Niolamia

happy #fossilfriday! bonus: this is niolamia, a meiolaniid turtle from eocene argentina. the function of its horns and tail spikes are unclear, though it remains a truly remarkable example of convergent evolution in its similarity to ankylosaurs
(art by @mariolanzas.bsky.social)

Random fun fact while I'm reminded of it
Niolamia has perhaps one of the silliest backstories in paleontology that I know off because it was named during the Argentinian Bone War
hear me out

#oc #orifure #kemono_friends #kemonofriends
#Niolamia #Hutchemys

it is also thought that niolamia possessed an acute sense of smell, which may have aided in foraging as well as intraspecific communication

I don't recall if I ever posted these on Bluesky, but here's a set of illustrations I made for the Meiolaniidae wikipedia page back when I expanded the information for those animals
The goal was to showcase the overall diversity in cranial ornamentation #sciart

In short:

Naturally I also saved individual versions of each drawing so I can put them more easily on the respective genus pages.
Niolamia is the one I'm least happy with mostly due to how I angled the head, tho it was also the first one of the batch I drew.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

But while he coined a name, he never bothered actually describing the skull his brother supposedly found, nor did he figure it nor did he even explain what Niolamia even means (given later events it could have been a typo when he meant to write "Meiolania argentina")

Roth does as he's told and finds a perfectly preserved skull, the iconic fossil we still have to this day
Now coincidentally, at the same time infamous fossil hunter Florentino Ameghino claims that his brother found a skull described as pretty much identical, which he immediately named Niolamia

The same thought occured to Juliana Sterli, who in 2015 voiced her suspicion that the Ameghino skull was never real to begin with, that he heard about Roth's discovery and simply pretended to have found an identical skull to call dibs on the name. Which somehow worked
And thats the story of Niolamia

Time passes and this arrangement is generally accepted. Ameghino is given credit for naming Niolamia and Roth's skull is used as the neotype the name is anchored at.
But you might ask, what the fuck happend to the Ameghino skull, or perhaps more aptly, is there an Ameghino skull AT ALL?

Niolamia argentina, oder eine andere Meiolaniide. Meiolania wäre von der Größe beeindruckender, aber Niolamia hat den extremeren Kopfschmuck.

A piece I made last year for the Meiolaniidae wikipedia page. A personal gripe of mine is that oftentimes family pages don't really reflect the diversity of a group in the main image. So I worked to illustrate four very distinct members of the family to show how wild they could get
#paleoart #SciArt

No problem, it came out back in July judging from when I added that information to the Niolamia wikipedia page