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"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 20, 2009
Category: frivolous nonsense
My good friend Luis Rey was kind enough to pass on the following photos, taken at the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris. It's the extinction carousel, (presumably) the only place in the world where you might ride a sivathere...
Posted by Darren Naish at 5:01 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 19, 2009
Category: mammalogy
Time only for a picture-of-the-day post... here are portraits of the big animalivorous microbats Otomops (a molossid, of course*), Cheiromeles (also a molossid) and Vampyrum (a phyllostomid). The pic is from Freeman (1984), but you might notice that two of the drawings are based on the photos featured in Walker's Mammals of the World.
Posted by Darren Naish at 4:23 AM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2009
Category: herpetology • mammalogy
You've probably seen - presumably on TV - Nile crocs Crocodylus niloticus interacting with Common hippos Hippopotamus amphibius (if you've seen it in real life, lucky you). By and large the two seem to keep apart. Having said that, there are certainly photos of the two sharing the same sandbanks. And then there are those instances of hippos scaring crocs away from carcasses, the weird reports of hippos mouthing and chewing the backs and tails of resting crocodiles, and those cases where crocodiles have been seen to walk or run across hippos' backs.
What can certainly be said to be the most remarkable croc-hippo encounter yet reported was photographed by Czech wildlife photographer Václav Šilha last year, and yesterday they were featured in various national newspapers. Here's the best photo (in my opinion: you may already have seen it November's BBC Wildlife magazine).
Posted by Darren Naish at 4:21 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 16, 2009
Category: mammalogy • ornithology
By now you might have read my two previous articles (part I, part II) on the assorted tetrapods I encountered in Libya last month. Here's the third and final part in the series [image below shows chital at left, melanistic fallow top-centre, nilgai bottom-centre, blackbuck at right].
It's a bit unusual for a Tet Zoo article, as it contains a whole paragraph of boring travel-writing stuff, but I hope you can grit your teeth and get through this - the meat and potatoes on obscure subspecies and so on is delivered towards the end, I promise. So, without further ado...
Posted by Darren Naish at 4:57 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 11, 2009
Category: Mesozoic dinosaurs • speculative zoology
Regular readers will know that I'm not exactly a fan of the idea - discussed here and there in the technical (Russell & Séguin 1982, Russell 1987), popular (Hecht 2007, Socha 2008, Naish 2008) and speculative literature (McLoughlin 1984, Magee 1993) - that non-avian theropod dinosaurs might have evolved into humanoids had they not bought the farm 65 million years ago [image below by Matt Collins].
The hypothetical (emphasis: hypothetical) evolution of big brains, intelligence and so on among imaginary post-Cretaceous deinonychosaurs is not (in my opinion) all that unreasonable, and I base this assertion on what birds have been doing over the past 65 million years. Look at parrots and corvids. Parrots overlap with primates in brain : body size ratio, intelligence and abilities, and evidence suggests that they (and corvids) have sophisticated emotions that aren't much different from ours (or from those of other primates; humans are not magic animals different from all the others, but part of a spectrum). You probably heard the recent reports about funeral rites in magpies. This was in the news thanks to the publication of Bekoff's paper (Bekoff 2009), but stuff like this has been widely reported anecdotally and there's every reason to take it seriously [Alex the grey parrot (1976-2007) shown below, from wikipedia].
Posted by Darren Naish at 7:02 AM • 127 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 10, 2009
Category: ornithology
After a little delay, I'd like to continue regaling you with, if I may, my assorted musings on my excursion to the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. In other words, I want to talk more about Libya...
Posted by Darren Naish at 7:51 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 47 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 • 71 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 • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
