September 1, 2008
Category: community • frivolous nonsense • ornithology
I'm now leaving, again, this time for SVPCA. I'm hoping that I might be able to do some blogging from the conference, but the last time I said this (the Munich Flugsaurier conference back in September 2007) there was neither the time nor opportunity for it, so don't get your hopes up. Thanks to SVPCA and other matters, I've obviously been unable to put anything substantial on the blog for a while now... making Tet Zoo all too much like a normal blog... and for personal (family-related) reasons, it's been a strange and sad week here. We're all in need of time off that we can't afford to take. Apologies to those awaiting email responses, please hang in there.
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Posted by Darren Naish at 4:52 AM • 50 Comments
August 28, 2008
Category: frivolous nonsense • ornithology
Thanks to the latest issue (no. 240) of Fortean Times I've just learnt of the remarkable case whereby an unlucky Canada goose Branta canadensis was, allegedly, hit by a meteoroid (Anon. 2008). The story goes that Derbyshire postman Adrian Mannion was 'having a morning cuppa with his wife Fiona' (I'm not quite sure what a cuppa is, but assume it's a sexual act of some sort) when a rock fell, from space, onto their driveway. It was followed by the goose, which hit the roof of their car. This story was reported in that most reliable of sources, The Sun newspaper, back in February (it's here). Their report includes photos, one of which shows Fiona holding a rock (it really doesn't look like a meteorite, not that I'm an expert), and another which purports to show the unfortunate goose [shown here]. The goose may not have been killed by the meteorite, but while lying in the driveway it was carried off and dispatched by a fox.
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Posted by Darren Naish at 7:42 PM • 19 Comments
August 27, 2008
Category: Mesozoic dinosaurs • picture of the day
What with the recent articles here on tree-climbing dinosaurs and dromaeosaur tails it seems appropriate to post this image, taken in a German museum (but unfortunately I can't remember which one: let me know if you do). I don't know anything about the mount, but I guess that the people behind it wanted to present the idea that dromaeosaurs might have been in the habit of climbing on their prey during acts of predation, an idea since discussed more seriously by Manning et al. (2006) (although they proposed that the sickle-claws actually functioned as climbing crampons)...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 5:50 PM • 34 Comments
August 26, 2008
Category: Mesozoic dinosaurs
One of the few things that everybody knows about dromaeosaurs - the sickle-clawed maniraptoran theropods best represented by Velociraptor from Mongolia and Deinonychus from Montana - is that they possessed a peculiar tail. Super-long zygapophyses and chevrons formed a bizarre, inter-twined array of body rods that ran the length of the tail and apparently assisted in its function as a dynamic stabiliser [image, © Greg Paul, shows Velociraptor versus two troodontids].
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Posted by Darren Naish at 5:28 AM • 28 Comments
August 25, 2008
Category: conservation • herpetology
I have not forgotten that 2008 is Year of the Frog: if you have, or if you didn't know this, please go back to December 2007 and read the explanatory article here. Some of you will also recall the EDGE project (EDGE = Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered), and here we look at an anuran that's one of many on the EDGE list.
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Posted by Darren Naish at 7:00 AM • 4 Comments
August 22, 2008
Category: Mesozoic dinosaurs • community • cryptozoology • frivolous nonsense
Well, what an interesting time I've had. Firstly, many thanks to everyone who left a comment - however silly or clueless - on the 'novel Mesozoic archosaur' I posted here a few weeks ago. As those in the know correctly stated, the cartoons depict the Brazilian Cretaceous theropod Irritator challengeri in its original guise as a gigantic flightless pterosaur. Now known without doubt to be a spinosaurine spinosaurid (Sues et al. 2002), Irritator was - astonishingly - first published (Martill et al. 1996) as a coelurosaur and as part of Tom Holtz's Bullatosauria (a since-disbanded ornithomimosaur + troodontid clade).
Prior to that however, the authors have gone on record as saying that they first identified Irritator as a giant flightless basal pterosaur (the skull had actually been modified by its original owner to make it resemble a pterosaur more than a theropod), and this is such a fun concept that Bob and I were inspired to 'imagineer' it. My version depicts the animal as a basal pterosaur, whereas Bob's might be a bit more pterodactyloidy. The scale is not tremendously accurate: the skull of Irritator is 60 cm long as preserved, not nearly 2 m long as shown in the drawing. Anyway...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 2:12 PM • 19 Comments
August 14, 2008
Category: frivolous nonsense • picture of the day
So, conference season is upon us, and I leave you now for a little while. But here's something to have fun with in the meantime... Back at a conference in 2003, Bob Nicholls (of paleocreations.com) and I wasted time during a lecture by drawing silly pictures. Here's mine, Bob's is below the fold. The question you have to answer is... exactly what were we drawing? Note the scale bars: this is a big animal (err, actually rather too big). The sound effects are speculative.
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Posted by Darren Naish at 10:40 AM • 54 Comments
August 13, 2008
Category: frivolous nonsense • mammalogy • picture of the day
As a kid, among my most favourite books were those of the Casa Editrice AMZ's Animal Life and The Private Lives of Animals series, first published in Italian during the late 1960s and translated into English during the 70s. There are loads of these books, and they all follow the same format: a big painting of the featured animal on the left (with text and a 'Did you know?' feature), and then little paintings reconstructing aspects of daily life on the right. The art is often wonderful, and the poses and scenes from these books have often been faithfully copied by many less gifted artists.
However, because the artists were often asked to depict scenes that had only been reported anecdotally - and never filmed or photographed - they had to paint all manner of absolutely incredible, anomalous occurrences. In Animal Life in Africa (Young World Productions, London, 1971), for example, we see a ratel attack a wildebeest, a shark attack a hippo, a secretary bird catch a rabbit, a Cape buffalo fight a rhino, baboons catching hares, a rhino beating up two crocodiles, and so on and on. But I'm not complaining. However, it's also obvious from some of the paintings that the artists sometimes knew very little about the animals they were painting. Look at these pages on Sable antelope Hippotragus niger. What's wrong?
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Posted by Darren Naish at 10:36 AM • 36 Comments
August 12, 2008
Category: ornithology
The Great spotted woodpecker shown here yesterday was, I think, an unusual individual, and thanks to everyone who had a go at explaining what it was that made her so odd. Unfortunately no-one got it right. Several of you noted that she appeared to be tridactyl on at least one foot, whereas she should be four-toed, with two toes pointing forwards and two pointing backwards (the zygodactyl arrangement). Incidentally, the common assumption that the zygodactyl foot is a climbing specialisation is probably not right (Bock & Miller 1959), but that'll have to be a subject for another time. Anyway...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 7:33 AM • 14 Comments
With six years of phd work on theropod dinosaurs behind him, Darren Naish mostly spends long hours in the library, hunched over his laptop. But he gets out sometimes, and picks up litter and pursues exotic lizards across the British countryside, aiming all the while to publish his technical work on obscure Cretaceous dinosaurs. He also messes around with pterosaurs, swimming giraffes, British big cats and stuff like that. He has given up on the stupid idea of being a dedicated academic and ekes out a living as a technical consultant, editor and author. He can be contacted intermittently at eotyrannus (at) gmail dot com. For more biographical info go 
