[WARNING: THIS IS FAKE, NONE OF IT HAPPENED, IT DOESN'T EXIST]
Have fun while Sparx and Alpha clean up the art before Beasts from our Past can finally release.
In 1976, Antarctic explorers found something shining through the ice. After breaking and chipping the ice away. They found a mysterious skeleton. It was developed, with... 8 legs... it for sure wasn't an arthropod because there was a skeleton, with ribs, a vertebra, and a complex limb structure. They analyzed a sample of the ice, and took an air sample out of the bubbles in the ice, and found the carbon and oxygen percents put it at the mid-to-late Cenozoic Era. They carefully excavated the skeleton, and analyzed it. they found the spine was fused at one point, with obvious stacking, meaning it didn't have 8 legs, it was two, four-legged tetrapods that were fused together.
They analyzed a chunk of ice with similar chemical structure found 68 miles away, and put it on. The animal had an oversized head and was an obvious carnivore. Wait. "How Scientists Did A Second Brontosaurus", turns out they slapped a Cryolophosaurus skull on it. Back to basics, I guess...
They eventually found a skull impression left on rock deep below the ice. They carefully considered every possibility, it fit. This changed the story completely. It had 2 temporal fenestra on each side of it's head. With its approximate age, this would've put this specimen as the very first mammalian Diapsid, throwing off all theories of Diapsids restricted to lizards and birds. But it was also a confirmed herbivore, as evidenced by it's flat, small, and numerous molars.
So, they carefully split the spines apart, giving them their two creatures. And that's when it all came together. The skull shape, the second set of temporal fenestra, it meant, the horses, zebras, giraffes, donkeys, okapis, they aren't Synapsids... they came from this creature, which was a diapsid. At some point, they must have evolved to lose that second set of temporal fenestra.
So, the paleontologists just kept digging... and digging, and digging. The later found a completely preserved specimen. I mean, it was dead, and starved, and it's eyes were gone, but, the skin, the hair, the bones, the flesh, it was all there. And boy was this boy BIG. 29 feet long and 18 feet tall?
Okay, so, it was indeed four-legged, not eight-legged like some paleontologists thought (See Jack Horner's "Evolution of our Past: The Eight-Legged Tetrapod"). The animal had a boastful neck, long as a giraffe, and a long body with a tail that'd make Diplodocus jealous.
However, it was discovered that the animal had much denser femurs than it's forearms. This led to the Kangaroo Theory, which said that this animal, while using it's long tail as support, they could rear up on their hind legs, and look much bigger than they already were, scaring any predators.
It was likely to live in pairs, as any bigger would've caused overgrazing of the trees.
Eventually, in 2008, a man digging for fossils found another specimen, but this one had a shorter neck, intact skull, and shorter tail. At first, it was thought that this was a result of sexual dimorphism, but as later proved that these two were of two separate subspecies. Also, later in 2008, the species was finally named, Armatemi epizon. The long necked version was given the title Armatemi epizon diutius, while the newer, shorter version was given Amatemi epizon brevior.
