Evolution has the potential to make some odd looking creatures, and with almost four billion years of life on Earth, that’s plenty of time to make some crazy looking animals. Good on evolution for not disappointing. Here are the five strangest animals that have gone extinct.
Platybelodon
Elephants are already pretty weird animals if you think about them. They’re a huge land animal that walks on tree trunk-like legs (that they can also hear with), are the color of an old sweatshirt, and have giant flexible hoses for noses. But there used to be an even weirder elephant walking the Earth. The Platybelodon doubled down on the general elephant penchant for having a weird nose/mouth area by developing what would best be described as a face spork-scythe. The Platybelodon would eat by biting a branch and using its second pair of flat tusks at the front of its mouth to cut through the vegetation. Which is just as strange as an animal snorting a bunch of water up its nose and then spraying it into its mouth.
Terror Birds
Everyone talks about the apex predators that were the T. Rex and velociraptor, but no one’s talking about the terror birds, a biological family that took over the top spot of the food chain. It’s also possible that no one’s talking about them because they’re completely ridiculous. They were enormous, standing anywhere between three and nine meters tall, and would stab or bludgeon their prey to death with their sharp beak and reinforced skulls. Or they’d kick their prey until it died. Whichever worked.
Arsinoitherium
Sometimes it seems like the old “walks like a duck, quacks like a duck” saying only works metaphorically, because the more we find out about the genetic makeup of animals, the less it applies. Partial case in point is the Arsinoitherium, a prehistoric mammal that looks like a two horned rhinoceros, where the horns are side by side instead of one in front of the other. But instead of being related to the modern rhino, Arsinoitherium’s genetics most closely resemble the elephant and the sea cow. That makes us wonder how something can so clearly look like a mildly mutated rhino and actually be a severely mutated elephant.
Woolly Rhinoceros
The Woolly Rhinoceros sounds like the lackluster invention of a lazy fantasy writer. Whoever came up with them needed something close enough to the real world to be believable, but far enough to maintain the integrity of the fantasy setting. They’re not fantasy though, as there are cave paintings that render surprisingly accurate depictions of the woolly rhino. Just like the mammoths they were knocking off, the woolly rhino was larger than its modern counterpart and covered in a thick layer of hair.
Opabinia
Any time Earth is invaded by an army of insect-inspired aliens, their mothership tends to look like the Opabinia. It’s long, flies by waving odd tentacle paddles up and down has an abundance of eyes, and has a proboscis mouth that looks like a fleshy crazy straw. Luckily, it never got big enough to deposit alien armies on Earth, since it rarely grew beyond two and a half inches. And we’re not the only ones who think this thing looks absurd. Apparently, when the animal was described in a paleontology meeting in the mid-70s, everyone reacted by laughing in the describers face.