palaeo xenobiology challenge

Hyrotrioskjan

so this was way more fun than I expected

The main idea for this animal was a sort of vertebrate squid. The "tentacles" all have a varying degree of bone on the inside with the front being the most ossified. There was a strange depression in one of the skull fragments which i interpreted as a recess which would accomodate a retractable eyestalk in its retracted position, but I reconstructed the animal with a pair of "ocelli" because of hollows in another nearby skull fragment.

I probably got the jaw arrangement wrong, but this is what seemed right to me. based on what I could see. Based on the signs of heavy innervation, this animal probably had keen receptors on its jaws, possibly to detect the beating hearts of prey items burried in sand. I reconstructed the animal with strong jaw muscles because the jaws seemed heavy, club-like and quite worn, suggesting it might have used brute force to beat and crack open shelled organisms. It would then suck out the soft innards and scrape any remaining meat off the shell shards with its teeth.

Based on a mess of long bones around the skull, I imagined the front limbs of this animal to be like tusks, but with a fleshy covering all the way to the end. The animal could use them for digging, dragging itself along the beach or anchor itself in place in the break of waves.

the following pairs of appendages would show much lower ossification and thus higher flexibility, but their softer nature meant they were probably scavenged upon after the death of this animal or they simply did not fossilize.

A trail of ring-like fossils hinted at a central structure running along the length of the animal, meaning there most definitely was a front end and a back end, but anything posterior to the skull is purely speculative and the skull was reconstructed from fragments without any knowledge of any sort of local fauna on this animal's home planet, so it most definitely is completely inaccurate despite my best efforts.