Mystery "Numbats"

 I was surfing the internet yesterday. I was looking for a picture of a particular animal for a project I'd like to somehow work on that has NOTHING to do with Metazoica or speculative biology. I was looking for a picture of a numbat. A numbat, in case you didn't know, is a small marsupial, said to be related to the extinct Tasmanian tiger. It's one of Australia's most beautiful animals, IMO. Well, I've known about numbats long enough to know one when I see one. But what I found was definitely not numbats! Eventually I did find a pic of a numbat, but these pics I found caught my eye and captured my heart and imagination. Apparently, they are AI generated. The coloring was almost reminiscent of a numbat, but the structure of the body and head were very different. The appearance was more like that of a cross between a mongoose and a fox. With a little bit of a squirrel thrown in there.

Well, this gave me a new idea. I do need some more entries for my checklist to finally complete my goal that I was supposed to reach over 20 years ago! But once I get these new animals I've found, I'll finally have over 4000 new species of Metazoic mammals. It'll be beautiful. Although by this time back when I started this project, I thought I would have about 10,000 Metazoic mammal species. Modern mammals are getting way ahead of me here! But in the late 1990s, I got a bit sidetracked for a few years by the death of someone who was my everything. I even decided to commemorate him by naming some of the animals on my checklist after him.

Anyway, I took the family Cynovulpidae and changed it back to the Canidae. Why not? They are remnants of dogs. And this is the newest member of the family. Meet Sylvialopex. It is a small, furry, highly-adorned fox of the Australian woodlands and brushlands that feed on small animals, insects, and sometimes berries. The collective name for these animals is "Australian bush foxes".

S. strigulus; the stripe-mantled bush fox.
Also calling it the "banner-tailed bush fox"

S. varius; the chequered bush fox.

S. tinnicaudatus; the ring-tailed bush fox.

S. verbera; the stripe-faced bush fox.

My thanks, many times over, to whomever came up with these. Sorry but, they're not numbats. But they do make interesting foxes! Here's another one. I decided to revive the Tachyglossidae into the Metazoic. But it only has one genus; Uroechidna. It's twice as big as Zaglossus today, and has a noticeably longer tail, but still feeds on ants and other insects. This was another one I found that was mistakenly labeled a long-beaked echidna.

Uroechidna sp. I currently call it the "Giant echidna".

Both of these genera inhabit the Australian region. But while Sylvialopex is confined to the continental eastern Australian brushland, Uroechidna lives in the Metazoic northern Australia and southern Great Barrier Mountains. Here's another I created myself last night. It was unintentional. I was trying to do a picture through AI of Natopterus, just to see if it can do it. I'm still new to this AI business. I do hope to master it someday. But here is a head-portrait of the newest species of Pteropus for the Metazoic..,

Pteropus rubrifrons; the red-fronted flying fox.

That truly looks like a fox. But since it was originally meant to be a bat, I kept it that way. It's just a new species I thought up.

So, those are the newest animals in our zoo. I hope to come up with some more soon.