"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....
October 31, 2007
Category: herpetology
As might be expected with any radiation of organisms that consists of literally thousands of species, it has proved difficult to come to a consensus on neobatrachian phylogeny, and massive complications have been introduced by convergence, parallelism and reversals.
Posted by Darren Naish at 5:59 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 28, 2007
Category: herpetology
Anurans have to be among the most incredible, charismatic and jaw-droppingly ridiculous of all tetrapods. Their reproductive biology beggars belief. It's true that the majority of anurans reproduce and develop in the manner that's most familiar to us: pair mates and lays eggs in water, tadpoles emerge from eggs, tadpoles grow into little frogs, frogs leave water. But about 20 anuran lineages have evolved direct development where a free-swimming tadpole phase is skipped and a terrestrial egg develops into a terrestrial froglet. Others make bubble nests (these might be on the water surface, or in terrestrial vegetation), others carry their eggs wound round their hindlimbs, or carry their tadpoles, or their froglets, on their backs, others retain the developing babies in a pouch, submerged in specially grown skin on the back, in a vocal sac, or in the stomach (yes, stomach). Some exhibit parental care of eggs, tadpoles and/or froglets: some feed their babies on unfertilized eggs, and in some species males and females are pair-bonded and provide extended biparental care. Individuals in some aquatic-spawning species practise clutch piracy: males actually grab freshly-laid egg masses and fertilize them.
Posted by Darren Naish at 10:20 PM • 34 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 22, 2007
Category: frivolous nonsense
For, like, the second time in the last six years we're going on holiday. So, goodbye. Back soon. Just received a copy of Gasparini et al.'s Patagonian Mesozoic Reptiles; looks awesome. Anurans, beluwhals, red panda empire, and really, really...
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:33 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 19, 2007
Category: herpetology
This time round we're looking at another group of 'horned' anurans: the Brazilian smooth horned frogs of the genus Proceratophrys. Smooth horned toads have conventionally been regarded as part of the huge South American leptodactylid group and they have often been allied with the far more familiar Ceratophrys species (the horned frogs). This has been contested in some studies however and Frost et al. (2006) argued that the smooth horned frogs were actually allies of Rhinoderma (the amazing mouth-brooding Darwin's frogs). As you'll know if you've been paying attention, however, there is a little bit of scepticism about Frost et al.'s new phylogeny....
Posted by Darren Naish at 12:36 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 18, 2007
Category: herpetology
If the idea of frogs with pouches is new to you, there is an entire radiation of South American frogs that possess both open pouches and enclosed marsupium-type pouches. However, not all members of this marsupial group do this - some of them produce aquatic larvae that grow up in ponds. Some phylogenetic studies indicate that the tadpole stage was re-evolved in these species, and that they descend from a pouch-brooding ancestor. On biting, I was always confused by Chris Mattison's statement that these frogs bite with their 'lower tusks'. Say what? No anuran has lower jaw dentition, with the notable exception of the marsupial treefrog Gastrotheca guentheri. Incidentally, the presence of mandibular dentition in G. guentheri is (among tetrapods) one of the best examples of re-evolution of a lost structure - ha, take that Louis Dollo (1857-1931).
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:39 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 17, 2007
Category: herpetology
Here's a photo of one of my favourite anurans: the fantastic Helmeted water toad, or Gay's frog* Caudiverbera caudiverbera, a large, robust Chilean species (the only extant member of its genus) that is said to mostly feed on other...
Posted by Darren Naish at 9:35 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 16, 2007
My opinions seem to have drawn a fairly equal amount of agreement and disagreement, and thanks to everyone who has proffered an opinion. If we're studying eyewitness accounts of such former cryptids as Mountain gorillas, Okapis and Komodo dragons, and those accounts pre-date the official discovery of these species, does this mean that this research is cryptozoological? The obvious answer is yes, but in admitting this we're saying that a substantial amount of research on the history of zoological exploration and discovery was and is cryptozoological in scope.
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:30 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 14, 2007
Category: mammalogy
So what was the mysterious beast shown in the photo? As usual, the Tet Zoo readership proved too clever to be fooled by such a rubbish trick. That white blurry streak in yesterday's photo was......
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:47 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 12, 2007
Category: picture of the day
Can you identify the mysterious cryptic beast shown in the photo? A prize to whomever gets it right*. The photo was taken in Europe, and the one person who was with me when I took the photo is not...
Posted by Darren Naish at 2:49 PM • 40 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 10, 2007
By naughtily avoiding the long list of things that I'm supposed to be doing in my 'spare' time I've finally done it: adapted my monumental, keynote cryptozoology conference speech into an article(s) for publication here at Tet Zoo. Ok,...
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:59 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
