July 5, 2009
On the way out last night (happy birthday Dad!) we drove past a dead hedgehog at the side of the road. A not uncommon sight, I'm sorry to say. The good news is that the body was still there today, so - naturally - I went and collected it. So, finally, I have a whole, intact hedgehog in my…
July 4, 2009
Yes, I thought that birds didn't eat millipedes on account of their toxicity. Most millipedes (including the little species we have here in Britain) secrete noxious liquid through glands on their sides, and substances such as chlorine, iodine and cyanide are involved. As is obvious from the photo…
July 3, 2009
The recent discovery that some Asian microhylid frogs frequent the dung piles of elephants has gotten these obscure little anurans into the news, possibly for the first time ever. Microhylids - or narrow-mouthed frogs - are not exactly the superstars of the frog world: they're only really familiar…
July 2, 2009
The Bob Nicholls artwork I featured yesterday got some of you talking about a particularly famous denizen of the Jurassic seas. Namely, the gigantic, edentulous pachycormiform actinopterygian Leedsichthys problematicus from the Callovian Oxford Clay Formation. Hold on - - isn't that a... a... fish…
July 1, 2009
My mate Bob Nicholls (of Paleocreations) has been producing some awesome artwork lately. Why, for example, there's this...
... and this...
The first illustration (both pics © Bob Nicholls and used with permission) shows the Jurassic pliosaur Liopleurodon Pliosaurus performing its usual trick:…
June 28, 2009
The Leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis is native to southern and eastern Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia. It's a highly variable little cat, regarded by some workers as consisting of at least ten subspecies. Some (like the Sumatran leopard cat P. b. sumatranus) are small and with…
June 27, 2009
For millenia, a battle has raged between alligators and water melons. Who will win? Well, the answer's obvious: one has a bite force of over 15,000 Newtons, and the other one's a water melon. Yes, the alligator vs water melon craze has gone mainstream, as testified by its appearance on Sky News...…
June 25, 2009
It's well known that elephants have a major impact on their environment: indeed, they're what's known as ecosystem engineers. In a new study, Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz of the University of Tokyo reports that Asian elephant dung might serve a hitherto unreported role as a microhabitat for certain small…
June 23, 2009
The photo of the Northern ground hornbill Bucorvus abyssinicus featured here yesterday was posted entirely on a whim. And I figured that I didn't need to say much about the species, nor about ground hornbills in general, given that they've been discussed at length on Tet Zoo before. But then I…
June 22, 2009
Ground hornbills - or bucorvids - have been Tet Zoo mainstays since the early days of 2006. However, the only species that I ever feature is the Southern ground hornbill Bucorvus leadbeateri (sometimes incorrectly referred to by one of its junior synonyms, B. cafer). It's easily recognisable for…
June 21, 2009
At some stage, I'll have to write full-length articles on lysorophians, aïstopods, the remaining temnospondyls, nectrideans, microsaurs, and assorted other groups of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic non-amniote tetrapods. Alas, this hasn't happened yet. In the meantime, here are some slides from one of my…
June 19, 2009
Oh, what the hell: given that we've already covered a new Wealden theropod, and have looked a bit at the palaeobiology of Majungasaurus within the week, I may as well resist my urge not to do more dinosaurs. In other words, I may as well cover Limusaurus as well, despite my previous protestations…
June 16, 2009
I've had no time to complete any new articles, and after the text you're reading now - originally intended to be a comment appended to Cute, furry, has claws, bites - got to reasonable length, I thought I may as well turn it into a brief article. I'm still not sure how a long thread on identifying…
June 15, 2009
I think I said recently that there have been way too many dinosaurs on Tet Zoo lately. It isn't that I don't like dinosaurs: it's just that I aim to provide balance and, let's face it, writing about charismatic megafauna all the time - especially dead charismatic megafauna - doesn't help. However…
June 13, 2009
I'm sure you'll agree that there have been way too many dinosaurs on Tet Zoo over the past few weeks. Let's balance things out by showing a cute little rodent. Your challenge: to identify it to species and - if at all possible - to say something quite interesting about the animal, or about the…
June 12, 2009
On Monday night I went to the cinema and watched the new environmental movie The End of the Line, directed by Rupert Murray. Featuring habitats, scientists and case studies worldwide, it shows how our rampant and poorly controlled (or uncontrolled) exploitation of the global oceans is depleting (…
June 10, 2009
In the previous article we looked at the Birds Come First, or BCF, hypothesis. It goes without saying that BCF has not won acceptance in the community, nor - in fact - is it even familiar to the majority of archosaur workers. Here, we take a critical view of BCF: does it stand up, or does it fail…
June 7, 2009
A substantial amount of evidence demonstrates that birds are theropod dinosaurs, and that birds evolved during the Jurassic from small, feathered maniraptoran theropods closely related to dromaeosaurids and troodontids (known collectively as deinonychosaurs) [the small dromaeosaurid Microraptor…
June 7, 2009
Here's a recent photo showing the proofs of one of my books. These particular pages (which focus on the 'dinosaur renaissance' of the 1960s and 70s) feature a Luis Rey piece: as usual, poor Tenontosaurus is getting dispatched by a Deinonychus gang. As you can see, Emma thought the picture looked…
June 5, 2009
The big buzz in the cryptozoology community right now concerns a piece of footage taken on May 31st 2009 at Oakledge Park in Burlington, Vermont, and on the shore of Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain is famous in the world of lake monster research as it's alleged to be home to a large, long-bodied…
June 4, 2009
Since the publication of Taylor et al. (2009) - the sauropod neck posture paper - we've been running a whole series of articles on necks and neck posture, and all that it implies, over at SV-POW! Please check it out. I've been too busy to contribute anything, but that changes later today. Sorry,…
June 2, 2009
Last year was Year of the Frog (nothing to do with the Chinese calendar, but instead a global effort to raise awareness about the plight of the world's declining amphibian species). I hope that you've not forgotten that the global effort to slow amphibian extinction continues unabated. For various…
June 1, 2009
Welcome to one of those annoying teaser posts - I'd post something substantive, if only I had the time.
But I don't.
The adjacent photo shows Pristimantis charlottevillensis, a strabomantid from Tobago that was named in 1995. Believe it or don't, strabomantids are sometimes known as squatting…
May 30, 2009
The proofs for one of my books arrived the other day, so I have been busy busy busy. This (in part) explains the lack of action here on the blog, and the preponderance of recycled stuff. Sorry about that. In fact, sorry, here's another recycled article from Tet Zoo ver 1. Hopefully I'll have the…
May 26, 2009
Today sees the publication of a new paper by Michael P. Taylor, Mathew Wedel and myself in which we make a bold and controversial claim: based on data from living animals, we contend that the necks of sauropod dinosaurs - all sauropod dinosaurs - were most likely held habitually in erect poses, and…
May 26, 2009
No time to produce anything new, so here's another recycled book review...
While the Mesozoic strata of Patagonia are particularly well known for their diverse and often spectacular dinosaurs, they have also yielded a phenomenally rich record of other Mesozoic reptiles, including turtles,…
May 23, 2009
Historically, an apparent absence of transitional forms has made it difficult to reconstruct the evolutionary affinities of the different modern avian 'orders'. As you'll know if you've been keeping up with the results of the various big molecular and morphological analyses - and who hasn't - the…
May 22, 2009
Here is a Secretary bird Sagittarius serpentarius skeleton I photographed some time ago: as usual, apologies for my terrible photography. The bird is lying on its back, and both its wings and legs are folded up. I would like you to concentrate in particular on its humeri: what the hell is going on…
May 21, 2009
Like most scientific communities, the world of academic tetrapod zoology is an incestuous place. Inspired by a comment made here at Tet Zoo by Matt Wedel - co-author, colleague and one of the three SV-POWsketeers - Cameron McCormick (who works on guppies but is collaborating with Michael Woodley…
May 20, 2009
Few dinosaurs are as well studied as the Upper Cretaceous tyrannosaurid theropod Tyrannosaurus rex. It might be easy to assume that this intense focus has been driven by the fame and glory associated with working on this dinosaur. That might be partly true but, in fact, T. rex really is one of the…
