Artiodactyla
gregladen | April 13, 2016According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there are 143 species of bovids. The Animal Diversity Web is a bit less precise, indicating that there are "more than 140 extant and 300 extinct species." That second number is highly questionable because today there exist sister species that are so similar I doubt they could be told apart from fossils alone. If you check around the internet, this ~140 number comes up again and again, and Wikipedia says 143.
Research published in 2011 and later by Colin Groves, Peter Grubb, and David Leslie, which has been tagged as controversial by some but…
gregladen | June 11, 2015We hear this all the time. Pig physiology is like people physiology. Pigs and humans have the same immune system, same digestive system, get the same diseases. Pigs are smart like people are smart. Pigs are smarter than dogs. And so on. Ask a faunal expert in archaeology or a human paleoanatomist: Pig teeth are notoriously like human teeth, when fragmented. Chances are most of these alleged similarities are overstated, or are simply because we are all mammals. Some are because we happen to have similar diets (see below). None of these similarities occur because of a shared common…
gregladen | November 29, 2013Every now and then, more often than you might expect, I mention something in lecture (usually in a classroom in front of students) and a small number of individuals express incredulity that the thing exists. Pygmies are one of those terms that garners disbelief. Many people assume they are made up. At the same time, a disconcerting number of times the opposite happens. Mermaids, aliens, dragons, Atlantis, etc. are not real but many students, educated by the History and Discovery channels, apparently, (I don't watch them but I hear things), think they are.
Strangely, one of the things…
gregladen | August 10, 2010In Robert Gardner's documentary film Dead Birds, the men of a highland New Guinea village guard the perimeter of the territory, watchful for men of the neighboring group who may be intent on sneaking into the gardens to capture and kill an unwitting child or woman in order to avenge a prior death. But they don't see the men sneaking through the dense riparian forest. They don't even look for them. Rather, they see the birds fly from their preferred habitat where they are foraging or resting, startled into the open by ... something. The birds belie the predator.
Today, in construction…
gregladen | December 2, 2008Also known as the "Anti-Dork Antelope." Not really. These are springbok.
The springbok has four remarkable characteristics. It is among the most dramatically colored of the antelopes, with the starkest contrast between the dark lateral stripe and the light brown (above) and white (below) fur. It is the fastest of the antelopes, by far. Lions and leopards need not apply: These are too fast for you to catch. It is one of the most rapidly reproducing of the antelopes, and will pump out little antelope babies as long as there is grass to eat. In the kalahri, where this photograph was taken…
gregladen | September 12, 2008Well, not really lies, but untruths. As perhaps the only person blogging on Scienceblogs.com who has actually eaten an okapi (Okapi johnstoni), I feel the need to clarify some misconceptions that are floating around about this beast.
If you go to the Sb home page, you'll find numerous links to the current Okapi story, about how the first photographs of a wild okapi have been obtained, and how the okapi was thought to have been wiped out due to the current civil war. I do not have time to write extensively about this right now, but I'll make a few points.
First, it is not the case that wild…
gregladen | December 19, 2007
Aepyceros melampus. This is one of the more widespread antelopes. Impala can be either grazers or browsers. They are pretty and they taste good.
This herd is located at De Wildt's Reserve very near Johannesburg
gregladen | December 5, 2007
The African Buffalo is NOT a bison, and it is NOT a "water buffalo" (it is not even the same genus as water buffalo). But like these other beasts, it is a kind of cattle.
The scientific name of the African Buffalo, or Cape Buffalo, is Syncerus caffir. Only the most cynical taxonomists would support the continued use of this term. "Caffer" is the same word as "Kaffir" which in modern usage has the same connotation as "Nigger." The term "caffir" or "kaffir" has been dropped from other species names, but as far as I know, not yet from the Cape Buffalo. I don't know why.
This particular…
gregladen | December 4, 2007Go to any bar and you'll see a lot of males standing and sitting around not mating. I'll bet you would have guessed that the reason they are not mating is that no females will mate with them for one reason or another. But there is the distinct possibility that they are very inconspicuously resisting mating opportunities. It turns out that males can do this .... avoid mating without conspicuous resistance ... more easily than females. For obvious reasons.
This could be why what has become (inappropriately) known as "reversed sexual aggression" often goes unnoticed, and a recent study of the…