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.
The recent discovery that some Asian microhylid frogs frequent the dung piles of elephants has gotten these obscure little anurans into the news, possibly for the first time ever. Microhylids - or narrow-mouthed frogs - are not exactly the superstars of the frog world: they're only really familiar to specialists, despite the fact that (as of June 2009) they contain over 450 species distributed across Africa, Madagascar, the Americas, and Asia. However, some more recent research on the group shows that, like so many animals, they're really quite interesting once you get to know them...
The Bob Nicholls artwork I featured yesterday got some of you talking about a particularly famous denizen of the Jurassic seas. Namely, the gigantic, edentulous pachycormiform actinopterygian Leedsichthys problematicus from the Callovian Oxford Clay Formation. Hold on - - isn't that a... a... fish? How on earth can I justify this inexcusable off-topicness?
Well, quite easily actually. The gigantic size of Leedsichthys (more on that below) means that it can't be ignored whenever we discuss trophic interactions in the Middle Jurassic seas. Perhaps it was preyed on by the large, contemporaneous pliosaurs (see Martill 1988, Hudson et al. 1991, Martill et al. 1994), and it's even been suggested that smaller marine reptiles - like metriorhynchid crocs - swam up to it and took chunks out of it on occasion. That's not such an unreasonable idea, given that some living odontocetes have been reported to behave in a similar fashion (however, read on). Its carcass must have provided a phenomenal resource for scavenging marine reptiles and all manner of other organisms. In short, Leedsichthys is 'very relevant' if you're interested in marine reptiles [different versions of Leedsichthys, as portrayed in popular media, shown above. Image provided by Jeff Liston, used with permission].
I also have quite a soft spot for Leedsichthys, having assisted in the 2002 excavation of Ariston, one of the most complete specimens yet found (Liston 2006) (this dig featured in the 2003 TV series The Big Monster Dig, broadcast on the UK TV channel Channel 4). In the adjacent image, that's me lying on my belly in the middle. It's a good arse shot. Anyway, we all love gigantic fishes, even those of us devoted to tetrapods...
The Leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis is native to southern and eastern Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia. It's a highly variable little cat, regarded by some workers as consisting of at least ten subspecies. Some (like the Sumatran leopard cat P. b. sumatranus) are small and with relatively few markings, others are large with thick, greyish fur and indistinct spotting (the Manchurian leopard cat P. b. euptilura), while others are distinctly marked and with a reddish background colour (like Bornean leopard cats P. b. borneoensis). It inhabits forest, woodland and scrub (the Manchurian subspecies lives in taiga woodland), and is said by some authors to be heavily dependant on water. Anyway...
For millenia, a battle has raged between alligators and water melons. Who will win? Well, the answer's obvious: one has a bite force of over 15,000 Newtons, and the other one's a water melon. Yes, the alligator vs water melon craze has gone mainstream, as testified by its appearance on Sky News... though, god help them, they managed to mistake an alligator for a crocodile. Hopeless. Anyway...
It's well known that elephants have a major impact on their environment: indeed, they're what's known as ecosystem engineers. In a new study, Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz of the University of Tokyo reports that Asian elephant dung might serve a hitherto unreported role as a microhabitat for certain small frog species. While inspecting Asian elephant Elephas maximus dung piles on Sri Lanka in 2008, Campos-Arceiz was surprised to discover individuals of the microhylid frogs Microhyla ornata and M. rubra and a species of the dicroglossid Sphaerotheca [shown here] hiding inside or under the piles (if you need to know where microhylids fit within the anuran radiation, see the Tet Zoo article here; I haven't gotten round to covering dicroglossids yet).
The photo of the Northern ground hornbill Bucorvus abyssinicusfeatured here yesterday was posted entirely on a whim. And I figured that I didn't need to say much about the species, nor about ground hornbills in general, given that they've been discussed at length on Tet Zoo before. But then I realised that the only in-depth treatment of ground hornbills at Tet Zoo comes from ver 1, and thus dates to 2006. That's three years ago. Given that so much has changed in terms of Tet Zoo's readership, it's clearly time to re-post this old, classic article. If you remember it from the first time round: sorry, but do note that I've added a bit of new stuff here and there. I've also removed all the stuff about dinosauroids, as I don't want to go over that again (see the link at the bottom for the full story).
On more than one occasion now, I've found myself staring through cage bars at a menacing, striding bipedal predator, strikingly coloured in black and brick red. This predator does all kinds of neat things if you watch it for long enough. On one occasion, it picked up a dead mouse and threw it around, apparently for no reason other than for its own enjoyment. It then picked up a stone in its mouth and repeatedly dropped it onto the little furry corpse. On another occasion, I managed to get one to engage in what looked like play behaviour: it not only ran in parallel to me, it lay down on one side, raised an arm, and then passed leaves and twigs through the fence in my direction. If the speculations of some ornithologists are to be believed, then the awesome feathered dinosaurs I've watched so often at the zoo - Southern ground hornbills Bucorvus leadbeateri - are avian 'pseudo-hominids'.
Ground hornbills - or bucorvids - have been Tet Zoo mainstays since the early days of 2006. However, the only species that I ever feature is the Southern ground hornbill Bucorvus leadbeateri (sometimes incorrectly referred to by one of its junior synonyms, B. cafer). It's easily recognisable for its red facial skin and low casque.
To bring balance, here's the other species: the Abyssinian or Northern ground hornbill B. abyssinicus (this one photographed at Dublin Zoo). In contrast to its close relative, it has a much taller casque, and blue facial skin. Its throat pouch is blue in females but red in males.
Alas, poor old bucorvids: they so often get mentioned these days as mere azhdarchid analogues.
At some stage, I'll have to write full-length articles on lysorophians, aïstopods, the remaining temnospondyls, nectrideans, microsaurs, and assorted other groups of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic non-amniote tetrapods. Alas, this hasn't happened yet. In the meantime, here are some slides from one of my talks...
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 
