Ratha's Creatures - Did They Really Exist?

Readers ask if the various creatures in the Ratha series really existed. The answer is yes, they are based on real fossils, but a few have been slightly modified. Keep in mind that I began the series in 1983 and wrote it until the mid 1990's. Paleontology has made huge leaps since then, finding many new prehistoric species and making new discoveries about old ones.
The three-horn stag that Ratha encounters in the first page of the first book is based in part on the Miocene proto-ceratid ("before deer") species Synthoceratus. This animal had a y-forked nose-horn, but a very un-deer-like snout and little horn-stubs instead of true antlers. To make the creature more appealing (to me as well as readers), I added the branched antlers and the more elegant face of later deer species.
Originally the dapplebacks were based on Hyracotherium, a fossil better known as Eohippus, "the dawn horse". Their dappled backs came from a painting in a paleontology book, showing the little proto-horses browsing in a leafy forest.
Now researchers have decided that the "dawn horse" really isn't a horse ancestor at all; it more closely related to the hyrax and the elephants.
In my mind, the dapplebacks are still horses, perhaps early versions of forest-browsing Miohippian proto-ponies that later gave rise to the main branch of horse evolution, the hipparions, with their enlarged center toe of three. Not the modern horse Equus? No, actually Equus was a side branch. Hipparion and its relatives formed the main trunk of the horse-y tree.

The “shambleclaw” that Ratha sees in the forest is a giant American ground sloth. Not monstrous, like Megatherium, but not tiny either. The name attempts to describe how the creature might have shambled along awkwardly, hampered by the huge fore claws it used to dig up termite mounds and strip leaves from trees.

Young Ratha almost becomes bird food when she confronts a huge flightless “terror crane” based on the species Diornis, with a bit of Teratornis added in. After the dinosaurs vanished, mammals remained small and had to contend with feathered avian dinosaur descendents that resembled the recently extinct moas of New Zealand. The birds had a head start on the furries, and grew huge, dominating the forests and plains of the periods preceding the Miocene, the Eocene and Oligocene. They may well have hung on until the Miocene

In the 1980’s, Diornis and Teratornis were thought to be carnivores, due to their huge hooked beaks. Now paleontologists debate that image, pointing out that the heavy beaks could have cut through vegetation as well as flesh. But mammal is still on the bird menu in the Ratha books, although the mammal in question manages to escape.

CB