanks and keep up the awesome work!
Really enjoy all the love you give to these underappreciated animals and periods! Invaluable channel for a layperson like myself.
This is wild. One of the few animals I've never heard of.
how do you know how many animals you havent heard of?
@@morthim Well like, on this channel.
Good job. Another very interesting animal. Well produced, with good narration and very informative.
The answer to the question: how they lived? is evident through anatomy and environment. Like today's iguanas of Galapagos Islands. The water is great for escaping the heat and offers more plant food than land. For me the case is clear. This lifeform lived on coasts, rivers and islands and went into the water to eat. 🤓🤷🏽
Thanks for the amazing Content! 🦖
First of all -- I love this channel! Tor decades into the future this makes detailed knowledge accessible for folks that don't want to take a graduate course! Now for the bad news -- my own speculation! A huge animal like that could never sink. Its gut would be full of gas, and it was a floating island. The only alternative was if it ate huge quantities of rocks or sand to weigh it down, which seems unlikely, although some paleontological context might be helpful here. Those big forelimbs suggest to me it was digging through mangrove-like environments eating woody roots and letting its huge gut do the work of digestion, and maybe floating around the rest of the time. Maybe crawling on land to lay eggs at times. IMHO.
Looks like a tortoise without a shell 😁
educational videos on obscure permian & triassic fauna is always an interesting topic, thank you
Great work as usual! Nice to learn more about both caseids and anteosaurs in the same video. Didn't know anteosaurs were, potentially, water-savvy creatures.
The study of Permian faunal isotopes mentioned in the video found Anteosaurus spent a notable amount of time in the water, likely because herbivorous dinocephalians spent an even greater amount of time there. Even though they were mostly terrestrial, anteosaurs were actually once perceived as crocodile analogues.
More!!!!!!!!!!! love the stuff that isn't focused on in mainstream paleontology stuff like documentary animation series.
Another great video 😎
Great content thanks for introducing us to such an interesting animal
I love how weird Permian animals were.
I say there are 4 rules in Evolution:
- crab is best
- Your ancestors were noodles, your descendants will be noodles
- everything will try to fly, no matter how many limbs they have
- since vertrebrates took over the land, there will always be hippos
Like crabs and fliers hippos just kept re-evolving over time; Imagine a time when the saying was "when Lalieudorhynchuses can fly"!
Another awesome video! Chimerasuchus' production and this narrator go well together.
I wonder if Lalieudorhynchus and other derived caseids could be better compared to beavers. Stocky animals with short necks that escape into water to avoid predators and sleep but forage on land. Perhaps the answer to the caseids odd anatomy could be found in the paleobotany of the time. Were they a perfect height to graze on groundcover cycads trunk crowns? Was there a large stalked herb like a large horsetail that, like a beaver processing a tree trunk, benefits a herbivore designed to sit in one place for an extended period? Probably should widen the search to caseid associated paleofloras in general and not just this one species
Very cute protomammal. It is shame we will never see how this critter behaved in the wild.
Based on reading Wikipedia articles, it seemed that many Permian animals kinda wanted to be the hippos of its time.
As far as I remember the Varanopids are still being considered Synapsids
Turtles and tortuses also have tiny heads for their body size. Convergent evolution? The plump body is an advantage if they forage under water because a larger body mass means they cool down more slowly so can stay active under water for longer until they have to return to land to bask. I would compare it more to a crocodile lifestyle, alternating between periods of basking on the beach and getting food under water.
I was thinking the same about the turtle-like shape, but turtles usually have very long necks (even if they are retractable and may seem short when not extended)
I friggin love permian fauna.
So it’s a hippo before the hippo existed
Beta hippo
Except they didn't have big head with large tusk like canines and 1820 PSI bite force
Since they lived before hippis arn't hippos the newer version of lalieudorhynchus
Miocene Rhino Teleoceras had a broad, hippo like body and was thought to be aquatic. More recent studies show it was likely a land animal however.
The Permian House Hippo is a shy beast...
Are you going to think of a suggestion making a RUclips Videos all about Geosaurus (A Marine Crocodile and/or A Sea Crocodile) on the Next Chimerasuchus Next Saturday coming up next?!👍👍👍👍👍⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
What is they were floaters? What if they slept by floating on the water, thus eliminating the problem of needing to surface to breath? They could have floated alone expending very minimal effort eating floating plants (such as water lilies) and plants growing in the shallows.
I was thinking, how possible is it that they were more manatee like? Except floating on the surface, rather than deeper into the water, because of their ectothermy. In this concept, they would feed on algae and plant matter floating on the surface. If they even leaned towards a detritivorous lifestyle, that could explain the purpose behind ridiculously large guts
Thought you were stuffed up lol im like, why does he sound so different today 😂 love the videos
Very cool, thanks G
Why does the depiction of lalieudorhynchus remind me of Tommy Boy?
Kid in Bank: Hey, Mom! It's the guy who robbed the bank.
Tommy: I didn't rob any bank.
Kid in Bank: Oh, yeah, right. Like it was some other real fat guy with a tiny head.
Tommy: I got a tiny head?
Channel Chimerasuchus do you watch or are you watching The Mandalorian?
Looks like a turtle without a shell
Ok I love how this hippoturtle looks 😁
New to me. 👏
WIll they still be scary if they behaved aggressively like hippos? If so, will it benough enough to scare the predators away?
Even if it had the temperament of hippos, Lalieudorhynchus would have been slower, less active, and it had a less impressive arsenal. Although it would be far from harmless, the idea kind of reminds me of the Toaster from Fallout New Vegas.
What if it was a shore/bank feeder that just floated at the surface, with just it's back and head showing above the water, to safely feed along the shore? idk...
I had a thought, just like ducks are classified into dabblers and divers, maybe they fed more like dabblers at the top of the water, if they were semi aquatic. Maybe the specialized much like a koala on a specific species of water plant much like water Lillie's or duck weed, just a thought.
nice video
Maybe they migrated or hibernate, which would explain why a semi aquatic animal would live in a monsoonal wet and dry climate
Hippo like behavior eons before the hippo existed.
Obviously not exactly like the fancy modern hippos 🦛 with their fancy new systems.
This is a Lalieudorhynchus moment
Almost looks like a turtle with no shell
Nice 👍
Galapagos tortoise heads and Komodo dragon bodies
Can you do Moschops next?
i love caseids so much. rip.
New favorite prehistoric animal
More freshwater species! Yes!
those tiny heads, wow
Look at these large lads
Look like turtles without the shell
the artists depictions look like turtles without shells
0:46: "the sandwich is mine!", "no mine!"
they look like turtles so much
So cute
In other words, hippos are Lalieudorhynchus-mimics🤓
Looks like a simple challenge for the Indoraptor(JW).
Good movie prehistorie animals
This odd prehistoric creature looks similar to a type of 🐢. Are they related?
I’m envisioning these animals as FLOATING eating machines, not needing a long neck because of focussing on consuming massive amounts of vegetation on the water SURFACE. This is unlike hippos, which were bottom-walkers and ate land plants.
The common chuckwalla ( Sauromalus ater) of the American South West also has a very large body with small head, but is only about 16 inches long. It is slow moving and a vegetarian. The large body may be a selective advantage for digesting desert plants. If the chuckwalla is a product of convergent evolution, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Lalieudorhynchus
to be aquatic.
Aren't this like a proto mammal Galápagos iguana?
"She call me Mr. Bombastic..."
Their tiny heads make me giggle😂
looks like a proto-turtle
Maybe the unusually small head enabled it to poke its head above the water while attracting minimal attention from predators.
Looks like a giant shelless turtle to me lol
AI narration is getting pretty good
This isn't AI generated.
seriously how does this not have 'pinhead' in its name !!
If one made this animal up, you would be told by experts that it was highly implausible, I think. What a goofy creature.
"They were too large to hide during the night, potentially explaining they disappearance"
So they learned how to hide!!
So in Permian age we already had “alpha versions” of saber-toothed cats, marmots, lemurs and, apparently, hippos. It would be fun if someone discovered flying or fully aquatic synapsids similar to modern bats and whales.
What really grind me about paleontologists trying to explain the lifestyle of "tiny headed - large bodied animal", they often not consider possible physiology for such animals. (Thanks to minimally preserved fossils of internal organ to defend their argument).
Physiologically, such head-body size ratio is necessary to achieve basic respiratory requirement for large-bodied animal.
For breathing, intrathoracic pressure is always maintained negative compared to the atmosphere. To prevent to much air escape during normal breathing, as the lung size increase, smaller airway diameter is required to maintain intrathoracic pressure - basically if you have bigger trachea diameter, then you'll get the lungs to easily collapse. This is possibly logical in Lalieudorhynchus' case.
But you can't evolve things by squeezing the airway diameter forever (the animal will be choked to death, duh). If you make the lungs size even bigger, you'll need way more "dead space" to buy time for air to not escape easily from lungs. The solution? Longer respiratory tract. Hence, the Sauropods can exist as very big, long-necked animals..
This happens too in highly-pressured environment e.g deep water. Hence, exist the Plesiosaurs
Of course, this pattern won't happen to animals who possibly have higher metabolism rate and/or use loud sound as methods of communication (e.g Theropods, late dinosaurs), and adapt their lung physiology by other means (e.g Crocodylians, Ichtyosaurs, Pliosaurs)
These, combined by behavioral adaptation, is truly a biological marvel.
They look like turtles without shells.
5:31 Talking about design flaws
How can an isotopic analysis be conducted on permian animals? Wouldn't they be too old to do such an analysis on?
Correction: Caseids are derived from Milleretta and had a synapsid-type temporal opening by convergence. You're not to blame for this mistake. This is a traditional myth that won't go away for several decades based on how long it took for paleontologists to realize birds ARE dinosaurs. Related taxa include Feeserpeton, Australothyris, Aclieistorhinus and Eunotosaurus. None of these are related to synapsids. You can test this hypothesis of interrelationships by including pertinent taxa. Google: the-case-for-cutting-caseasauria-out-of-the-synapsida/ for a 2011 blogpost on this topic.
They are of course related to synapsids.
@@Dr.Ian-Plect - add more taxa and caseids leave Synapsida. You are quoting from out-of=date textbooks.
@@DAVIDPETERS12C No David, I'm stating a very basic fact in biology.
--------
Drop your ugly, smug attitude and think.
When I first read the title, I thought it said proto hippo. I don't know how that happened. Now I want to know where hippos came from.
Scientists seem to have regular difficulty in accepting semi-aquatic lifestyles in prehistoric animals. I think it's the western conceit of viewing things in a 'black & white' dichotomy.
They appear to me to be more adopted to eating plants on the surface of the water than anything else with the head being so far up on the body. Floating in the water and munching plants on the surface just seems right to me.
That's what naked turtles look like!
Obviously they all had shrunken heads from making a witch doctor angry
I don’t think that a large, stout ectotherm would have a significant issue staying active at night. Even today, with lower temperatures, large nocturnal ectotherms like constrictors and crocodilians exist. A large casseid that led a low energy lifestyle anyway could be fine. Also, even just before the ascendency of modern humans, slow and well defended animals like ground sloths and giant tortoises coexisted with some of the most powerful and intelligent Carnivoran mammals. Not even pack hunters could tip such tanks. This cotylorrynchus and relatives could have a tough skin, be able to swipe at potential predators with its hands, and may have had folds of skin to hide its head in. Probably it would be less agile than a modern tank, but predators of the time weren’t very diverse and didn’t hunt in packs either. Probably the minor mass extinction killed it. After all, very few cases of demonstrable outcompeting are proven. Most of the so-called advanced and derrived forms wouldn’t be here without external help, such as climatic changes..
they would have very likely to have dragged their tails when moving on land because of their longer front limbs and much shorter back limbs