Category: ornithology
As is so often the case with neat animals these days, oxpeckers are in deep trouble. Across much of their range they have become extinct, or are in steep decline. What's particularly interesting about this is that the two species are declining at markedly different rates: a discovery which has revealed a new and hitherto undiscovered complication as goes oxpecker ecology and lifestyle.
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Posted by Darren Naish at 7:13 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: mammalogy
Sloths. Were there predatory sloths? Sloths that lived in the sea? Sloths that dug immense tunnels? Sloths on Antarctica? Sloths so keen to get to the US of A that they didn't wait for the land bridge, but swam...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 6:03 PM • 46 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Before getting distracted by godwits, I was talking about troodontids and their asymmetrical ears (and this itself came as a distraction, as beforehand I was talking about the evolution of blood-feeding in birds). The irresistible comparison that comes to mind is of course with owls, as owls also have asymmetrical ears (though not all of them do). The fact that troodontids evolved asymmetrical ears immediately falsifies the long-cherished notion that owls are unique among vertebrates in this respect. While the fact that owls have asymmetrical ears is reasonably well known, what isn't so reasonably well known is that the asymmetry observed within owls differs among the species that have it. Here we look at this subject in more detail...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 4:40 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: ornithology
My planned excursion to the wilds of Hayling Island (Hampshire, UK) didn't happen today. So instead I went and visited some friends and ended up at.... Hayling Island. I don't know how many people go and watch birds and come away thinking about character acquisition and phylogenetic relationships, but someone has to :)
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Posted by Darren Naish at 8:18 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Mesozoic dinosaurs
One of the most speculated about groups of dinosaurs are the troodontids, a mostly Cretaceous group of maniraptoran theropods, best known from eastern Asia and western North America. They were not particularly big, the largest species reaching 3 m in length. One new detail - as yet little discussed and apparently mostly overlooked - has me speculating, despite best efforts....
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Posted by Darren Naish at 4:46 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: preemptive
All of this yet to come......
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Posted by Darren Naish at 8:00 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: ornithology
In the previous posts we looked at the behaviour of oxpeckers: the idea that they feed on blood and the other tissues of their hosts was introduced, and we can now doubt the idea that they are symbiotic 'friends' of the mammals they clamber about on.
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Posted by Darren Naish at 6:16 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: ornithology
Best known for feeding on ticks, oxpeckers - an unusual group of African starlings - in fact have a far more diverse diet: they also eat flies, lice and mites, and very occasionally they may pick at carrion. There is one report of a Red-billed oxpecker eating fruit, but this is now regarded as erroneous. Significantly, they eat snot, ear-wax, tissue and blood. Lots of blood....
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Posted by Darren Naish at 9:22 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 
