Miocene megafauna

I should have plenty of time to do a Friday Art Attack later, but first I wanted to post this video that I stumbled across completely by accident. I've seen others like this, but this one is quite specific to a particular time period, and its one that few others really spend much time on, sadly.

The Miocene is a fauna that feels considerably "modern" (with the exception of a few representatives of a few families that are now gone, like the handful of creodonts, the bear-dogs, the dog-bears, the barbourofelid, etc.) yet exotic and different than anything living today. Not so exotic that you'd look at them and wonder what they were exactly, but they just look different. Elephants with four tusks instead of two, little elephants. Fast, elegant running rhinos as well as pot-bellied, low-slung hippo-like rhinos. Half-sized horses. Double-sized camels. Cabyparas as big as a wild boar. Anyway, you get the drift. If there was another continent in our world that had these animals on them, we'd think of them as exotic but not so exotic that we'd wonder what the devil they were.

Anyway, with any luck, he'll do the Pliocene and the Pleistocene too, during the which we'd see this already pretty modern-looking fauna become more and more obviously modern. 

The Oligocene would be interesting too; without modern carnivorans, it'd feel pretty different, but maybe not quite as exotic as all that even so. The Eocene and the Paleocene, on the other hand, would certainly feel exotic and probably even strange and impoverished to some degree in terms of diversity. Any animals that were representatives of modern families would also look strange and unfamiliar, like little Eohippus, for instance. For that matter, the earth itself during the three paleogene periods might seem oddly foreign, with widespread oceans and tropical conditions extending much farther north and south than they do now.

Another quick aside; I just recently started re-reading the Malloreon, the sequel series to the Belgariad. I think this may be the first time I've re-read it... ever. Right off the bat, I'm reasonably impressed with the first ten chapters or so that I read, but the new author's forward to the omnibus printings is nearly as absurd as the first one. On top of that, he made the ridiculous mistake of claiming that he has twelve books in the megaseries, just like the Iliad. Of course... the Iliad is made of up twenty four books, not twelve. And he wrote this in the era where the internet was a thing, too. Sigh.

I've also received the 80s printings of Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master which I ordered from Thrift Books, and I've got the 80s version of Silverthorn on its way too. Within a few days, I'll have the entire Riftwar Saga in it's original version back in my hands. The copies I've got of the Magician books, while certainly old, are actually in better condition than the ones that I used to have too, which is kind of nice. Although I've certainly got plenty of other things on my docket to read, I'll probably bump this up to near the front of the line. It's been a long time since I've read what used to be one of my favorite fantasy series. Let's see if I still think it's as good years later.