I want you to imagine dedicating yourself to
a really specific, highly meticulous project.
Not just a quick sprint, but something that spans,
I mean, something that takes you three decades
to finish. That is a massive chunk of a career.
Right. And you finally synthesize all this data.
You pinpoint the exact significance of your findings.
And you select this perfectly elegant poetic
name to introduce your discovery to the world.
The crowning achievement. Exactly. You publish
the paper. And then almost immediately, the governing
bodies of your field tap you on the shoulder
to say, hey, great job, but your perfectly chosen
name. It's already legally owned by a snail.
Oh, no. And a clam. Your kid. And a brachiopod
and a fish. Yeah, that is a highly specific occupational
hazard when we're talking about biological classification.
It really is. Welcome to this custom -tailored
deep dive. Today, we're pulling from a Wikipedia
article detailing a fascinating extinct giraffeid
currently known as Lyrechoryx. And our mission
for this deep dive is to look past all the dry,
you know, scientific nomenclature. We want to
uncover the beautifully messy, iterative human
process. of paleontology. Because the public
perception of paleontology is usually just, well,
it's the finished product, right? Right. The
dinosaur in the museum. Exactly. We see the fully
articulated skeleton or we read a really definitive
species profile and it projects this aura of
absolute certainty. But the actual journey from
digging up a fragmented fossil to putting it
on the phylogenetic tree. It's a bit more chaotic.
It is highly dynamic. It takes constant reevaluation,
intense debate, and you have to be totally willing
to revise your path conclusions. So let's unpack
this because the timeline here is just wild.
The modern era of this specific story kicks off
in 1994. A great year. Right. Researchers are
out in the Siwalik Hills of Pakistan. They're
digging in the Miocene sediments of the Chinji
Formation, and they find some fossils. The main
one gets labeled YGSP 47357. Rolls right off
the top. Oh, yeah. Incredibly catchy. But this
specimen, it becomes the holotype for the animal.
And for anyone listening who might not know,
the holotype is basically the gold standard.
The anchor. Right. When you establish a new species,
you anchor that name to one specific physical
specimen. So YGSP47357 becomes the biological
standard that all future giraffids of this type
have to be compared against. But looking at the
inventory of this holotype, we are not looking
at a full skeleton, not even close. No, it really
is. It's a partial skull. The records say they
have the brain case, the basic cranium, the occipital
region, and crucially, these horn -like structures
called ossicones. Yes. So how does a researcher
take just the base of a skull and some horns
and say, ah! Yes, an entirely new evolutionary
profile. It's a great question. The base of cranium,
the base of the skull and that occipital region
are actually super diagnostic, especially for
a giraffe. Because of the neck. Exactly. It's
not just a box for the brain. It has to anchor
all that incredibly complex neck musculature.
It supports the immense weight of the skull and
those heavy ossicones. Makes sense. So by analyzing
the angle of the horns, the thickness of the
skull vault, the shape of the joints at the back
of the head. Paleontologists can figure out how
the animal carried its head. Wow. They can even
deduce how it fought with other members of its
species and where it fits in the broader picture
of giraffe evolution. So the architecture of
the skull is basically a map of the physical
forces it lived with. Exactly. And the ossicones
are really the star of the show here. The horns.
Right. They're the primary feature used to tell
different giraffe branches apart. Size, shape,
orientation. It's all in the ossicones. OK, so
they analyze these fragments and they place this
beast in the middle Miocene epoch. So we're talking
roughly. 12 .1 to 10 .1 million years ago. Deep
time. Yeah. What is the scene like for these
animals back then? Well, the Middle Maya scene
was a huge boom period for these types of mammals.
And based on this skull from Pakistan, researchers
thought they had a member of the Sepithyrinae
subfamily. Sepithyrinae. Yes. And this is why
this specific fossil matters so much. If that
classification is right, this partial skull.
is the oldest known record of that entire clade.
Oh, wow. So it pushes the whole timeline back.
Exactly. It proves this evolutionary branch was
diversifying way earlier in the Miocene than
anyone had confirmed before. But they didn't
just have the one skull, right? They had backup.
Right. They found four other ossicone fragments
at different spots in the Chinji Formation. The
paratypes. Yes, the paratypes. YGSP 6392, 47192,
and a couple others. Why are those important
if we already have the gold standard holotype?
Because a single skull could just be a weirdo.
A weirdo. Yeah, I mean, think about it. Maybe
that specific individual just had a really big
head or some developmental quirk. Ah, right.
Like if aliens found one human skeleton and it
happened to be a seven foot tall basketball player.
Perfect analogy. They'd think we were all giants.
So you cross -reference the holotype with the
paratypes to build an average composite picture
of the population. Okay, so we've got the holotype,
the paratypes, the middle Miocene dating, the
whole Seba 3 -Day connection. All of this is
scooped out of the dirt in 1994. And then, crickets.
For 30 years. Just waiting. The formal description
doesn't happen until 2024. How does that happen?
It's actually really common. Pulling a fossil
out of the ground is just step one. The easy
part. Honestly, sometimes it is. After that,
you have to carefully prep the bone, run advanced
imaging, and do massive comparative studies.
You have to compare that one basic cranium against
every other known myosin giraffe on record. Just
to make sure it's actually new. Right. To prove
it's a novel genus and not just a regional variation.
of something we already know. It takes funding,
it takes time, it takes experts. So decades go
by, but here's where it gets really interesting.
August 2024. The paper drops. A paper drops in
the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Rios
and Salinas finally publish. They declare a new
genus and species. Lyra Shirkana. It's a beautiful
name. It really is. Let's break it down. The
Shirkana part honors Tanya Shurkan. The person
who originally found the holotype in 1994. Which
is awesome. It's vital to recognize the field
workers. The people physically spotting anomalies
in the rock are the foundation of all paleontology.
And then there's the genus name, Lyra. This comes
right back to those horns we were talking about.
The ossicones. Right. When they looked at the
shape, they realized it looked exactly like a
lyre. the ancient stringed instrument it gives
you this incredibly vivid image of this ancient
giraffe wandering around with these sweeping
curved musical looking horns on its head it's
poetic it's perfectly descriptive it is but this
is where the strict uncompromising rules of taxonomy
come crashing in yeah you can't just pick a name
because it's pretty no you cannot Taxonomic classification
requires every genus name to be globally unique.
Right. Otherwise you get chaos. If a bug and
a dinosaur have the same name, searching databases
becomes a nightmare. So when they published Lyra,
the governing bodies flagged it as preoccupied.
Preoccupied, which is a very polite way of saying,
sorry, taken. Taken by a lot of things. Yes.
Not just one obscure bug. Lyra was already the
registered name for a snail. Yep. A clam. A bruchiopod.
And a fish. Four completely unrelated aquatic
creatures already called dibs. It really shows
how crowded the catalog of life on Earth is.
Biologists hit this wall all the time. When your
name is preoccupied, you are legally obligated
to formally retract it and publish a fix. I feel
like everyone listening can relate to this. You
know, when you finally hit send on that massive,
super important email to the whole company. And
you immediately see a typo in the subject line.
Yes. You have to send that horrible, immediate
follow -up email, correction, please see attached.
That's basically what these scientists had to
do, but in the permanent scientific record. Exactly.
So in 2025, Rios and Salunias issue their correction.
And they have to find something that satisfies
the rules but still honors their original idea.
Right. They don't want to lose the lyre imagery.
So they land on lyrekerics. Lyrekerics. They
took the Greek suffix kerics, which means horns,
and tacked it on. So it literally translates
to lyre horns. That's a great save. It's a perfect
taxonomic fix. It secures the unique genus identifier
while keeping the descriptive morphology. Lyricuric's
shirkana becomes official. Problem solved. The
paperwork is filed. 30 years of waiting, plus
a minor naming crisis, all neatly resolved. I
didn't think so. But no. Because what does this
all actually mean for the science? Just when
the ink is drying on the new Lyricuric's name
in 2025, the plot thickens again. It does. Later
that exact same year, a massive book is published
called At the Foot of the Himalayas, Paleontology
and Ecosystem Dynamics of the Swalik Record.
A light beach read. Very light. But inside this
book is a chapter co -authored by Nico Salonius,
the very same researcher who just co -named Lyra
Courix. He and M. Danowitz do a brand new reassessment
of the material. Wait, why are they reassessing
the exact same fragments, the holotype and two
of the paratypes, mere months after they just
finished naming it? Because science doesn't sleep.
They were doing a deeper, more granular comparison
of the morphology, specifically looking at how
these animals fit into the broader ecosystem
dynamics of the Swahili Hills. And when they
looked closer at the skull base and the horn
structures, they saw signals that complicated
their original Wyrick -Ricks classification.
So what did they do? They formally decided to
provisionally refer those three specimens. to
a totally different, already existing genus called
Dessinotherium. Okay, stop. From the outside,
that sounds wild. You spend 30 years getting
a fossil named, you fight a snail for the trademark,
you win, and then months later you say, actually,
never mind, it belongs in this other category.
I know how it looks. It looks like they messed
up. It looks like the data is just totally unstable.
But if we connect this to the bigger picture,
that perspective is entirely wrong. This is not
a failure of science. This is exactly what science
is supposed to look like. You mean the willingness
to change your mind. Exactly. Taxonomy is not
some rigid, infallible catalog. It's a living,
breathing hypothesis. We are trying to group
millions of years of messy, overlapping evolution
using a few broken bits of bone. Right. So when
Salonius and Danowitz referred the fossils to
Dysenteryum, they were just following the evidence,
even though it contradicted their own recent
paper. That takes serious scientific integrity.
And I think the crucial word in their paper is
provisionally. Yes. They didn't say we were totally
wrong. It's 100 % disinetherium. They introduced
nuance. The nuance is the whole point. They explicitly
noted that while these fragments looked a lot
like disinetherium, there were real differences.
The angle where the horns attach, the thickness
of the joints at the back of the skull, it didn't
perfectly match the baseline. And to make it
even more confusing, they noticed these fossils
also shared similarities with a completely different
extinct giraffid called Bramatherium. Right.
And this is the reality of studying Miocene paleontology.
Classifying these giraffes is incredibly hard
because they were highly adaptable. They were
evolving fast. Yes. And their physical traits
often converged because they were facing similar
environmental pressures in the Sawalik Hills.
The lines between a Lyraecherix, a Decenotherium,
and a Bramotherium were probably really blurry.
So we have a partial skull with lyre -shaped
horns. The base of the skull looks a bit like
Dicenotherium, but it also resembles Bromotherium,
and it still might actually be its own unique
thing, Lyricurix, sitting at the very bottom
of the Cybithrinae family tree. It is a beautifully
complicated puzzle. It totally shatters the illusion
that paleontology is just dusting off a complete
bone and putting it in a pre -labeled box. It
really does. So to synthesize everything we've
pulled from this deep dive, We're looking at
a fossil found in 1994. It sat there until 2024.
Then in the span of one year, it was named. It
got into a trademark dispute with a clam. It
was renamed Lyra Crix. And then it got provisionally
reclassified into a broader ecosystems study.
It's a whirlwind. It proves that our knowledge
isn't static. The scientific record is an active,
ongoing dialogue. And this raises an important
question about how we handle new information
in our own lives when it challenges our previous
categories. We have to have the same intellectual
flexibility that these paleontologists have.
When new data comes in, you have to be willing
to adjust your labels. Absolutely. I want to
leave you with a final thought to mull over today,
building on this entire journey. Okay. The holotype
was pulled from the dirt in 1994, but it didn't
get its story told until 2024. 30 years in a
drawer. It makes you wonder, how many other world
-changing discoveries are sitting in museum drawers
right now? Oh, thousands. Right. Missing evolutionary
links, entirely new clades, labeled with some
provisional number like YGSP 47357, just quietly
waiting for someone to finally read the story
hidden in their bones. The next big breakthrough
is probably already in a filing cabinet. It completely
changes how you view museum collections. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive
into the wonderfully messy world of Lyra Carrick's
We really appreciate you exploring these sources
with us, and we can't wait to unpack the next
topic with you.