Now on ScienceBlogs: Attack of the pregnant cannibal fathers
"It is - still - the best zoological blog out there, period"
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.
You've read the blog, now buy the books....
The Great Dinosaur Discoveries (US edition)
The Great Dinosaur Discoveries (UK edition)
Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life
Walking With Dinosaurs: The Evidence
Dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight
Category: herpetology
As a Tet Zoo regular you'll know and love the remarkable limbless amphibians known as caecilians. In case you don't know, caecilians have sensory tentacles, sometimes have protrusible eyes, sometimes lack eyes entirely, often exhibit sophisticated parental care [maternal skin-feeding...
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:05 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: herpetology
You've probably seen - presumably on TV - Nile crocs Crocodylus niloticus interacting with Common hippos Hippopotamus amphibius (if you've seen it in real life, lucky you). By and large the two seem to keep apart. Having said that, there...
Posted by Darren Naish at 4:21 AM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: mammalogy
So, I recently returned from a brief sojourn in Libya. The trip was led by Richard Moody, best known for his work on Cretaceous sea turtles; I was also accompanied by palaeornithologist Gareth Dyke and by a group of people...
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:11 AM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: herpetology
The Natterjack Epidalea calamita (introduced in the previous article) is a remarkable animal, well adapted for the dry, relatively saline environments it inhabits (there are places where Natterjacks inhabit saltmarshes, moors, and disused industrial areas). A proficient burrower, it...
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:20 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: herpetology
If you've been following the toad series, you'll have read articles that introduce toads in general, discuss reproductive biology, and look at cranial anatomy. This can all be regarded as background introductory stuff. From hereon, we're mostly going to...
Posted by Darren Naish at 9:20 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: herpetology
Yes! MORE TOADS. You surely know what a toad's head looks like. But there's a lot about toad skulls that you almost certainly don't know, and the aim of this article is to review toad skull anatomy. This might...
Posted by Darren Naish at 8:03 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: herpetology
After a brief hiatus we return to the remarkable world of toads, and this time round we look at reproductive biology. As a western European person, the toad species I'm most familiar with (the Common toad Bufo bufo and...
Posted by Darren Naish at 4:51 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: herpetology
One of the dirty little secrets of biology is that many groups of organisms have never been 'defined' in the phylogenetic sense: a group grows over time as people add new species to it, but they only do this...
Posted by Darren Naish at 5:35 AM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: herpetology
I forget how it started now, but lately I've been very, very interested in toads (yes, toads), so much so that I've felt compelled to write about them. The problem is that toads - properly called bufonids - are...
Posted by Darren Naish at 4:22 AM • 37 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: picture of the day
What's going on in these pictures?...
Posted by Darren Naish at 11:25 AM • 32 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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