Now on ScienceBlogs: Making excuses
Amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals - living and extinct
Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Portsmouth, UK) who mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs. He also studies such things as the swimming abilities of giraffes and fossil marine reptiles. An avid interest in modern wildlife and conservation has resulted in many adventures in lizard-chasing, bird-watching and litter-collecting. I've been blogging since 2006 and a compilation of early Tet Zoo articles is now available in book form as Tetrapod Zoology Book One. Additional recent books include The Great Dinosaur Discoveries and Dinosaurs Life Size. For more biographical info go here. I can be contacted intermittently at eotyrannus (at) gmail dot com. PLEASE NOTE: I am now completely unable to keep up with email correspondence. I do my best to respond to all queries and requests, but please don't be offended if I fail to reply. I blog from and about conferences - please contact me for more info. Follow me on twitter: @TetZoo.
You've read the blog, now buy the books....
The Great Dinosaur Discoveries (US edition)
Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life
"Walking with Dinosaurs": The Evidence - How Did They Know That?
Dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight (Guide 10; Field Guides to Fossils Series.) (Palaentology FG Fossils)
Tetrapod Zoology
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November 8, 2011
Category: community • gratuitous self-promotion
You are currently at the old, defunct version of Tet Zoo. To see new stuff (from July 2011 to present), click here. See you there.
Posted by Darren Naish at 10:53 AM • • 0 TrackBacks
July 5, 2011
Category: community
On January 23rd 2007, Tet Zoo ver 2 - the ScienceBlogs version of Tetrapod Zoology - graced the intertoobz for the first time. There was rapturous applause, swooning, the delight of millions. Looking back at it now, that very first ver 2 post is rather odd. It's on the blood-feeding behaviour of oxpeckers (Buphagus) and it only really mentions the move to ScienceBlogs in passing, as if it wasn't a big deal.
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:16 AM • 87 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 30, 2011
Category: community • mammalogy
So sorry for the very short notice. The following airs here in the UK tonight (Thursday 30th June 2011), Channel 4. I look forward to it.
Posted by Darren Naish at 9:20 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 29, 2011
Category: frivolous nonsense • gratuitous self-promotion • herpetology
If you didn't know, I've been away. The last four articles that have appeared here were all scheduled to publish in my absence. I've been in Romania and Hungary where I had a great time - saw lots of neat animals (fossil and living) and hung out with some neat people. I'll talk about some of this stuff in due course. For now, here's a really nice picture, kindly provided by artist-animator Ethan Kocak.
Posted by Darren Naish at 11:37 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 27, 2011
Category: ornithology
Yet more from that book project (see the owl article for the back-story, and the hornbill article for another of the book's sections).
Hornbills, hoopoes and woodhoopoes are all similar in appearance and have been classified together in a group termed Bucerotes. Vague similarities with other long-billed, forest-dwelling birds (like woodpeckers, long-billed cuckoos and such passerines as tree-creepers) meant that early ornithologists were often confused about the affinities of these birds. By the late 1800s, however, most had realised that all three were close relatives, and that they were most likely close kin of kingfishers, bee-eaters and rollers. The group that includes kingfishers, bee-eaters, rollers, hornbills and hoopoes has been termed Coraciiformes; some recent phylogenies have found Coraciiformes of tradition to be paraphyletic to Piciformes (woodpeckers and kin) (e.g., Mayr et al. 2003, Cracraft et al. 2004, Ericson et al. 2006, Hackett et al. 2008). The resulting 'coraciiform' + piciform clade appears robust and has recently been named Picocoraciae (Mayr 2010).
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:00 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 24, 2011
Category: ornithology
Suppose you're interested in the anatomy and biology of ground hornbills. Now suppose that you get the chance to make physical contact with one of these awesome birds. Here, at last, is the opportunity to get bitten!! Surely you've always wanted to know what it feels like when a ground hornbill bites you. No? Ok, maybe it's just me. Anyway, the opportunity to get bitten by a ground hornbill presented itself to me a few weeks ago, so who was I to miss out?
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:10 AM • 100 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2011
Category: ornithology
More from the bird book. For the back-story, see the previous owls article.
Hornbills are among the most distinctive and spectacular of Old World tropical birds. Often flaunting bright colours and sometimes reaching huge sizes (the largest species have wingspans of 1.8 m), they're well known for their enormous, curved bills and large bony crests. [Image above shows Great Indian hornbill skeleton Buceros bicornis (l) and male Wreathed hornbill Rhyticeros undulatus (r) (by Blijdorp, from wikipedia). Hornbills like the Great Indian hornbill are forest-dwelling omnivores that eat fruit as well as small animals. In the Great Indian hornbill, the casque has a flattened upper surface and is sometimes used in head-butting. This is a long-lived bird, reaching its sixth decade in cases. Image below shows two Rhinoceros hornbills B. rhinoceros - by JP Bennett, from wikipedia - at top, and Knobbed hornbill or Sulawesi wreathed hornbill R. cassidix - by Tobias, from wikipedia - below. The Rhinoceros hornbill is a giant, forest-dwelling species of south-eastern Asia. Its horn-like casque is larger and more prominent in males. The red colour on the casque is derived from the oil gland under the tail.]
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:10 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 20, 2011
Category: gratuitous self-promotion • hate-filled rants • ornithology
There's something they don't tell you about freelance writing. It's about all the fails: the many, many projects that get pitched, worked on and made into proper presentations that then get sent to book fairs, interested companies and so on, but ultimately explode on the launch pad, or die a slow, lingering death. I don't know if it's that I'm especially unlucky, or if it's that I've pitched an unusually high number of books, or if it's that I've genuinely worked on a high number of projects that were never destined to succeed but, whatever, I've now worked on loads of failed book projects. It's not all bad, by the way - you still get paid for the time and work you've put in.
Anyway, the reason we're here is that one of those (so far) unsuccessful book projects is a big one on the evolutionary history and diversity of birds. To give you some idea how far down the line this project went, check out the various screen captures. I can't mention company names or whatever, but things on this one have definitely failed and I'm still interested in seeing the project through to publication (and, no, I am not putting the book out there and then trying to sell it - I have learnt from bitter, bitter, bitter experience that this idea just doesn't work out, at least not without starving and losing your home through total loss of income). If you can help, or are interested, you know where to find me.
Long-time readers will know that, thanks to various other failed book projects, I have tons of un-used text sitting around on all manner of zoological subjects. When time and inclination allows, I sometimes update and recycle bits of said text for Tet Zoo. As you read this, I'm away from my desk and out in the field, and as I didn't have time to generate much novel Tet Zoo content, I decided on a whim to recycle stuff from the bird book. Given that I wrote briefly about owls the other day, I decided to use the owl text (updated a little, and with references). Enjoy.
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:35 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 19, 2011
Category: mammalogy
One of the most remarkable pigs has to be the Bornean bearded pig Sus barbatus, one of two currently recognised bearded pig species. The other is the much smaller, shorter-faced Palawan bearded pig S. ahoenobarbus of the Philippines: genetic work suggests that S. ahoenobarbus is not a close relative of S. barbatus, but actually closer to the Celebes warty pig S. celebensis and other Philippines pigs (Lucchini et al. 2005). S. barbatus occurs on Sumatra, Bangka, the Riau archipelago and the Malay Peninsula as well as Borneo. There are two subspecies: S. b. barbatus has long cheek beards while S. b. oi has more wiry-looking snout hair. Molecular work confuses the distinction between these two forms, since Sumatran populations supposed to belong to S. b. oi are actually closer to the nominate Bornean population that to Malaysian populations of S. b. oi (Lucchini et al. 2005, p. 33).
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:55 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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