You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Megan Weatherall.
And I'm Amy Atwater, and we're two living scientists who are
weirdly excited about dead things.
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So pay attention to the warnings in the description.
This episode is all about giant lemurs of Madagascar.
Now I want you to imagine Once Upon a time there were even more
lemurs in Madagascar, and these lemurs were swole.
Heaven, Burr, swole, there are big, big, big ones.
There were ancient lemurs in Madagascar that went extinct
fairly recently. So we are talking within the
last 1000 to 300 years. That means that they are very
commonly referred to as sub fossil lemurs.
We've talked a little bit about what defines a fossil and I have
realized that this is kind of an interesting qualifier is that if
they go extinct within the last 10,000 years, like we're still
going to call them sub fossils even though they're not older
than 10,000 years. And I'm like, if you go extinct,
then all your bones are now sub fossils because, right.
I mean, I've never thought about it as like instinct dependent,
but maybe that's. Why the the sub fossil to fossil
categorization is a little bit weird because it seems like some
people have like that 10,000 year cut off and then some
people have totally different cut off.
I've heard if it's within like the last 15,000 years but it's
not fully per mineralized. I've seen people call that sub
fossil. So the word sub fossil has no
real meaning. Words don't mean anything, Amy.
It's subjective sub fossils, yes.
So whatever you want to call it, it essentially means they're
dead, but they haven't been dead for that long.
We are going to talk about the overlap with humans that is
documented. Yeah.
You you already know where it goes.
Arm wrestling. They were doing a lot of arm.
Wrestling and like lassoing and like riding on the backs of no,
mostly just murdering and eating some cool things just about
lemurs in general. So right, lemurs, as we've
talked about quite a few times, because they're freaking
amazing. They're on the island of
Madagascar, which is off the coast of Africa.
Lemurs used to be much more widespread than that in their
evolutionary history, but they went extinct everywhere except
Madagascar. Now, because Madagascar has been
isolated as an island for, you know, 60 million years,
depending on who you ask, that can change that number.
But let's just go with like about 60 million years of
isolation. So that means that there have
been opportunities for these, like, radial adaptations similar
to I was just like, it's like the beak of the Finch, but
instead it's like the big ass and body ass lemurs.
Yeah. The body of the lemur, Yes, it's
really interesting because it's like these giant lemurs were
doing things in their niche that are in like what as I will talk
about animals like sloths and koalas and monkeys that they
were able to, you know, kind of be like, hey, this is an
available space. I'm going to get super bulked up
and become essentially a gorilla lemur, which is just freaking
weird. So no, it's just really
fascinating. But they're still lemurs at the
end of the day. So some characteristics that we
see in lemurs, these are strepsorine primates.
They are not, they're not as closely related to humans and
stuff. And so one of the things that
lemurs have is like a tooth comb, which just means all of
their incisors and I think even some of their canines, maybe
even, I'm not really sure, they're all really tightly
joined, literally like a little comb.
It's probably a grooming adaptation.
So that's really distinctive lemur trait.
They have the little like weird forks in their incisors too.
Like their incisors don't have a flat bottom?
Or is it just that like the teeth themselves become the
teeth of the? I think it's just the teeth
themselves become the teeth of the comb, yes, that they just
get pushed together quite a bit. And we see this in some of the
earliest lemur fossils of like these adapeds like Darwinius,
the one from Messel. Messel has has a tooth comb and
they have some other interesting things.
They have what we call a grooming claw.
Other cultures call it a toilet claw.
It is exactly what you think it might be.
So they've got some weird post cranial adaptations as well.
So a lot of these giant lemurs had those sorts of things.
We're going to talk about some weird ones.
Other things that are characteristic of lemurs too is
that they tend to have a little sexual dimorphism.
They don't and a lot of them are matriarchal and they're like
they're hierarchical structure, which is really cool as well.
So we don't really see change in canine size even in these sub
fossil ones. It's apparent that they too
didn't have like this male social dominance very much like
modern lemurs. And another cool thing about
lemurs that you've talked about is the torpor aspect.
I'm lemurs. They I live in a very resource.
They can go through periods because of the just the seasons
not having a whole lot of resources.
And so they'll go into just like this hypo metabolism state and
just like chill the fuck out. And I guess these giant ones
were probably capable of that too.
So it's just really. Interesting.
Wild. Yeah, I know that like the the
small ones are the ones that have been the best studied as
far as torquer goes, but I didn't know.
I wonder if that's also just because they're like when you're
studying torpor you have to plant temperature thing like a
little troll doll belly button gem.
I wonder if it's just a little bit harder to do that on a big
one. That's a good point.
I thought you're going to say when you do those, you have to
like, keep them in captivity and get them real cold.
Also that too. Yeah.
Yeah, hard to chill off a gorilla sized lemurs.
Not that we have them. But yes but they're sub fossils
so you know want to bring them back.
There is decent DNA but actually not great DNA either.
They have a really hard time figuring out how some of these
giant lemurs are actually related to modern lemurs even
though they didn't go extinct that long ago.
So just goes to show you that understanding evolutionary
relationships is not even if it's from more recent time
doesn't mean that it's any easier to understand how one
species are one genus might be related to another, which is
which is very cool. So today we're going to talk
about the major types of these giant sub fossil lemurs of
Madagascar. We're going to walk through
them. Then we're going to talk a
little bit about their human interactions, how we know all of
that. And then we're going to end by
talking about how big exactly were they and how controversial
that has been ever since their first discovery.
And there's just so many anecdotes of all of these
different hilarious size comparisons that are very.
So we're gonna have you Scroll down to your first image because
I know how. I'm excited.
There's one image that I know of about these guys just because.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
It is it is. Oh God.
All right. So this is this is probably one
of my favorite pieces of Paleo art.
I want you to envision Bigfoot with a giant like rough of white
fur, except Bigfoot is a gentle beast and he's leaning out and
he's got his arm outstretched, sort of like the Sistine Chapel,
but instead of touching God or humans or another lemur, he's
got a little a little parrot, a lighting on his finger and just
the decisions that went into this.
I fucking love it. I love it.
This is creepy. This is amazing.
It's, it's so strange and it's just such a strange decision,
but it's, it's everything. It's.
Everything. It was a good decision.
I really like that you pointed out the weird white kind of like
fluffy fur around the face. It gives me very much founding
father vibes like. Like mutton chops?
Yeah, it's definitely got white mutton chops.
Or like, even like we can go back to the old country.
Like this is like Mr. Dossi, you know, the Mr. Darcy lemur.
I also love how human the hands are, even though, as I just told
you, lemurs have specific adaptations to their their hands
and feet. So it's very creepy.
It's not accurate in the slightest.
It isn't at all. Is he actually maybe killing
that bird? Like it kind of looks like he's
like letting the bird a light on him.
But as I look at it closer, it looks like maybe he's grabbing
it by the. Yeah, but you.
Can. Oh, yeah, no, maybe.
Maybe. I was going to say yeah, yeah.
Like what my son does now with the cat.
Yes. Yeah, oh, danger.
So far so good. Yeah, but the.
Bird doesn't look distressed. Doesn't it?
I don't know. Look at its head.
Its head is back, but maybe it's singing.
I envision this as very much. Which fucking Disney movie is
that where she just sings to all of the forest creatures all the
time and Sleeping Beauty. Yeah.
And they, like, make her outfits and shit.
Like, I think that's kind of what's.
That's what I. Sleeping Beauty lemur version
plus mutton shops plus, that's what.
We're humanoid lemur. Yeah, super.
Weird. Or possibly bird murder.
It's really kind of hard to tell from this image.
And I Yeah, love the duality. It's up to interpretation.
And I really think so. We actually did a blog post on
giant lemurs back in like 2012 I believe.
And. I think and the only thing I
remember is this photo. Yeah, and I think this photo may
have been the inspiration. I think like the photo maybe
even came first, which is just very fascinating.
So that is definitely going to be an eye catcher for folks.
But if you want to scroll on down to the next picture, this
is the one you can look at while I go over some of our different
taxa that we have here. So you want to describe what
you're looking at just to get us started?
Sure, this is an image of. Let's see how many different
lemurs are there. There's seven different lemurs.
One is just there for a sense of scale.
The injury is just to show you. Is that what that is?
That's a modern lemur that some of these are closely related to.
And so that's just giving you a sense of scale.
Yep. It looks like Pooh Bear with.
Absolutely. Yeah, and I was giggling because
they've drawn several of them as being like climbing or
suspensorial, so like sloths, like hanging upside down.
But of course, when you when you draw animals like this, there's
always the temptation to like extend one of the arms out.
And so a lot of them look like they are like high fiving a
tree. Archaeoindres looks like it's
doing a full Hamlet play, staring at its.
Own hand. Yeah, yeah, it's got some some
interesting hand postures, I'd say.
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Everybody else is in full color but the Pooh Bear.
Is is the Pooh bear is our modern, our modern taxa taxon
here, while the other in color ones are some artistic
representation of these sub fossil giant lemurs.
So we have three different groups who are depicted here.
The first one we're going to talk about is arguably my
favorite though man, I found out there was another contender.
So there's three main groups, but I'm going to talk about two
little rando ones too. But out of the three groups, the
one that really sparked a lot of this is the sloth lemurs.
All right, so this is Paleopithicidae.
I'm going to call them sloth lemurs.
All right, So what you're looking at in the image there is
the one climbing the brown one that's climbing sloth, like
that's Paleopropithecus. So that is one of the most giant
of these. But the biggest of the bigs is
RKO injuries, the one that's on the bottom there shaking its
fist at the kids in its yard. And so those are.
Shake your fist like that. And then?
Amy's just making jerk off signs like I'm not going to notice.
And we've also got, I don't entirely know how to pronounce
it, but Babakodia, I think is generally it, it's the other one
that's fully inverted super sloth style and it goes full
sloth. So what I mean by when I say
sloth lemur is they're not weird.
They're they're not sloths, You know that which are totally
they're, which are weird, right. So sloths are Zenarthrans, which
are most like South American anyway, and these are all
obviously African. So these are the biggest of all
of the lemurs of all time. Archaeo Indris is the biggest of
the big. Now they had these long curved
hands and feet. That is how we are interpreting
them to be specialized hangers. One of the other ways we see
this, this kind of sloth like is that their arms are actually
longer than their feet. So they're doing a lot more of
the upside down hanging with their arms and their feet are
more robust and short to just kind of, I guess like a sloth.
Now they were interpreted to be like sloths, totally herbivorous
and all lemurs except for the ones that eat insects and stuff
like get never mind. So they were eating mostly
leaves is what they are thought to be.
And they were still in Madagascar when humans got
there. And there is quite a bit of
evidence of human butchery of the sloth lemurs, which is
really interesting too and sad, really depressing.
I think we write in the blog post and it's like Amy was only
1500 years too late from seeing one of her greatest loves.
And I was I missed out. But other people did actually
witness these, but not in a sense of like understanding
necessarily their entire biology.
So a lot of this interpretation is from the bones.
So one of the first guys who found the cranium of
Paleopropithecus, so the second largest is that he was like,
this motherfucker is an aquatic creature that is swimming at the
water surface with just its eyes, ears and nostrils barely
above the water. Literally, that is, and this
paper. What a wildly.
Different interpretation. He uses all of these different
anatomical reasoning for this of the paper.
Paper I was reading was like. Unfortunately, the post cranial
bones that he brought to bear up his argument did not even belong
to Paleopropithecus, so whoops, fail.
So sort of like a Diplodocus brontosaurusy, sort of.
Situation. Yes.
It's Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus.
Yeah, it's not that I care. I do.
I have to.
I get paid money to care, so I do care.
Yeah. So Archaeo Indras is considered
one of the largest primates to ever evolve anywhere, anytime.
So we're not just talking about lemurs.
We are talking it is in the running of literal gorillas,
orangutans. Like it is fucking
Gigantopithecus is still bigger definitely, but it's still in
like are probably top 10 primates which is freaking wild.
I feel like it, really. If you're not a paleontologist,
it must sound very strange to not not have an idea of how big
an animal truly is. Like part of it is that you
don't usually have the full skeleton.
A lot of it is that you don't have like a good sense of how
that animal would stand. So like a horse that you stood
on its back legs is a lot fucking taller than a horse that
you stand on all fours, you know?
So like what it obviously that's not the typical body posture for
a horse, but when you're talking about an extinct animal, that
can be a lot more difficult to kind of describe.
So like, even things like height can be really difficult to
accurately describe because you don't know how that animal stood
or how tall it was on any given day or whether it were high
heels. It's just it's always going to.
Be a mystery. It's fascinating.
So I'm going to have you go ahead and scroll on down to what
I mean by sloth lemur to see this articulated skeleton.
Please describe this beauty that you see.
Jesus. I mean, sloths are skeletally
horrifying. And I would say that this is
also quite disturbing. They have way longer, you know
how like everybody's like, oh, birds have such long necks.
Like if you really looked at a chicken that gets huge, like no,
sloths have creepily long arms and legs.
They are frightening and they are adapted.
Specifically they have a suspensorial like locomotion
system. So they have this, they're
designed to hang and dangle. And so they have really long
creepy hands and feet as well. And So what I'm looking at here
is a stretched out, lanky, upside down motherfucker with
fangs. Technically slots all their
teeth are fangs, but these This one is clearly a primate and has
giant chunky fangs and a. Really.
Oh, maybe I should add that other image back to this, but it
didn't have a scale bar, so I was pissed off.
Neither does this one, which is also frustrating, But this one,
Thank you. And I guess when I say canine.
So while they still had pretty chunky canines like Megan is
noticing, there wasn't dimorphism between the sexes
with those. So that's kind of what I want to
clarify again that yeah, they still had.
Because in a lot of primates, the males will have much bigger
canines than the females. Yes, exactly, and so also thank
you for pointing out. Very similar in this sloth.
However, when a sloth is hanging on a branch completely inverted
like it does, it is relying largely on its claws.
It has extended its claws, whereas sloth lemurs have just
done it with their fucking creepy long hands.
What I read is that they went full.
They went so hard for this that they couldn't have done anything
else with their hands. Like they were legitimately
curved. It is that like what you're
seeing isn't them? Like like, oh like what we would
do to bend our fingers over a bar?
No, they're, and not even that, but look how curved the
metacarpal is. Look how curved the first
phalanx is. So while sloths do it with their
claws, sloth gamers were like fuck that shit.
And they have normal nails like a primate does.
And but they have done the same adaptation for gripping the
branches by modifying their actual hands and feet to be able
to maximize their hanging potential here.
Which is and if you want to scroll on down to see exactly
how chunky their heads can get. That looks like an orienton.
That is a chunky head and. Look at the nose of it too.
It like looks like a nose already, which is really
interesting. So another thing.
It's got like nostril bones, which is not a thing that
happens. Another thing that separates
lemurs are strepsarines, which literally translates to wet
nose. That is like the nose of a cat
or a dog when you boop it and it's a little bit wet, right?
That's what a lemur would have had.
Whereas haplarines, which are pretty much all other primates,
including us, that translates to dry nose.
It's interesting that it looks so different because it is.
They are using their noses differently than other primates
are of the same size. So like typically when you look
at a skull, rather it has a, a wet nose, a dry nose, it kind of
just has like this straight chunk of nasal bone and the, the
nostrils that you see or like the, the flared out sides of a
dog's nose, those are like cartilage and flesh.
They're not necessarily representative bone.
But this guy has two like he's got tits on his nose.
Like he's got two big Bony bumps.
Do you think that means he just had like a giant nose?
Like, did this guy just have like, just like this super
massive, wide heart-shaped nose? Part of me is now wondering if
this is reconstructed at all as well, which is why I went ahead
and threw in the other image into this document, which they
still have fucking weird noses. So go ahead and Scroll down to
see more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I don't think quite the same sculpted, like straight up
looking like it has a fucking nostril nose.
But here this one again. Look at Yeah, B.
No, absolutely. B has I.
So that's a really interesting observation.
And I don't know enough about modern.
Yeah, actually I have seen some lemur, modern lemur skulls that
don't really look like this. This this one pissed me off
because there's no scale bar. So I was like, what?
The and they're definitely not the same size, right?
So like they're all being. Presented as if they're not.
Yeah, they right. Exactly.
They're all being kind of put, which is probably why there
isn't a scale bar. But here again, you can see, I
mean, these things had bowling ball heads, which is really
interesting to like the depth of the Ramis of the of the
mandible. So like the back of the jaw,
like the angle of the jaw is like, I mean, it is a it's it's
chunky, it's swole. It is it's geeked out.
Like it's it's impressive. And I didn't read too much
around. I mean, I would assume that
those are adaptations to a highly folivorous lifestyle,
which is eating a lot of leaves. Eating leaves is hard, right?
Gorillas are also folivorous. So we also see quite the chunky
jaws with them. Same with maybe some of these
like, you know, the tough eating Paranthropus, Boise Eye and what
not the heart anyway. So it's just, it is it's
probably an adaptation to eating a lot of leaves.
Still very, very, very fascinating.
Incredibly thick zygomatic arches, which are your, your
cheekbones on your skull and just know from herbivore skulls
anytime you have a big mantibial angle, so like a big chunky,
like lower cheek. And if you have a thick
sagamatic arch that's associated with a really big masseter
muscle. So specifically, it's like
directing your chewing power towards the back of your tooth
row instead of being up in your clipping teeth.
So you're really good at grinding and slicing and not
necessarily, I mean, don't tempt a horse, but theoretically
they're not as good at nipping as they are at grinding.
Actually, you know what? Go ahead and stick your hand in
a horse's mouth and tell me what happens.
But I'm going to guess that you're going to get pulverized
on both ends and just slightly worse at the back end.
Right. And I mean, now that you say it
too, I am seeing some, you know, general similarities to those
oridans, like the really chunky oridans that you've worked on.
So these weird sheet pig mammal things that also have a lot of
these features including the thick zygomatics and you know, a
very chunky mandible as well. So yeah, would love to to learn
more about some of that convergence that may or may not
be occurring and these weird giant levers.
And then if we Scroll down again, this one gives you a
slightly better sense of size. But motherfuckers, please denote
your fucking scale bar like it has a scale bar.
And I'm, I'm assuming that's three centimeters, but I don't
know because it doesn't. And that's why I included the
entire caption in it 'cause I'm like, did I just not see it?
But what you're looking at here is that it's Paleopropithecus on
the top, and then we have got Archaeo Indris on the bottom.
So within these sloth lemurs, this is showing you that again,
while they're both big ass chunky boys comparable in size
to the skull of a gorilla, this is RKO Indris just is like tops,
the tops, the cake. It is just the biggest.
And they both have, again, as we're noticing, this weird nose.
So kind of curious about that. I'm super curious about that.
So those are the sloth lemurs. Now our next group that I'm
going to talk about are known. This is Megalodapidae and these
are the koala lemurs. So they can always they are also
get really large, but I found one article that was like, but
their heads were oversized for their bodies.
I was like, what? Let's let's Oriadonts have that
too. When you when you look at an
Oriadon skull, you can't imagine that it's the size of like a
regular animal because like Primerica Carious for example,
has a skull that's the size of a cow skull, but it's the size of
a like medium pig. It's not.
They just have giant. I guess it's like an ancestral
condition, at least in herbivores, to have a massive
fucking head. And then as you become more
derived in your herbivory, you often reduce the size of your
head because you don't need it, because you're doing more, At
least with with like ruminants, you're doing more digestion in
your stomach and less intense chewing.
So oh. My God, I wonder what the guts
of these giant lemurs was. Like.
That would be interesting, but we ate them all, so we don't
know. So we've got koala lemurs
there's. So this is the genus
Megalodapus, also thought to be quite large, about 5 feet long,
maybe 1 1/2 meters. That's the equivalent.
I'm not even going to the sizes, like the weight yet because we
have a whole section on that now.
They are called koala lemurs not because they're marsupials but
because they had similar bodies, which then they were like long
arm, short legs and big feet and hands for clutching tree trunks
or branches. So even though they were fucking
giant, they still were probably very committed to life in the
trees. And they were.
They're described as slow climbers with huge pincher like
feet. Those are the ones in that first
image that are shown. Kind of just like doing a koala
thing like very much in. Hugging.
Yeah, tree hugging versus tree inverting.
Yeah. And so again, this one is some,
sometimes people say it's gorilla sized.
Spoiler alert, it wasn't. But, you know, it's it's fun to
talk about that kind of stuff. Now, some researchers also
think, so again, these are going to be another herbivorous group.
They're eating a lot of leaves and it's thought that they maybe
were reliable. Some of the trees in the
ecosystem were actually reliant on megaladapus to help disperse
seeds, kind of like what some folks have said with sloths, not
to confuse everyone. And then another interesting
that was pointed out from the Duke Lemur Center, which seems
like a very, very cool place based on their Instagram that I
follow heavily, is that they point out that like, you know,
modern lemurs are very vocal, especially the injuries, which
is that like the another tree huggin one that's still alive.
And so they're like, and they're fucking loud.
So we can't even imagine how loud Madagascar must have been
3000 years ago when all these motherfuckers were just.
They're like, they must have been deafening with their very
loud calls, which is. Yeah.
So if you want to Scroll down to see the size of this one, I like
this better because it's in someone's hand.
So thank you, stranger on the Internet.
Oh, George Perry. Are we talking about the
mandible? The mandible and it has a skull
under it too. So these are your koala lemur
images. So again, fucking huge.
And in the bottom photo and the bottom lower right is a modern
day lemur skull. I was very annoyed that they
didn't tell me which one, but whatever.
None of them are all that big. Do you know the biggest of the
modern lemurs? Megan Pop quiz.
The one that has the stripey tail.
No, that's a ring tail. Actually I might be wrong about
this, so maybe I'm going to take this quiz.
Back is it? Is it the red one?
Ruffed lemur. Now I'm Googling.
It's the fuzzy fuzzy one. See now I.
Can't oh damn it, it's the injury, it's the injury.
It's your Pooh bear one. So the injuries are what the
sloth lemurs are most closely related to.
So injuries are cool. They're also in a group with the
the Sifax Sifax. It's spelled sifaka, but it's
pronounced sifaka. And we had this, we had this
event at UT Austin that was like for kids and stuff.
And we had some jumping contest because the they're like super
efficient at at jumping. And anyway, all the kids are
like, I'm a sifak. I'm a sifak.
And I was like, this is hilarious.
This is this is some good shit. So.
So you're telling me Zaboomafoo is not the biggest lemur?
Which one is Zaboomafoo? Isn't that a black and white
roughed lemur I. Think it's a ring tail.
It's also a puppet for large portions of time.
I should know. I watched the Zaboom.
Yeah, exact. This is a boomafu lemur.
I think it's a rough. Lemur, I love that you are
tripping. Oh.
No, it's a seafaka. It's a seafaka.
Oh, is it? Is a seafaka.
I love that you're tripping more over Zaboomafu than you are over
the pronunciation of these Latin names.
Like that's. You're such a nerd.
You have no idea how many times this morning I was like
paleopropathicity, paleopropathicity.
Anyway, so I did. I did it a lot.
So those are our koala lemurs. Cute, cute, cute.
Now the one is. Pause you here because you just
keep saying cute, cute, cute, fucking monstrous.
That is terrifying looking like, but it's got a giant sagittal
Crest, which is a place where muscles attach that are often
for the front of your mouth. That's where the the ouchie,
ouchie bite, bite, bite muscles go.
So yeah, that looks, that looks. That looks like.
That's terrifying. That's a koala on steroids.
Look at those fangs. Also, again, a weird nose that
that nasal. Bone and a weird nose, yeah, no,
it like it's like a, it's the opposite of a trunk.
It's like extended. You know what it looks like?
It's actually a pig. That's what pig noses look like.
Oh well, pigs still have a semi. They have like.
Pre whatever they have. A semi mobile snout.
Yeah, they've got a mobile snout, but it's made of
cartilage instead of being made of cartilage muscle.
So anyways. Well, I think we might have to
go down some other rabbit holes sometime.
You know, if you go back to the first image of the beautiful
bipedal lemur, beautiful, you know, that's what I'm referring
to. This is it's gorgeous.
It's. Right, the one that's crushing a
bird. Yeah, right.
Well, it's debatable. I mean.
Debatable. That picture has captured a lot
of what I'm feeling right now. Like, is this something that
would be terrifying, or is it something that's gentle but also
probably would fuck you up because you can't really trust
that just because an animal eats plants, it won't beat the shit
out of you. Like, right.
It's really got the vibes of these slothammers down.
Yeah, exactly. It's we can understand now where
this is coming from. Yeah.
So our last of the major three groups is the RKO lemurs.
OK, So these are the monkey lemurs.
So on that image that had all 7 under six of them in there, the
ones that were on the ground doing the terrestrial motion,
those are the monkey lemurs. So out of the the ones we've
talked about, they're not as big.
They're more baboon sized. They do more of like they seem
to be doing more of a baboon or rhesus monkey kind of behavior,
which are terrestrial monkeys. And yeah, again, they seem to
have convergence with baboons and macaques.
That's what a rhesus monkey is. They are also thought to be hard
food specialist. But we're all and that there may
have actually been some evidence of omnivore in the monkey
lemurs. I don't have as much on this
one. You can Scroll down to see the
one picture of the cute little Bony face, which isn't cute at
all, but I'm going to. Go.
Oh my God, that poor thing. Look at its Yeah, look at that
limb bone. I don't even know if that's a 3D
print or a real bone. Again, very little information.
Thanks Internet. That looks like real.
So what I'm looking at right here is we've got a skull in the
middle and we've got a regular femur on the left hand side and
we've got a very, very infected femur on the right hand side.
It's got all of these little lumps and divots of bone that
appear to have grown up, which that happens when like you
damage the like the periosteum, like the outside lining of the,
the bone. And so it will like lift up and
you get like these weird deposits of bones.
So bone bruising will cause that, but so will various
infections. And judging by the fact that the
entire thing is covered, that boy had a sick, a sick leg.
Jesus. Yeah, it stays.
It doesn't look that great either.
It doesn't. It looks pretty.
It looks pretty gnar. Yeah.
So they had a tupper anyway, so great.
These, even though they're sub fossils, still limited numbers
of these specimens. We're working well and that's
quite I was kind of thinking about that when we talked about
like the a lot of these seem to have kind of fucked up noses
like they've got like big nose protuberances.
I wonder if that's also just maybe we have one really fucked
up skull and the rest of them didn't have it.
Like sometimes you you can't tell the difference between well
that one was a bit bit of a weird looking 1.
Tony was a little fucked when you don't have more than just
Tony. So.
Right. And think about it, if you only
find Tony and Tony's your only representation.
And This is why I have so many problems with dinosaur and human
evolution taxonomy, because I'm like, what if you just found the
fucking weirdo and you're trying to make all of these?
You need a good sample size so you can beat out the Tony's.
So then we have two other groups that don't get quite as big.
One of them is the Packy lemurs. These are like a ruffed lemur.
They're just a really big ruffed lemur.
Yay, cool for them. I don't have a picture of that.
They consumed fruit. So we're seeing quite the, like,
spread of different ecological roles.
And then the last one I wanted to tell you, OK, is the giant
eye. Eye.
Scroll down. There's a giant eye eye.
There's a motherfucking giant eye eye look at that picture.
Oh, it's horrifying. I love it.
I can't believe that one
extinct. And it was definitely still
extant when humans arrived. I found out a thing that said
that its incisors were collected, drilled and used for
like decorations and necklaces and stuff which is interesting.
That the incisors like nightmare fingers.
Well, so the first thing I immediately was like, do we know
if it had the same fucking nightmare?
Mare finger? So eye eyes, right?
The modern day eye eyes, which are also relatively large as far
as lemurs go. They have this very extended
digit, I think it's digit 2, and they use it to tap on trees and
whatnot and get grubs and it's creepy as fuck.
It is like way too long. It is very, very disturbing.
Yeah, it's how my mother plays Jenga.
She takes one of her fingers. She just.
She. Gently taps, but imagine new
game way longer. Yeah, we need to have someone
make us an II finger that you can put on your own finger, like
the little fake hand things. And then that's how we should
play a game of Jenga. Yeah, Oh my God.
But be so hard. Be so hard.
My mom does a great job of it, but her finger isn't like
supremely long so. So what I found out is that they
don't actually have a ton of material from this one.
So while they I read that it is very much just like a giant eye
eye and all ways of creepiness that that would entail.
However, it doesn't seem like we have a great sample size of
anything beyond a couple skulls and maybe a couple post cranial
pieces that don't necessarily include digits.
So I don't know. But I would assume that just
being again, recent and just a giant I, I guess it had the
creepy fingers that would have been even bigger.
And for reference, I'm going to talk about size of this 1A
modern day I. I is about 5 lbs which is about
2.32 point. 7 lbs. They're very they're, you know,
got that wiry, scary fluff. I guess that's true.
The extinct ones, 11 to 18 lbs, like at least two if not like 3
to 4 times the size of a modern eye eye.
So just take a modern eye eye and multiply it by three and
that's what would have been waiting for you.
And it was nocturnal. It was definitely still a
nocturnal. And so they're more
insectivorous because as they're saying, eating bugs and grubs
and shit. And so that is what would have
been around at night in Madagascar like 1500 years ago
are fucking like small dog sized eye eyes.
Wow, Yeah, that's so gross. OK, so, and I've been talking,
I've been talking a lot about, yeah, humans, humans, humans.
So we do know that humans interacted.
There are these different quotes about early white people going
and hearing about regions that had hornless water cows that
would make large noises. These are probably translation
errors too, if you know what I mean.
And so they very much did coexist with people and that
indigenous people of Madagascar would show these European
researchers places where they could find their bones and other
weird extinct things like the pygmy hippopotamus and stuff
like that. And some of those bones have
clear cut marks on them. So go ahead and Scroll down to
see a sloth lemurs. So this is back to
Paleopropiticus having a ton. And this is just one of many
that this document claimed to have.
And it was very, very clear that they're.
So we're seeing deliberate cutting and maturing marks on
this bone and it's above the medial epicondyle of the I don't
know what bone is, what has that lit long bone is.
That the humorist. Is that an arm?
Is that a humorist? I think that might be a
humorist. Epicondyle.
Whoops. Oh, it says it right there.
The left humorous. Got it.
Right. OK, so we know that they're
eating them. And then I found this cool
paper. Go ahead and Scroll down that
there are actual legitimate cave paintings of these motherfucking
sloth lemurs. Oh, that's so cool.
In this scene, it is shown with a hunting scene with dogs to the
right and then kind of to the far left you can see a faint
thing that they think might be a weapon.
And at first when I looked at it, I thought that the sloth
lemur was full slothing it and the dogs were running towards
it. But as you can see in the
interpretation and the image below, it looks like it's like
dead on the ground with its legs straight up.
I don't really know what's going on here.
I mean, that makes more sense than hunting an animal in the
trees with dogs, so. What if it was like a really low
hanging tree? I mean, it might be helpful to
have dogs just to let you know there's something in the tree.
I guess they could tell you where it is.
Having seen my dogs corner many a squirrel, they're not going to
get it no matter how hard they try.
Right, right, right. So no, it is probably more and
then what it's just rigamoris, just not how you say it.
But I thought it's like arms are straight up well, you know.
Two of its arms It looks like two of its arms have been cut
off. Right.
Well, humans got hungry, yeah. That's really cool.
Yeah, yeah, it's very, it's really cool that there is.
I mean, there's just so many aspects to this story.
Really, really fascinating. And when it came back, like I
reread our blog post about this and it's pretty funny because
we're hilarious. Always have been, always will
be. And most of our article is US
and mostly me because I think I wrote this while you were on
vacation after you made me write about fossil fucking fungus.
And I, I, most of the article, I just bitch about how all of the
size estimates do not have any standard error associated with.
So every time, right? You've already been talking
about this. We've talked about this in other
episodes. If you only have like a bone
and, and in this case, a lot of it is like teeth versus like a
long bone. If you only have that to
reconstruct your size, there's always going to be errors
associated with those calculations.
And a lot of folks don't propagate those errors to show
you where the actual like, you know, like, OK, this one says
that it weighed 508 lbs based on molar teeth.
But if you look at something from the femoral head, it says
like something completely different, you know, and
especially if you don't actually list that error with it, then it
can. It's very meaningless.
And our example was actually pretty funny.
So let me see if I can. Find this.
We could just use that old material.
Oh, it was great. Actually, half of the images
I've shown you are from our blog post.
So I only remember that you. Are welcome us yes.
So a lot of them are saying like it's in the size range of like
330 to 414 lbs, but it still doesn't.
So a range is a little bit better, but still not really
talking about it. So we wrote in paleontology or
really any science where you're predicting body mass from a
bone, you accumulate standard errors from all your regressions
and calculations. The standard error is extremely
important when judging the validity of a mass estimate.
Let's say we use Amy's pinky toed estimator mass and
calculate a value of 175 lbs ± 200 lbs and she's probably 175
lbs, But she could be 375 lbs or -25 lbs, making the estimate
completely statistically insignificant and therefore
shouldn't really be published. Which is our point.
Which is very just very funny. And then I continue to rant
about how I don't have access to a paper that supposedly had
better shit. So today I went and got me
access. I'm so proud.
Of you, I'm not going to say how, because it was.
You robbed a library, But yeah, yeah, sure, that's better.
Than what I did. So Yep, because like again, to
give you some ballpark estimates of what people have said, these
fucking fossil lamers like whey is really wide-ranging.
Megalodapus has been compared to that of a calf, a bear cub and a
Saint Bernard dog. I have no idea how much any of
those weigh except maybe a calf, but I have miniature calf.
But like a calf of, of Yeah, it's a cow calf anyway,
impressed by its very long skull, Radinsky incorrectly said
that Megalodapus was the largest of this extinct lemurs, even
though it's actually Archaeoindris.
And then some people have said that Archaeoindris is about the
size of a human, maybe larger than a human, possibly gorilla
size, and possibly the largest primate ever, which is not true.
And and then, yeah, the Paleoprithecus has been compared
to a modern chimpanzee. And again, a lot of baboons are
used for RKO lemurs. So literally it's just like
whatever fucking animal you want to throw in.
It's been thought of for these sub fossil lemurs.
So finally I got access to that paper.
You can Scroll down to my final image, which is the table I've
been wanting for 10 fucking years. 12 years.
That shows us it's still great. It's still not great, but it's
it's, it's OK. They did do a lot of numbering.
They used as many elements as they could.
They used modern species, not just primates.
They also use the animals. We're comparing them to koalas
and sloths. And they, they tried to do a lot
of just standardization. I think it was a lot of looking
at the cross section of limb bones, at the, at the cortical
bone there to be able to get these rates.
So here we have RKO. Indras is given a mean weight of
161.2 kilograms, with the range of it being from 1:51 to 188.
A gorilla on average weighs 300 lbs, which is 136 kilometers.
Or I'm great with the metric system.
I was doing so well, except for that rigor, Morris.
I digress. The point is, RKO interest was
probably around the same fucking size as a gorilla.
It's really a gorilla sized lemur, but that was like
partially arboreal, which gorillas are.
Not you do. Not see those motherfuckers in
the trees. So I mean, this baby was big.
The average is 161 kilograms and that is 355 lbs.
And that's so we're talking about a 355 LB lemur, 355 lemur.
That's wow. So bizarre and I just.
I know that from other research, a lot of times it can be
difficult to tell the difference between something that is
arboreal and something that digs a lot.
And I wonder if maybe this needs to be reevaluate.
Like, that's a huge fucking animal to have in a tree.
Yes. And I know that the the trees in
Madagascar at that point were a little bit weird, but I thought
they were just spiky and short. I don't think that they were
like redwoods, like so big. Archaeo Indris.
The biggest one, this £350. Chonco Chonco lemur is a sloth
lemur and has been interpreted to be in trees.
However, they've also compared it to being a giant ground
sloth. Yeah, that.
Kind of sloth. Yeah.
So I think that is needs to be considered.
Yeah, interesting. Just like giant ground sloths
were also interacting with trees quite a bit as well.
Because they're still eating these things.
They still needed those crazy claws to be able to reach those
branches. But I will also say that then I
was like, well, is this as big as a giant ground sloth?
No, giant ground sloths are way fucking bigger than this.
We're talking the biggest. Yeah, the biggest of them.
So maybe RKO Indris was doing some shit in the trees.
Maybe it was a giant ground sloth style.
Maybe it's a little bit of both. Maybe actually know maybe about
it. It was obviously delicious.
Lemurs fucking. Wild.
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