Prehistoric Wall Clocks

A prehistoric wall clock spends its time on the animals that never got their own movie franchise, the long stretch of life sitting on either side of the dinosaurs' moment in the spotlight. Ten specimens fill out the full set, and this page works through five of them the way a dig proceeds, starting at the surface and working down, each layer older and stranger than the one above it. The hands move on a silent sweep movement quiet enough to vanish behind whatever extinct animal is doing the work on the dial.

Barely Buried

The top layer barely counts as digging at all. A Dodo Wall Clock holds the one animal in this set that never needed a shovel to turn up, since the last confirmed sighting sits inside recorded human history, on the island of Mauritius, logged by sailors. The artwork renders it plump and grey-brown across the same 12 inch face as the rest of the dig, stout legs under a heavy body and an oversized hooked beak turned toward the viewer. Extinction here came from ships and the rats and pigs that arrived with them, not from an ice sheet or a falling rock, which makes the dodo the one specimen on this wall that belongs to written history rather than to stone.

The Ice Age, Just Beneath the Surface

Dig a little deeper and the ground turns to permafrost. A Woolly Mammoth Wall Clock wears a shaggy red-brown coat the top layer never needed, printed straight to the edge of a frameless disc, with two curved tusks sweeping out and nearly crossing near the tip, built for a cold that finished off the last mainland herds roughly ten thousand years ago. Whole mammoths have turned up frozen in Siberia with hair still on them and grass still in their stomachs, a preservation job no other layer here manages nearly as well. A small holdout population, cut off on an Arctic island, was still alive after the pyramids at Giza had already been standing for centuries, proof the ice age sits closer to recorded history than the calendar makes it feel.

Sharing that same frozen ground was the one predator every mammoth herd had reason to worry about. A Saber-toothed Tiger Wall Clock features canine teeth long enough to show past a closed jaw, a stocky, muscled build suited to a short ambush rather than a long chase, and a coat rendered in dusty gold instead of the orange stripes its name suggests, since the real animal was not a tiger at all, only a distant relation to the housecats curled up in our cat wall clock collection. Los Angeles turned out to be an unlikely hotspot for finding them, thousands of individual skeletons pulled from one tar seep downtown, animals that waded in after easier, already-trapped prey and never walked back out.

Where the Seafloor Turned to Stone

Go deeper still and the ground stops being dirt at all. A Megalodon Wall Clock depicts a shark long enough to dwarf anything swimming today, a wide grey-blue shape painted onto the same MDF disc, cruising over open water with a mouth built around teeth the size of a human hand. The animal vanished a little over three and a half million years ago, long after the dinosaurs were gone, proof the fame gap here cuts both ways: some of these ancients predate the famous lizards, others arrived long after that story ended. Those teeth are the only reason anyone knows this shark existed at all, since a shark's skeleton is mostly cartilage that rarely fossilizes. For centuries before anyone understood that, teeth this size turning up in European hillsides got explained away as petrified dragon tongues, the same impulse behind our mythical creature wall clock collection, a story that held up until the 1660s, when a closer look matched the shape to a jaw instead of a serpent.

Bedrock

Every dig eventually hits a floor it cannot get past, and here that floor is older than almost anything else sold in this store. A Trilobite Wall Clock renders the segmented, three-lobed shell the animal is named for, jointed plates fanning out from a central ridge with a pair of compound eyes still visible near the front, among the earliest eyes complex enough to focus that show up anywhere in the fossil record. Trilobites crawled across ocean floors for roughly two hundred seventy million years, longer than the age of dinosaurs and every mammal since combined, only to disappear in the same mass extinction that closed out the Permian period, millions of years before the first dinosaur took a step. Split a piece of the right shale almost anywhere and there is a fair chance one of these shows up pressed into it, proof the trilobite is less a rare find than the most common evidence anything was alive here before nearly everything else.

Hanging the Whole Cross-Section

A real dig only shows its layers to whoever is standing over the hole. A wall gets to show all of them at once.

• One wall, one timeline: hang the dodo, the ice age pair, the megalodon, and the trilobite left to right and the wall reads as one strip of geologic time, not five unrelated animals.
• Splitting the layers up: a kid's room can take the mammoth and the saber-tooth without much argument, while the trilobite and the megalodon read better in a study or office.
• Battery: one AA is the entire power grid, so a hallway or stairwell far from an outlet is still fair game.
• Hands: black spade hands and a red second hand cross all ten faces, tying five very different extinct animals into one connected set.

Back Near the Surface

The famous lizards get a wall of their own, and rightly so. Anyone who wants the household name should head for our dinosaur wall clock collection instead. A few animals from that same age made it past the extinction that took the rest. Crocodiles shared swampy ground with the earliest dinosaurs and left descendants still swimming today, distant cousins of the patterned skins in our reptile wall clock range. Between the two, this dig sits where it should, older in places, sturdier in others, holding five animals most people forget to ask about until they see them printed on a wall. For every creature that never made it into this hole in the ground, the broader animal wall clock family has a wall-ready answer for every branch of the kingdom that did survive.