Anna and the King of Siamogale

The president of the United States just got back from a whirlwind trip to Asia. I don't know if he traveled to the swampy, watery area of southwest China, where, a short six million years ago, an otter (now sadly extinct) strutted around. These dudes weighed 110 pounds.

What happened was, they found a skull and mandible (jawbone) and they have been able to figure out just how very menacing a predator a 110-lb otter would be. You have to say the male of the species was probably just a tad scarier than Steve Buscemi. The female is thought to have had an RBF similar to Kendall Jenner.

The full name of this awesome hairy creature, the size of a wolf was Siamogale melilutra, and the remarkable thing was that fearsome jaw, which, with its ability to eat giant clams by crunching right through the giant clamshell.  

And SiMel was not known to be picky about condiments, either.  Not one jar of cocktail sauce was found near the remains, meaning that they must have gobbled their clams with no sauce at all!

"The abundance of aquatic and near-water environments in that region may have allowed aquatic carnivorans such as Siamogale to become the dominant predators of their ecological communities," is how Scientific Reports reported it.

After the scientists did a complete analysis of the otter jaws they found around the remains, they found out Si's super jaw, and compared him to Aonyx, which was a smaller sort of otter who tipped the scales at between 20 to 50 lbs. but was also known to crush crabs through the shell with his teeth alone.  So even those of us who were asked to sit in the back in Zoology 101 can figure that an otter weighing over twice that much was able to rule many a swamp.   

"Our findings suggest that Siamogale does not have a living analog (that's science talk for "Ain't nobody like you nowhere no how!"), but exhibits limited similarity to the living oral-crusher Aonyx in having significantly stiffer than expected mandibles among otters," the authors say in the science journal.

I am now in the market for one of these critters, so that the next time that guy comes knocking on my door with a "truckload of steaks from a cancelled restaurant order" that he is "willing to let go cheap, just to get rid of them," I can just have the door answered by Otis, my 110-pound otter.