"It is - still - the best zoological blog out there, period"
With six years of tedious phd work on theropod dinosaurs behind him, Darren Naish stares longingly from his office window at the birds outside and wonders: why did I bother? He pursues exotic lizards and feral cats across the British countryside, occasionally prizes the skeletal jaws from hedgehog corpses, and aims to publish his technical work on obscure Cretaceous dinosaurs. He remains desperately in quest of an academic job that'll last more than a month, and - with a background in TV research, e-learning development, academic editing, popular writing, teaching, landscape gardening, parenting and the wonderful world of retail - he still holds out hope of becoming a dedicated academic. 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....
May 31, 2007
Category: herpetology
It has always been rumoured that some snakes grow to sizes that exceed the 10 m record generally accepted as the authenticated maximum: this was for a Reticulated python Python reticulatus shot on Sulawesi in 1912. Numerous stories and...
Posted by Darren Naish at 11:01 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: mammalogy
The amazing skull of a giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis, courtesy of Mark Witton. This presumably wasn't an old individual (you can clearly see the sutures of most of its bones), nor does it have the enlarged ossicones and general gnarliness...
Posted by Darren Naish at 5:25 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 30, 2007
Apologies to all for total lack of proper posts recently - I am just too busy. However, several posts will - in theory - appear very soon, and I hope that they will prove really, really interesting (especially to...
Posted by Darren Naish at 4:08 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 29, 2007
Category: picture of the day
A not-particularly-realistic model of the Triassic protorosaur Tanystropheus. This animal is best known for its bizarre elongate neck: this consisted of 12 tube-like vertebrae. There wasn't much flexibility between them, which raises the question as to how, and how...
Posted by Darren Naish at 3:15 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 28, 2007
Category: picture of the day
The skull of the immense Pleistocene rhino Elasmotherium sibiricum, with reconstructed horn, as displayed at the Natural History Museum in London. Relatively well known as fossil rhinos go, E. sibiricum is the largest and best known species of the...
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:21 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 27, 2007
Category: picture of the day
This image shows a life-sized restoration of the South American tapejarid pterosaur Tapejara imperator as displayed at the Karlsruhe Museum fur Naturkunde. This remarkable pterosaur was named by Diogenes de Almeida Campos and Alex Kellner in 1997 and is...
Posted by Darren Naish at 5:30 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 26, 2007
Category: picture of the day
Following a recent phone discussion with Dave Hone of Ask A Biologist, I'm going to try something really lame in a desperate effort to boost my number of hits. Shudder. I am going to start posting a new picture...
Posted by Darren Naish at 10:53 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 24, 2007
Category: Mesozoic dinosaurs
Same old story: Naish plans to blog on long-promised subjects, Naish gets distracted by cool new stuff, Naish ends up writing about cool new stuff and delaying long-promised subjects for even longer. Here, inspired by a paper I recently...
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:40 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 22, 2007
Category: mammalogy
I promised myself not to bother, but what the hell. Last week I assisted journalist Marc Horne in his research on rabbit-headed cats, and the result was an article in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper that you can read...
Posted by Darren Naish at 5:12 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 20, 2007
Category: pterosaurs
For the last couple of years I've been working, on the side as it were, with University of Bristol's Barbara Sánchez-Hernández and Mike Benton on the fossil vertebrates from the Galve region of Teruel Province, NE Spain. Our new paper - a large synthesis of the fauna, published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology - was made available last week, and provides much new data on the distribution of such creatures as istiodactylid pterosaurs, spinosaurid theropods, and heterodontosaurids. If you like Cretaceous tetrapods, it's all very, very exciting...
Posted by Darren Naish at 12:17 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
