Mammals haven’t had a game plan figured out for all that long. Sure, today we fit into a couple of subclasses and can, with a few exceptions, be pretty easily identified at a glance, but there was a good long stretch of time when Earth’s warm blooded denizens were, from an evolutionary standpoint, nature’s undeclared majors. The Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and even the Cenozoic eras were lousy with furry, fleshy prehistoric weirdos: Australia was home to a hippo-sized wombat called Diprotodon, rhinoceroses spent a few million years not sure how many horns was too many, and the Spanish island of Menorca was once the home of Nuralagus Rex, a fifty pound rabbit.

And then you have Madagascar, where evolution goes full-on Sid’s room from Toy Story. The nation off the southeast coast of Africa has been a point of fascination for researchers for years thanks to its isolated nature, and the 70 million some odd years that it’s spent separated from the mainland gave it plenty of time to develop its own unique brands of prehistoric faunal strangeness. They had five foot lemurs that looked like Alf, reported on here by the Daily Mail. There was the Elephant Bird, which Britannica describes as a 1,000 pound nightmare ostrich.

And now there’s Adalatherium hui, a newly uncovered species. Nobody’s really sure what its deal was.

Nature, uh, finds a cray

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