crurotarsans
tetrapodzoology | November 8, 2008We all know that many birds feed their young. Nowadays, many of us are also familiar with the idea that hadrosaurs and other dinosaurs might also have fed their young. Far less well known is the possibility that crocodilians may do this too, at least sometimes. As with those fruit-eating alligators, I have John Brueggen of the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park to thank for the video you see here (and thanks, again, to Tim Isles for bringing this subject to my attention in the first place).
In the video shown here, a female Siamese crocodile Crocodylus siamensis allows her babies to…
tetrapodzoology | October 30, 2008
Do you remember the photo - provided courtesy of Colin McHenry - showing a variety of crocodilian skulls? I published it in an article on the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting, and here it is again. The challenge was to try and identify the largest skull. Suggestions included Saltwater croc Crocodylus porosus, outsized American croc C. acutus or Slender-snouted croc Mecistops cataphractus, but it's none of those (for the resurrection of the genus Mecistops Gray, 1844 for cataphractus see McAiley et al. 2006). The monster skull is in fact that of a False gharial Tomistoma schlegelii. Yes, a…
tetrapodzoology | October 2, 2008
A few years ago Brito et al. (2002) published a brief but very interesting little paper in which they reported frugivory in Broad-snouted caimans Caiman latirostris. Two captive Brazilian animals were observed and photographed feeding on the fruit of Philodendron selloum [photo here is Fig. 1 from Brito et al. (2002)]. They later offered fruit to the caimans again "and frugivory was confirmed with other caimans from the pen" (p. 96: the ambiguous wording indicates that other individuals were happy to accept and eat the fruit as well). Apparently, herbivory has been recorded on quite a few…
tetrapodzoology | June 1, 2008
The silence must have been deafening. As - hopefully - everybody knows, during 2007 Spencer Lucas and colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were charged with intellectual theft, of pre-empting the writings of colleagues, and of publishing on material without getting an OK from those based at the repository where the relevant specimens were held (all of this is documented in painstaking detail here). In particular, they apparently pre-empted Bill Parker's in-press paper on a new aetosaur genus, and appeared to take credit for Jeff Martz's re-…
tetrapodzoology | February 6, 2008
While googling for astrapothere images recently I came across the image used here: wow! This is a life-sized reconstruction of the gigantic Miocene alligatoroid Purussaurus, first named in 1892 for P. brasiliensis from the Upper Miocene Solimões Formation of Brazil. Most of the salient features that are diagnostic for Purussaurus can be seen in the reconstruction: the snout is incredibly deep, wide, rounded at its tip, and decorated with bumps and ridges, the dorsal surface of the snout is strongly concave, the external bony nostril opening was proportionally huge and anteroposteriorly…
tetrapodzoology | January 30, 2008
Long time readers will, I'm sure, recall Tet Zoo's role as whistle-blower back in April 2007. The article that started all the trouble - The armadillodile diaries, a story of science ethics - was posted here. Well, as you'll know if you've seen today's Nature, a new article by Rex Dalton brings this story to wider attention...
For those who haven't read the original Tet Zoo article and can't be bothered to do so now, the story is - to put it very briefly - that Spencer Lucas and some of his colleagues (Andy Heckert, Justin Spielmann and Adrian Hunt) at the New Mexico Museum of Natural…