‘Bringing sabertooths to life’ video by paleoartist Maricio Antón

There may be as many paleoartists on the planet
as paleontologists. Mauricio Anton is one of the few paleoartist in high demand based on his great skill and dedication to research.

In this video
Anton takes you from the studio to the savanna, from sketches made in the field to the delivered illustration.

Antón stumbles only when he presents
traditional morphologies that make traditional mistakes and one (Fig. 3) turned upside-down. Corrections are offered for vertebrates (Fig. 1), placentals (Fig. 2) and Carnivora (Fig. 3).

Figure 2. Tetrapod phylogeny: Anton oriignal and revised here. Adding taxa makes synapsids archosauromorphs in the LRT. Way too few taxa here compared to the LRT.

Figure 2. Placental phylogeny: Anton original and revised here. Adding taxa puts tree shrews at the base of many basal placental taxa in the LRT. Way too few taxa here compared to the LRT.

Figure 3. Carnivoran phylogeny: Anton original and revised here. Small, slinky, arboreal carnivores are basal in the LRT, not highly derived sprinters like cats and dogs. Way too few taxa here compared to the LRT.

Granted, Mauricio Antón is an artist, not a taxonomist.
He relied on the literature to produce his artistic cladograms (Figs. 1-3). So do many others. A valid cladogram is like a table of chemical elements. Having one is essential to understand interrelationships.

This is why
the large reptile tree (LRT, 1903+ taxa) was created: to test the work of prior and current workers by minimizing taxon exclusion. At this point in the LRT, there are no large gaps between taxa. Every taxa is pretty much like its sister taxa with minor modification.

Note how traditional carnivoran cladograms
(Fig. 3) nest highly derived dogs and cats at the base. Strangely tree-dwellers similar to tree shrews tnest at the most derived nodes in these traditional cladograms that no one is cheching to see if they make sense. According to results recovered by the LRT, where basal arboreal placentals are more like arboreal marsupials, traditional cladograms like the carnivoran cladogram presented by Anton are upside-down. Colleagues, please check your work for logic flaws like this one.

PS. Technical note:
The sound quality of the Antón video suffers from several bouts of drop-out silence, as if the microphone became disconnected. If you can, just bear with it. It’s not your computer. And the sound does come back every time.