May 30, 2007
The amazing skull of a giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis, courtesy of Mark Witton. This presumably wasn't an old individual (you can clearly see the sutures of most of its bones), nor does it have the enlarged ossicones and general gnarliness of mature males. The specimen also has a low median hump;…
May 30, 2007
Apologies to all for total lack of proper posts recently - I am just too busy. However, several posts will - in theory - appear very soon, and I hope that they will prove really, really interesting (especially to people interested in our views on the diversity of extant mammals. And please don't…
May 28, 2007
A not-particularly-realistic model of the Triassic protorosaur Tanystropheus. This animal is best known for its bizarre elongate neck: this consisted of 12 tube-like vertebrae. There wasn't much flexibility between them, which raises the question as to how, and how much, the animal could bend its…
May 28, 2007
The skull of the immense Pleistocene rhino Elasmotherium sibiricum, with reconstructed horn, as displayed at the Natural History Museum in London. Relatively well known as fossil rhinos go, E. sibiricum is the largest and best known species of the diverse rhinocerotid clade Elasmotheriina. I have…
May 26, 2007
This image shows a life-sized restoration of the South American tapejarid pterosaur Tapejara imperator as displayed at the Karlsruhe Museum fur Naturkunde. This remarkable pterosaur was named by Diogenes de Almeida Campos and Alex Kellner in 1997 and is famous for its immense sail-like crest,…
May 26, 2007
Following a recent phone discussion with Dave Hone of Ask A Biologist, I'm going to try something really lame in a desperate effort to boost my number of hits. Shudder. I am going to start posting a new picture every day. Yes, every day. The pictures might be of anything, so long as they are…
May 24, 2007
Same old story: Naish plans to blog on long-promised subjects, Naish gets distracted by cool new stuff, Naish ends up writing about cool new stuff and delaying long-promised subjects for even longer. Here, inspired by a paper I recently published with University of Bristol's Barbara Sánchez-…
May 21, 2007
I promised myself not to bother, but what the hell. Last week I assisted journalist Marc Horne in his research on rabbit-headed cats, and the result was an article in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper that you can read here. I'm not going to write anything new on these cats, but the article does…
May 20, 2007
Another one of those projects too-long-in-gestation has finally appeared and, unlike the others (e.g., the much-delayed British dinosaurs article), it's one that I haven't previously mentioned on the blog (I think). For the last couple of years I've been working, on the side as it were, with…
May 17, 2007
Yet again, I am totally snowed (the day job, editorial work, technical consultancy, in-progress manuscripts, etc.) and haven't been able to complete any of the frighteningly long list of articles I am planning to blog: you know, the ones on more sheep, more anguids, Australia: land of placentals,…
May 12, 2007
As you might guess from the following article, I still have a bit of a thing going on with anguid lizards (the family that includes slow-worms, glass lizards, alligator lizards and galliwasps). This is despite the fact that I spent a lot of time over the last few days talking about new tupuxuarid…
May 10, 2007
I just couldn't resist covering this, sorry (though, technically speaking, it's old hat). On June 17th 2004, the reign of Hogzilla - an immense pig estimated to be nearly half a ton in weight and 3.7 m in length - was brought to an end. The animal 'rampaged' across southern Georgia until it was…
May 8, 2007
I've returned several times on this blog to the Slow-worm Anguis fragilis, a legless anguid lizard that occurs across Europe and Asia as far east as western Siberia. I find slow-worms very charismatic animals. Part of the appeal might be that they are easy to find in the places where I've lived,…
May 7, 2007
Here's the plan over the next week or so...
Australia, land of placentals; more sheep; giant anguids, legless and not; and It's all about me. Amazing social life of green iguanas to be published soon, and what about those long-promised posts on vampire pterosaurs, proto-narwhals, Piltdown,…
May 4, 2007
As some of you now know, finally I have something that might be considered close to a dream job: I'm now a researcher for Impossible Pictures, the company that did Walking With Dinosaurs, Primeval and a host of other things (website here). This job isn't going to be forever, but it's a start, and…
April 29, 2007
Popular culture would have it that turtles are weak, flaccid, crappy organisms with dull social lives, stunted and barely functional internal organs and - it goes without saying - undersized sex organs. Right? WRONG...
Warning: the following blog post may be considered unsuitable for viewing by…
April 27, 2007
So, on to more ornithomimosaurs, aka ostrich dinosaurs (part I here). This time, the ornithomimids: this is the ornithomimosaur clade that includes only the edentulous arctometatarsalian taxa. Yes, I said arctometatarsalian*. However, note that some authors have incorrectly regarded Ornithomimidae…
April 25, 2007
As events conspire, I again find myself unable to devote time to completing any new blog posts. That's a shame, as I'm desperate to finish and publish my article on the terrifying sex organs of male turtles (yes really: stay tuned). In desperation, I've opted to dig out and recycle some old text.…
April 22, 2007
A week ago I went on a tetrapod-finding trip - with my good friends Mark North and Jon McGowan - to the Isle of Portland. Portland isn't an island: it's a promontory, sticking out from the south coast of Dorset into the English Channel. The plan with this post was to show off some of the neat…
April 21, 2007
Hmm, how cryptic. Post to follow soon (thanks to Mark North for photo: that's him on the right). Calling all palaeo-artist friends and colleagues: please start sending me your temnospondyl images (see profile for email).
April 18, 2007
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we keep coming back to the subject of flightless bats. Besides fictional future predators and night stalkers, there never have been any flightless bats so far as we know.
Whenever this subject is discussed however, we have to pay appropriate homage to…
April 14, 2007
I'm out in the field tomorrow: whether I blog on what happens will depend on... what happens. Think snakes, sea caves and mammal tracking. Until then, here is a mystery...
What do these horns belong to? They're part of Jon McGowan's collection: he acquired them some years ago from an antique shop…
April 12, 2007
Yesterday the most remarkable thing happened. No, I have not been handed new DNA work on the Dufftown rabbit-headed cat, nor has the rest of Yaverlandia been found. An articulated azhdarchid has not been discovered on a Cretaceous savannah ashfield, nor have the islands of the SW Pacific yielded…
April 10, 2007
In the previous post we introduced the aetosaurs, a strange and fascinating group of armour-plated quadrupedal Triassic crurotarsans. Equipped with stout limbs, a strange upturned snout and (usually) toothless jaw tips, aetosaurs have been interpreted as omnivores, herbivores, and even as…
April 9, 2007
More aetosaurs coming soon. If only I didn't have all this other crap to deal with first.
April 5, 2007
Having written articles lately on war rhinos, British big cats and rhinogradentians, I think it's time to come down to earth and cover some far more mundane, less speculative areas. Expect, then, a whole slew of articles on small lizards, brown passerines and mice. As regular readers will know, I…
April 1, 2007
In the previous post we looked at the diversity of the rhinogradentians (aka rhinogrades or snouters) belonging to the so-called monorrhinan or uni-snouter division, and we also started to go through the asclerorrhinan or soft-nosed snouter division. Here, in the second post on this much-discussed…
March 31, 2007
I am always surprised when I meet zoologists who aren't familiar with Harald Stumpke's* famous 1957 book Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia, a volume translated into English by Leigh Chadwick in 1967 as The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades (and referred to from hereon as 'Stumpke 1967').…
March 30, 2007
One last post on British felids, and if you're bored or uninterested in cats.. well, sorry. Rhinogradentians next (though with a nod to Cretaceous zygodactyl birds, burrowing ornithopods, prosauropods, and the new azhdarchoid pterosaurs that Dave Martill and Mark Witton showed me today). Anyway,…
March 29, 2007
In the previous post I discussed some of the interesting goings-on that happened at the 1st Annual Big Cats in Britain Conference, held at Hull between the 23rd and 25th March. If you found any of the stuff I covered interesting, then you'll be pleased and (hopefully) intrigued to know that I didn…
