I’ve been pondering about how iNatting would work if time travel was possible through something like camera traps. How would we observe plants or small bugs? What period would you wanna do your first observations? And I bet we would still need the fossil holotypes to identify organisms by species level. Would actually like to start with some obscure formations like Elliot in Jurassic Antarctica or Burgess Shale in the Cambrian
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I personally would very much like to see a bennu heron–assuming it was a real bird, it went extinct in ancient times, but not before ancient Egyptians who saw it drew it!
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https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/wishful-thinking-a-time-camera/59731
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/time-traveling-inaturalist/3973
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I was just recently thinking about Egyptian art in this context!
In another thread, someone suggested that one reason people are so interested in identifying birds is that there are so many bird guide books available. I immediately thought of the wonderful birds in Egyptian art, which predate guidebooks … as far as we know. Although perhaps somewhere there is a guide just waiting to be unearthed or translated?
I am looking forward to giving this topic more thought.
Aha! I may have just figured out the meaning of those beautiful and mysterious “Nazca Line” geoglyphs carved in the deserts of Peru (ca. 500 B.C. - 500 A.D.) They are an early form of iNaturalist!
This user identifed their observation as Order Araneae, but they’re still waiting for a specialist to ID it further. (and you thought your observations were taking a long time to reach RG?)
And this user made an observation they identified as Family Trochilidae, but not every identifier agrees it’s even a hummingbird, and some lively discussions have ensued.
There has also been a heated debate as to whether or not geoglyphs really count as “evidence” at all, much like our own forum topic:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/are-drawings-evidence/8595
So some zealous identifier has been marking them all as “Human.”
(But fortunately, then, as now, the rules do indeed permit drawings.)
And then there is the further problem that these and all similar observations have been down-voted in the DQA for “date is accurate”, thus banishing them to the limbo of “Casual” observations, and making it even less likely the specialist Identifiers will ever see them…
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The Egyptians mummified animals. Are there any heron mummies?
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I wish I could go on a fishing trip in the Devonian
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There are three times which I would especially love to explore and make observations in.
Firstly: The Silurian.
For one, there seems to be a rather high diversity of sessile epifauna, and all the major invertebrate taxa which I find most fascinating are already present. Also, observing the first land- and the first vascular plants would be pretty cool.
Secondly: The Cretaceous Period
I’d be very interested to see angiosperms (“dicots” especially) and their pollinators after their initial explosion in biodiversity, which I believe happened during this period.
Finally, I’d also be very interested to see middle European ecosystems before the last ice age. A lot of plants (species of magnolia, most notably, I believe) either disappeared from this region or went extinct all together because the alps prohibited them spreading southwards and evading the cold. Especially regarding trees, the area I live in isn’t that diverse compared to other areas (in Asia, and North-America) of similar climate.
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I’d love to see American megafauna: ground sloths, short-faced bears, camels, etc.
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Would a mummified wild animal that has a date and general location of death written down count as an observation?
Even if you have the appropriate data to add the observations of others, AFAIK iNat is supposed to be for your personal observations, except for specific use cases like a teacher running a school project, a young child, etc. And these special circumstances should be explained in a comment under the observation.
It would be an absolute dream to observe the intact Pleistocene ecosystems with all the megafauna and unique interactions that existed at the time.
Would be amazing to observe the land crocodile Quinkana, the marsupial lion Thylacoleo, or Diprotodon in Australia; the Shasta Ground Sloth, giant beaver, Californian tapir, jaguars, Smilodon and mastodons in North America; the mammoth steppe of northern Asia with horses, rhinos, reindeer, cave lions, and of course, mammoths; and the primate-dominated ecosystems of Africa, with our ancient cousins as well as the giant baboon Dinopithecus, dirk-toothed cats, long-horned buffalo Syncerus antiquus, the weird alcelaphine antelope Rusingoryx atopocranion, and so on.
New Zealand before human settlement would be mind-blowing, as would the other Pacific islands that had fauna like mekosuchine crocodiles and Meiolania turtles.
I’d like to see how the first loranthaceous mistletoes transitioned from being root to stem parasites in the Cretaceous in Gondwana and see who dispersed the seeds.
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All this talk about megafauna, and yet the original post asked,
I think that’s the real point here. Authors like Steven J. Gould have pointed out that the artistic depictions of evolutionary time are misleading because they focus on vertebrates and especially megafauna. As if insects and other small invertebrates were no longer evolutionarily relevant. Once life emerges onto land, most such tableaus show little if any marine life, as if the oceans were no longer evolutionarily relevant either except as habitats for land animals to recolonize.
The wording of the original post suggested that remote sensing of these ecosystems, such as through camera traps, would be severely limited in its capacity to reveal the smaller organisms which, then as now, formed the bulk of biodiversity.
One of the most interesting things to me is how in the age of the dinosaurs, there was no grass, and hardly any flowering plants. Landscapes would have looked so different back then!
You are correct that it’s not really proper, but OTOH there are several dozen RG observations from before 1908 that could not possibly have been directly made by the account observer. Plus, I think the idea of having ludicrously ancient observations from Ancient Egypt, etc would be cool, and there’s no risk of iNaturalist getting flooded with these ancient specimens that it would cause data storage or data processing issues.
I have had this thought before as someone very interested in Paleontology
I would love to iNat the Carboniferous swamps. That would be such a blast. I imagine there would be a ton of weird non-vascular plants, lichen, and small inverts to find - nevermind the very large inverts.
A little swing by the Silurian to see what the heck Prototaxites looked like would be a nice bonus, as would a peek into the immediate post-Permian to say hi to some Lystrosaurus.