Now on ScienceBlogs: Live Organ Transplants
"It is - still - the best zoological blog out there, period"
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 here.
You've read the blog, now buy the books....
The Great Dinosaur Discoveries (US edition)
The Great Dinosaur Discoveries (UK edition)
Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life
Walking With Dinosaurs: The Evidence
Dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight
November 9, 2009
Category: frivolous nonsense • mammalogy
My wife gives money to a cancer charity. She gets literature of some sort for doing this, and here's the front cover of the Christmas booklet she recently received. Why, as a Tet Zoo nerd, do I find it so funny?
Posted by Darren Naish at 4:30 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 5, 2009
Category: cryptozoology
Goddammit, no time for more reports from Libya, or for more in the toads series, or for articles on hairless Spectacled bears or tiny heterodontosaurids or neovenatorids, or anything really. Here's how things are progressing in view of Saturday's event...
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:23 AM • 51 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 3, 2009
Category: herpetology • mammalogy • ornithology
So, I recently returned from a brief sojourn in Libya. The trip was led by Richard Moody, best known for his work on Cretaceous sea turtles; I was also accompanied by palaeornithologist Gareth Dyke and by a group of people interested in the country's geology.
Libya - officially, the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya - is huge: it covers nearly 2 million square kilometres and is the fourth largest African county. However, 90% of the country is desert, and the population is only about 5.7 million (of which nearly 2 million live in Tripoli, the capital). It's a land of spectacular sweeping landscapes, enormous vistas, rocky hillsides, wadis and deserts. The landscape isn't all that different from the wilds of Morocco - the only other north African country I've visited - but the towns have a totally different feel, as Libya lacks the long tourist tradition of that country. Visitors thus get none of the constant hassling they get in places like Morocco. While the country runs on paperwork, with everything being stamped in triplicate, signed and counter-signed, there's no strong military presence or anything like that, and we never felt uneasy or uncomfortable. Huge pictures of Gaddafi are everywhere.
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:11 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 30, 2009
Category: cryptozoology
On November 7th 2009, the Centre For Inquiry in London is hosting a one-day event titled Monsters From the Deep! It's being held at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square (a venue I know all too well...). I'm giving a talk at the event so wanted to advertise it: for more details please visit the CFI website here. The day kicks off at 11am and will include both talk and workshop sessions. Charles Paxton of the University of St. Andrews, well known for his work on statistical ecology, will be giving a talk titled 'Anecdotes, statistics and sea monsters'. The belief that anecdotal data (in this case, reports of sea monsters) can be dismissed wholesale is naïve, as analysis can still reveal meaningful inferences (make sure you see Paxton (2009) for more on this). Charles will also be leading a workshop on 'Ecology of aquatic monsters'. A very belated congrats to Charles, incidentally, for his 2002 Ig Nobel Prize for Bubier et al. (1998).
Posted by Darren Naish at 10:10 AM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 28, 2009
Category: herpetology
The Natterjack Epidalea calamita (introduced in the previous article) is a remarkable animal, well adapted for the dry, relatively saline environments it inhabits (there are places where Natterjacks inhabit saltmarshes, moors, and disused industrial areas). A proficient burrower, it starts digging a burrow with its forelimbs but does most of the work with its hindlimbs (hindlimb burrowing is typical for anurans, whereas forelimb burrowing is highly unusual). The burrows help the toads to gain access to moisture in dry habitats because they typically extend down to damp sediments; a particularly absorbent patch of granular skin on the animal's belly enables it to make the most of damp sediments when they're encountered [adjacent photo by kind courtesy of Neil Phillips].
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:20 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 26, 2009
Category: herpetology
If you've been following the toad series, you'll have read articles that introduce toads in general, discuss reproductive biology, and look at cranial anatomy. This can all be regarded as background introductory stuff. From hereon, we're mostly going to look at toad diversity in rough phylogenetic order: that is, starting at the base of the clade and working up to the 'top'of the tree [European common toad Bufo bufo shown here, from wikipedia. This individual has really weird nostrils].
Basal toads are all South American, and include the South American redbelly toads (Melanophryniscus) and the stumpfoot or harlequin toads (Atelopus). The South American Rhaebo toads (conventionally included within Bufo) also seem to be basal within the bufonid crown. The rest of toad phylogeny is rather controversial: some studies recover a major Old World clade that includes several Asian, African and Eurasian clades as well as a clade of New World toads including the Cane toad group (Rhinella) and North American group (Anaxyrus) (Pramuk et al. 2008). If this topology is correct, crown-toads - ancestrally South American - radiated extensively in the Old World but re-invaded the Americas during the Eocene. Others studies find Rhinella and so on to be outside of the Old World clade (Van Bocxlaer et al. 2009). We'll be coming back to the various details here later on.
Posted by Darren Naish at 9:20 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 21, 2009
Category: herpetology
Yes! MORE TOADS. You surely know what a toad's head looks like. But there's a lot about toad skulls that you almost certainly don't know, and the aim of this article is to review toad skull anatomy. This might seem like an arcane subject, but - as we'll see - the diversity of toad skulls is really quite remarkable and much of toad success can be put down to various of their cranial features (such as their parotoid glands and strong degree of cranial ossification)...
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:03 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 19, 2009
Category: herpetology
After a brief hiatus we return to the remarkable world of toads, and this time round we look at reproductive biology. As a western European person, the toad species I'm most familiar with (the Common toad Bufo bufo and Natterjack Epidalea calamita [see later articles for details on the name changes]) are seasonal breeders that turn up at ponds early on in the year [Common toad mating ball shown here, photo by Neil Phillips] and produce strings of hundreds or thousands of eggs (between 400 and 7500). There are other toad species that are even more fecund, with individuals of some species (like the American toad Anaxyrus americanus and Cane toad Rhinella marina) producing more than 20,000 eggs on occasion: if you put an egg string from one of these species into a straight line, it would be up to 20 m long. You might think that no-one will ever see an egg string even approaching that length, given that the toads wind the strings around plants and debris. However, the egg strings of species that lay their eggs in streams or rivers sometimes become un-entangled by heavy rains and are then swept downstream: Shannon & Werler (1955) reported seeing a doomed string belonging to a Mountain toad Incilius cavifrons that was about 14 m long.
Posted by Darren Naish at 4:51 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 18, 2009
Category: community • frivolous nonsense
Preparing blog posts for Tet Zoo takes hours, sometimes days or even weeks. It's done in "spare time". Putting crap on facebook takes minutes and can be done during the course of a normal work day. Some of the stuff is soooo hilarious it deserves to be shared...
Francisco Gascó (aka Paco) knocked this up, thanks Paco. It was taken in about 1992 1994 (when I was 18 19): note the Battat dinosaurs on the terrarium lid, Greg Paul theropods on the wall, and Luis Rey spiky amargasaur t-shirt. The croc skull is a juvenile C. niloticus.
Posted by Darren Naish at 7:51 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Uncertain Principles 11.08.2009
Neurotopia 11.09.2009
The Primate Diaries 11.09.2009
Stoat 11.07.2009
Tomorrow's Table 11.07.2009
