Giddyap Rhino

Over the weekend, while visiting my parents in Maryland for Thanksgiving, Angela and I were able to skip down to DC for a bit. We poked our head in to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where we spent most of our time in the prehistoric mammals exhibit.

Prehistoric mammals are pretty darn cool. One thing that struck me was the remarkable diversity of rhinoceros-like animals.

What if the ancestors of the rhinoceros had survived in their various ecological niches? We could have hyracodont-like animals instead of horses, menoceras and subhyracodont-like farm animals, and elasmotherium and paraceratherium-like warbeasts. Yeah, you’d have to rename them, but the picture these paint to me resonates well for a slightly-alien (perhaps Talislanta-inspired) fantasy world.