August 3, 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…
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...
If you'…
August 1, 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…
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…
July 30, 2008
More on weird odontocete skulls. This time, another river dolphin: this is the skull of the Amazon river dolphin or Boto Inia geoffrensis, also known as the tonina, bufeo or pink dolphin.
Three generally recognised Inia taxa exist, and views differ as to whether these are subspecies or species. I…
July 29, 2008
Yay: day 3 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week. While we've previously been looking at the skulls of extant species, this time we have a fossil (or, actually, a diagram of one: from Muizon 1988). It's Scaphokogia cochlearis from the Miocene Pisco Formation of Peru, described by Muizon (…
July 29, 2008
Welcome to day 2 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week, and here we look at one of my favourites: Platanista, the Asian river dolphins or susus. Susu is a Hindi onomatopoetic name based on the exhalation noise these dolphins make, and other local names include susuk, sishuk, shushuk and…
July 27, 2008
Welcome to another of those week-long series of themed posts, produced (ostensibly) to save me from spending time on blogging (other jobs require priority). Previous series have been ankylosaur week and sea monster week. This time round we're looking at seriously frickin' weird cetacean skulls…
July 26, 2008
Very late to the party here (the story was first published waaaaaay back on the 18th), but it just seems wrong not to cover this at Tet Zoo. Sincere apologies to the Bleiman brothers at Zooillogix and to John Lynch at Stranger Fruit, both of whom covered the following several days ago, but what the…
July 25, 2008
We looked previously at a partial skull, collected in northern Africa. Apart from the odd outing when it's been used in teaching, it's been sat in a box on my desk for a couple of years now, forlornly hoping that it might one day earn a place in the peer-reviewed literature. However, that would…
July 22, 2008
This incomplete fossil skull was collected from the coast of northern Africa by Dave Martill and is suspected to represent a new species. It's one of those annoying back-burner projects that sits there on your desk for months and months.. eventually the months turn into years and still have you…
July 20, 2008
The idea that non-avian dinosaurs might have been able to climb trees is (I assume) not all that familiar to people outside the field of dinosaur research, but within the field of dinosaur research it has become an increasingly familiar idea within recent decades. Thanks to the discovery of such…
July 20, 2008
Annoying teaser ahoy! The tree-climbing dinosaurs are coming...
July 18, 2008
Once upon a time longhorn cattle were abundant and kept by many people; in fact, they were the most abundant domestic cattle, and this breed more than any others was selected for 'improvement' by Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) of Leicestershire, the great pioneer of domestic cattle breeding (note that…
July 17, 2008
The original title for this article was going to be 'Sorry Heteralocha, but you ain't that special'. I ended up deciding against that, however, as I realised that few readers would know what the hell I was on about, nor indeed what Heteralocha is. Heteralocha (Heteralocha acutirostris to be…
July 15, 2008
I suppose it's not every day you get to appear in a TV series called MonsterQuest. I appear in two places in one episode (first screened last week): once for a little while in the section embedded here, and again much later on. The bit with me starts 2 minutes, 20 seconds in (let's not worry about…
July 15, 2008
Better late than never, I've only recently gotten hold of Zhou et al.'s paper on the enantiornithine bird Pengornis houi, published online in Journal of Anatomy back in January but now available in hard-copy. I must say that I really dislike the new trend of publishing things in special, online…
July 13, 2008
It's going to be a busy week, and already I've been totally unable to finish any of the planned articles. But I'll do what I can. In an effort to produce something short and sweet, here's a look at a question I've been pondering for a while: why do some owls have ear tufts? There are currently…
July 12, 2008
One last thing for sea monster week... but don't get your hopes up too much. We looked earlier at the Moore's Beach (or Santa Cruz) sea monster, a carcass that was identified as that of a Baird's beaked whale Berardius bairdii. I mentioned the fact that the skull was retained by the California…
July 11, 2008
Better late than never; I was at the office of a London-based publishing company yesterday, so didn't have time to get anything ready before today. I know you'll all forgive me. Anyway... so, how to finish sea monster week? With a predictable and familiar set of images that you've seen a hundred…
July 9, 2008
Yay for day.... (counts) ... four of sea monster week. This time another familiar carcass image... well, familiar to me anyway. This remarkable object/shapeless hunk is the Tecolutla monster, collected from Palmar de Susana between Tecolutla and Nautla, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1969. Initially…
July 8, 2008
Faked tadpole monsters and misidentified dead whales are one thing - are there any real sea monster mysteries left out there? The good news is yes, but as we'll see it's not just the identity of the creatures concerned that is mysterious. This is day 3 of sea monster week, and we here look at a…
July 8, 2008
Welcome to day 2 of sea monster week. This time the featured 'monster' is a beached carcass: it washed ashore at what was then called Moore's Beach (it's now Natural Bridges State Beach), just north-west of Santa Cruz, California, in 1925 and, while identified correctly in virtually all of the…
July 7, 2008
Welcome to sea monster week. Yes, a whole week devoted to the discussion and evaluation of photos purportedly showing marine cryptids, or carcasses of them. Why do this? I'm not entirely sure, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. We begin with a fantastic image that - hopefully - you've…
July 6, 2008
You blog readers are so fickle. Write several thousand words on a spectacular group of carnivorous mammals that have never previously been the subject of any sort of semi-popular review, and get bugger all attention. Write about 50 words and post two pictures, and - hey - the whole world goes nuts…
July 5, 2008
Here's a fossil I described recently. Does anyone want to have a go at identifying it? Don't worry, I know what it is (or, at least, I and my colleagues think I do), but why not go ahead and have fun. Note the scale bar...
Here's a close-up of part of it...
Coming next: SEA MONSTER WEEK!
July 3, 2008
Time for more borhyaenoids. Finally, we get round to the taxa that you might have seen or read about in prehistoric animal books: the sabre-toothed thylacosmilids, the supposedly bear-like borhyaenids, and the gigantic and even more bear-like proborhyaenids. We previously looked at basal…
July 1, 2008
Distractions distractions distractions. Mayfly chameleons. Sea monster carcasses. Avian supertrees. Fake tiger photos. New pterosaurs. Frogs. But... must... complete... borhyaenoid... articles... For the intro, go here. Time now to crack on with hathlyacynids and prothylacinids. If you don't care…
June 29, 2008
By now I hope it's clear, even to novices with no special interest in the extinct wildlife of the Cenozoic, that ancient South America had what we might technically call a Really Awesome Faunal Assemblage. Astrapotheres, sebecosuchians, phorusrhacids, teratorns, gigantic caimans, madtsoiid snakes…
June 26, 2008
There's a big crossover, sure, but I often wonder if everyone who visits Tet Zoo also visits SV-POW! Today is the day we put that to the test. To find out more about this image....
.... you must, by law, go here.
Next: oh no, it's the giant killer opossums!
