Something a little different this week ...
Steppe Polecat, Mustela eversmanni Lesson 1827.
I spent three years of my life measuring mustelid skulls. I kind of miss it.
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European polecat, Mustela putorius L.
And with that, we end our series of Monday Mustelids which we began back in January.
Marbled polecat, Vormela peregusna Güldenstädt 1770
(source)
Seriously, who wouldn't love this little guy?
Have now returned: much more on the details later. Think chickcharnies, giant pigeons, mekosuchines, 40 years of the Patterson footage and Patty's hamstring tendon, Siberian roe deer Capreolus pygargus in England, and statistics and sea monsters. A fun time was had by all.
Oh, and on the way back…
This weeks Pseudoscience of the past is brought to you once again by the New York Times from November 21, 1851. In this episode we demonstrate how you can tell nearly everything about a person from...wait for it.... wait..... yes! Their Hat!
Now this isn't something you can tell from how…
Nice. I do so love bones, their strength, resiliency, artistic lines made even more poignant by their functionality. I love, too, how rife a bone is with information, skulls especially. There's an entire encyclopedia in a skull.
Hi John,
What did you do with all of these mustelid measurements? Were they on living species or extinct ones as well? Michael
Michael,
Extant species. They formed the data for my PhD dissertation. You can find copies of resultant papers at http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/publications.html - scroll down to 1997 and work backwards.
No explorers died (or dogs eaten) in the making of my research :)
Curious why the skull is annotated/labeled in Russian. Do you know anything about the specimen?
The skull reads:
Ðз колл. С. У. СÑÑо
ганова (From the collection of S. U. Stroganov)
Ñжн-ÐÑибал. (south-Pribal.)
[possibly Pribaltiysky: southern Baltic region]
The rest I'm just unsure of.
I did some searching on S.U. Stroganov, and it appears there was a fellow of the Western Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences by this name; this table of contents shows him as the author of the first three monographs:
"Materials on the systematics of Siberian mammals"
"(A) new view of the shrew for Siberian fauna"
"Materals to(ward) the knowledge of Siberian mammalians (notes on nomenclature and systematics)"
Same guy? If so, interesting.
Interesting stuff, but a little quibble on ChrisTheRed's translations: It reads 'Stroganova' as far as I can ascertain, indicating that S.U. is/was a lady (female).
Just for the records.
Genitive of male surnames is the -a phoneme (genitive because it's the collection OF Stroganov), which is the same as the feminine nominal case. If it were a woman's name, it would be Ðз колл. С. У. СÑÑоганови. Iz koll(ektsii) S.U. Stroganovi.