Tetrapod Zoology
Archives for August, 2008
Mysterious striped mammal photographed
Posted by Darren Naish on August 6, 2008 Amazing news! This mysterious striped mammal was recently photographed by a camera-trap: I won’t say where it was photographed as that’ll give the game away. What is it? I’ll announce the answer soon, but feel free to guess in the meantime (this is not a hoax: the photo really does genuinely depict a wild mammal).…
What was the Montauk monster?
Posted by Darren Naish on August 4, 2008 Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or spending all your time on Tet Zoo, you will almost certainly have heard about the ‘Montauk monster’, a mysterious carcass that (apparently) washed up on July 13th at Montauk, Long Island, New York. A good photo of the carcass, showing it in right lateral view and without…
Weird whales grand finale
Posted by Darren Naish on August 3, 2008 Well, here we are at the end of seriously frickin’ weird cetacean skull week. I hope you’ve all enjoyed it. We’re going to finish with a bang by looking at a few – yes, not one, but a few – of the real way-out-there oddballs among the odontocetes. We start with a famous freak individual…
Blunt-nosed paedomorphic cutie
Posted by Darren Naish on August 2, 2008 Let’s face it, all the frickin’ weird cetacean skulls we’ve looked at so far have belonged to frickin’ weird cetaceans: sperm whales and river dolphins. Time for something less frickin’ weird, though still frickin’ weird, if you get my meaning. It’s a boring old dolphin. But is it just a boring old dolphin? No, of…
Killer sperm whales
Posted by Darren Naish on August 1, 2008 You would be forgiven that doubting that this awesome object – displayed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History – is a fossil odontocete skull, but it is. Discovered in Lompoc, California, and as yet unreported in the scientific literature (so far as I can tell), it is the skull of a large predatory…