Q:   Is the Indricothere the same animal as the Baluchiterium ( whose fossils where found in the Baluchistan Valley in Iran?)
Thank you,
Alberto Guerrero
A:   Dear Alberto,
There is a lot of confusion about which name should be applied to these gigantic rhinoceros-relatives (there are several different species). You are quite right to suspect a close link between Baluchitherium and Indricotherium, and my own opinion is that these two names refer to the same animals. In particular I agree with the Russian palaeontologist Vera Gromova that Baluchitherium grangeri, named by her American colleague Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1923, is identical to Indricotherium transouralicum, named by Maria Pavlova in 1922.

Ironically, the fossils from Baluchistan do not seem to belong to the same group, but to the genus Paraceratherium, named by the British palaeontologist Clive Forster Cooper in 1911. Recently the French Palaeontological Mission to Baluchistan has collected large amounts of new material of these animals. (By the way, these fossils are known mainly from the Pakistani part of Baluchistan, rather than the Iranian side.)

Much of the confusion regarding the names probably arises from the fact that these discoveries took place just before, during and after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, but there are also genuine scientific questions that remain unsolved. Very few people have worked seriously on this group and I don't think anybody could now say exactly how many species are known or how they are related to each other. It seems to me and several of my colleagues that it is reasonable to call all of them indricotheres, regardless of what we believe about their relationships.

I hope this answers your question! — Mikael Fortelius

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Q:   I know I'm watching puppets and computer animated animals, not real ones, but still, most of the prehistoric mammals are… well… ungangly, to say the least. Their legs aren't in proportion to their bodies, and they move so slowly. Are grace and speed part of climbing the evolutionary ladder?
— C.C.
A:   You raise an interesting and important point. Apart from the technical problems of making extinct animals move on the screen, there is a real phenomenon involved that the modelers have tried to capture. Although most modern paleontologists would take exception to the phrase "climbing the evolutionary ladder" (which perhaps you use jocularly?) I think most would probably tend to answer yes to your question. There is no doubt that the skeletons of most modern large mammals are considerably less massive than those of most large mammals 40 million years ago. Those animals that today retain old-fashioned, heavy skeletons (like rhinos) are certainly less characterized by grace and speed than, for example, large ruminants, which have much less massive skeletons for their size.

I believe many factors are involved, including the frequently mentioned but hard-to-prove arms race between predators and their prey. Personally I suspect that the most important factor involved is economy: natural selection favors solutions that minimize energy expenditure. This would result in not only lightweight solutions and long limbs but also the smooth motion patterns that we perceive as graceful. This does not mean that the resulting animals are necessarily "better" in any other sense, of course. In fact they almost certainly lack "luxuries" that the older models could afford.

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