There are many traits we associate with ‘cute’ animals, such as big eyes, a large head, chubby cheeks, and short, stumpy legs. These traits aren’t just exclusive to animals living today; they were also present in animals that lived millions of years ago, during times when our planet - and the wildlife that inhabited it - looked very, very different.
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We’ll never know exactly what these prehistoric animals looked like, but thanks to some exceptionally preserved fossils it’s possible for us to paint a pretty accurate picture of what they may have looked like in life. Some were terrifying, murderous brutes you’d have avoided like the plague, while others were cuter than buttons.
Cutest prehistoric animals
Sacabambaspis
If asked to name the cutest animal of all time, few, if any, would say “fish”. Yet this long-lost ancestor of today’s salmon, tuna, and cod, with its large, front-facing eyes, gormless grin and seemingly squishy body, ticks a lot of ‘cute’ boxes.
This primitive fish, known as Sacabampaspis, lived during the Ordovician Period, roughly 470 million years ago. Sacabampaspis was amongst the first animals that we’d typically consider a ‘fish’ - it lived in water, it was torpedo-shaped, and it had a long, powerful tail. However, unlike today’s fish it was armoured and its mouth was devoid of jaws.
Sacabampaspis belongs to a group of armoured jawless fish known as ‘ostracoderms’. For a time, this group dominated saltwater and freshwater ecosystems across the globe, far outnumbering jawed fish in terms of diversity. Despite their dominance, ostracoderms ultimately faced extinction at the end of the Devonian Period (~360 million years ago). In their absence, jawed fish thrived and evolved into thousands of different forms, including those that grew legs, crawled out of water, and spawned a dynasty that would give rise to everything from reptiles to mammals.
Anurognathus
While pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, they did live at a similar time and were arguably just as terrifying. Some, such as Quetzalcoatlus, were as large as bi-planes and hunted like today’s herons, snatching prey with their long beaks before gulping them down whole. On the opposite end of the spectrum was Anurognathus, a ‘fluffy’, sparrow-sized pterosaur with huge eyes and a toothy smile.
Anurognathus is one of the smallest pterosaurs currently known to science; weighing in at an estimated 40g, it wasn’t that much heavier than a large strawberry. Unlike most pterosaurs, Anurognathus had a rounded skull and jaws full of tiny, pin-like teeth. It was also covered in a coat of hair-like filaments known as pycnofibers, which - in life - would have given it a ‘fluffy’ appearance and made it look a lot like a bat.
Anurognathus not only looked like a bat, it behaved like one too, using its short, agile wings to hunt flying insects at dusk. It lived during the Late Jurassic (~149 million years ago) in the tropical forests that once covered Germany.
Homotherium
There are dozens of different species of sabre-tooth cats, but Homotherium was arguably themost successful of its kind, inhabiting North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa from four million years ago to 12,000 years ago. As an adult, it would have been a terrifying sight - with its large, serrated canines, muscular body and huge paws - but as a cub it would have been just as, if not even cuter than a baby lion or tiger.
Unlike a lot of other extinct animals, we don’t have to infer what Homotherium might have looked like from fossils; instead we can look at a flash-frozen cub that was discovered in Siberia, Russia, late last year. This particular Homotherium was just three weeks old at the time of its death, roughly 35,000 years ago.
While this ‘chilling’ mode of preservation implies a nasty end for the cub, it’s great for researchers as it has meant that many delicate features have been preserved, including its shaggy beard, dark-brown fur, and circular paw pads. These features have previously been hypothesised for Homotherium, but this incredible find now confirms them.
Opabinia
Before animals with bones - or vertebrates - emerged, soft-bodied creatures dominated oceans across the world. Opabinia is one of the most iconic of these; with its five stalked eyes, clawed ‘trunk’ (known as a proboscis), and segmented body lined with lots of fan-like flaps, it looks unlike anything alive today and more ‘alien’ than ‘animal’. Yet, despite its odd features Opabinia is undeniably cute.
Opabinia lived during the Middle Cambrian (~505 million years ago), a period of time when Mother Nature experimented with many weird and wacky evolutionary designs - Opabiniabeing a case in point. Like many other animals from this period, Opabinia was discovered in a formation of rocks known as the Burgess Shale. These rocks are renowned for preserving many different soft-bodied creatures and, as a result, are incredibly important to our understanding of how life evolved on Earth.
Opabinia measured just 10cm in length and is thought to have spent the majority of its time hovering just above the seafloor, searching through loose sediment for food with its proboscis.
Mei
A lot of dinosaur names strike fear into the hearts of those that read them - take, for example, Tyrannosaurus rex, ‘Tyrant King’, Thanatotheristes, ‘Death Harvester’, or Saurophaganax, ‘Lord of Lizard Eaters’. The same can’t be said for Mei, a tiny dinosaur whose name means ‘Sound Asleep’ in Chinese.
This feathered theropod’s name is as short as its stature; it measured just 50cm from head to tail and, fully grown, was not much bigger than an average duck. However, it had one of the largest brains of any dinosaur, relative to its body size, as well as sickle-shaped talons that it likely used to hunt small lizards and insects on the forest floors where it lived.
Mei lived during the Early Cretaceous (~125 million years ago) in what is now China. Of the two specimens that have been discovered, both were preserved in a sleeping position with their heads tucked underneath their arms. It’s thought, based on this resting pose and the type of rock that the specimens were found in, that they were likely entombed by ash from a nearby volcanic eruption.
Dwarf Elephant
As babies, elephants are some of the cutest animals alive today. Now imagine an elephant that, even as an adult, stood no taller than your waist and was covered in a coat of fuzzy hair - cute, right?
This diminutive elephant is known as Palaeoloxodon falconeri and it lived on the Mediterranean islands of Sicily and Malta during the Middle Pleistocene, from 500,000 to 200,000 years ago. At just 90cm tall, it’s the smallest species of elephant ever discovered and roughly a quarter of the size of its close cousin, the 4m tall straight-tusked elephant, or Palaeoloxodon antiquus. Save for its coat of short, fuzzy hair, which researchers think helped it maintain a stable body temperature, it looked just like an elephant, only smaller.
How this dwarf elephant evolved can be explained by a process known as ‘island rule’. This is an evolutionary phenomenon whereby animals trapped on islands increase or decrease in size, depending on the availability of resources and the presence of predators (or lack thereof). It’s thought Palaeoloxon falconeri may have evolved from a group of Palaeoloxodon antiquus that migrated from the mainland to Sicily and Malta via a series of smaller islands that were exposed when sea levels in the Mediterranean were lower.
Japanese Wolf
There are few animals cuter than dogs, or ‘man’s best friends’. Their closest living relatives, wolves, give them a run for their money though, particularly an extinct subspecies known as the Japanese wolf, or Canis lupus hodophilax.
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This diminutive wolf was once endemic to the islands of Honshū, Shikoku and Kyūshū in the Japanese archipelago. It’s closely related to the grey wolf from Asia and North America, but it’s distinct enough to be considered its own subspecies. Its legs were shorter than its extant cousin and it stood only 58cm at the shoulder, compared to a grey wolf that stands at roughly 85cm. It also had a smoother coat made up of short hair.
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While they officially became extinct in 1905, there have been many reported sightings of animals resembling the Japanese wolf in the last hundred years, primarily around the mountains of central Japan. A lot of these sightings have been attributed to wild, wolf-like dogs, one of which was famously photographed in 1996 and sparked global interest in the search for Japan’s so-called ‘ghost’ wolves.
Wilson’s Little Penguin
Last year, palaeontologists announced the discovery of a pint-sized, prehistoric penguin they named Eudyptula wilsonae, or Wilson’s little penguin. This extinct penguin is closely related to today’s little penguins (Eudyptula minor), or kororā, that live on the shores of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. These adorable seabirds are the world’s smallest living penguins and primarily hunt small herrings and sprats, squids, and crustaceans.
From comparisons with their extant cousins, researchers have estimated that Wilson’s little penguin stood ~30cm tall and weighed in at ~1.5kg. So far, only two skulls belonging to Wilson’s little penguin have been found, but from these it’s clear that little penguins’ skulls have broadened over time.
The discovery of Wilson’s little penguin, which lived some three million years ago, has told researchers that these miniature penguins have been stalwarts on Australasian shores for a long, long time and have weathered a series of significant climatic changes in the region. As well as being cute, these little penguins are incredibly resilient too.
Indohyus
It’s hard to imagine that whales, the largest animals alive today, descend from this small, pig-like creature that stalked the banks of rivers in Pakistan and India during the Eocene Period, roughly 50 million years ago. Indohyus, whose name means ‘India’s Pig’, is one of the earliest known ancestors of today’s whales, which includes everything from the small, extremely rare, vaquita porpoise to the colossal blue whale.
Indohyus looks nothing like a whale at first glance; with its furry coat, skinny legs, and pointy ears, it looks more suited to a life on land than one underwater. That said, Indohyus did possess some adaptations that are exclusive to today’s whales. These included heavy limb bones that helped it sink while diving for tasty, aquatic plants, and distinctive ear bones that made it easier for it to process sounds underwater.
As descendants of Indohyus spent more and more time underwater, they swapped their legs for fins and grew increasingly larger. In a little under 50 million years, they went from roughly the size of a housecat (Indohyus), to the largest animal to have ever lived (blue whale).
Lystrosaurus
It’s a misconception that the toughest animals survive mass extinctions. In fact, those that survive tend to be the unassuming animals that, in the period prior to the mass extinction, live in the shadows of the larger, more ‘charismatic’ animals.
Take Lystrosaurus for example, a small, chihuahua-sized creature that not only survived the worst mass extinction of all time - the ‘Great Dying’ at the end of the Permian Period (~252 million years ago) - but prospered in the time that followed.
Lystrosaurus is part of a large group of animals known as dicynodonts - tusked, herbivorous creatures that were, essentially, the cattle of their time. Lystrosaurus was small, for a dicynodont, but it was still stockily built, with powerful forelimbs designed for digging burrows.
Prior to the mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period, dicynodonts were incredibly diverse and ranged in size from the relatively small Lystrosaurus, to the elephant-sized Lisowicia. However, after the ‘Great Dying’ wiped out 70% of vertebrate life on land, Lystrosaurus found themselves as one of only four lineages of dicynodonts left. And they were by far the most numerous, making up a whopping 95% of the total vertebrates found in some fossil beds dated to the Early Triassic. It’s unclear why Lystrosaurus survived the ‘Great Dying’ while others didn’t; renowned palaeontologist Michael Benton has suggested it may, “simply [be] a matter of luck.”