herpetology
tetrapodzoology | October 28, 2007
Welcome back, err, me! And, while I could have started with 'here are the things I saw on holiday', I became concerned that my list of bats and raptors might seem a bit mundane in comparison to what certain of my friends have encountered (wait until you see what Carel got to see). Anyway, to business. Tet Zoo regulars will know that I've had a thing about anurans (frogs and toads) recently (go here, here or here); the reasons for this will become clear soon enough. And to make things easier in the articles that will follow, I thought it might be a good idea to produce a short article on…
tetrapodzoology | October 19, 2007
Yesterday - the day I posted an article on horned treefrogs - there was a peak on the site stats graph. In view of that I'm thinking that weird anurans are popular, so I'll try the same trick again. This time round we're looking at another group of 'horned' anurans: the Brazilian smooth horned frogs of the genus Proceratophrys. This time I really will try and keep it brief: I have ichthyosaurs to deal with...
Like the hemiphractids we saw yesterday, smooth horned frogs are wide-skulled ambush predators that hide on forest floors in tropical South American forests, specifically those of…
tetrapodzoology | October 18, 2007
As per bloody usual, I'm going to struggle to get a 'proper' post finished today, so yet again I'll have to settle for posting something short and sweet (PS - I failed miserably). Who am I kidding anyway - 95% of the bloggers in the blogosphere routinely produce articles that are shorter than my 'short' posts. I'm sure Tet Zoo readers know how lucky they are :) I'm reading a lot about obscure frogs and toads at the moment, hence the adjacent image. But more on that in a moment. Let me start by saying a very belated congrats to Brian Switek - better known as Laelaps - for hitting the big time…
tetrapodzoology | October 17, 2007
Here's a photo of one of my favourite anurans: the fantastic Helmeted water toad, or Gay's frog* Caudiverbera caudiverbera, a large, robust Chilean species (the only extant member of its genus) that is said to mostly feed on other anurans (though it also eats insects and other arthopods, fishes and even small birds and mammals)...
Females can reach an SVL (that's snout-to-vent-length) of 320 mm, which is huge. Its larvae reach a ridiculous size of about 150 mm and take about two years to metamorphose. Together with another obscure Chilean anuran (Telmatobufo), Caudiverbera has conventionally…
tetrapodzoology | October 16, 2007
I have tried desperately to not be distracted by the mysterious rodents, new gigantic dinosaurs and Iberian lynxes that have been on my mind lately - plus lots of things are happening with the 'Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective' conference that I'm co-organising with Dick Moody, Eric Buffetaut and Dave Martill (to be held in May 2008: more news later). Before the whole white squirrel thing, I was talking about cryptozoology (here), in particular on the ideas that (1) a cryptid is any animal reported from anecdotal data (i.e., it does not have to be a 'monster'), and that (2) given that…
tetrapodzoology | October 10, 2007
By naughtily avoiding the long list of things that I'm supposed to be doing in my 'spare' time I've finally done it: adapted my monumental, keynote cryptozoology conference speech into an article(s) for publication here at Tet Zoo. Ok, so it wasn't so 'monumental' or 'keynote', but I thought I might as well recycle it anyway (for more on the conference in question see the article here). The general message here might, by now, be familiar to Tet Zoo regulars, as I've been promoting the same view for a while now...
The talk included several hundred words on the discoveries made by Marc van…
tetrapodzoology | October 9, 2007
There's no way I'm going to have time today to post any of the promised articles - sorry. Once more, all I can do to combat the frustration is post a picture of the day: this one depicts the head of a Green turtle Chelonia mydas and was provided by Dave Hone, thanks Dave. Chelonia is a wide-ranging oceanic cheloniid (or hard-shelled sea turtle). Its common name comes from the colour of its body fat, not from the colour of its scutes or skin. The fact that its generic name is the same as that sometimes used for the entire turtle clade explains why turtle workers mostly prefer to use the name…
tetrapodzoology | October 7, 2007
So I've told you all about the Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting (three links), and I've told you all about the 55th SVPCA (here and here). But there was a third conference I attended recently (August 17th-19th) that I have yet to write about - it was that cryptozoology one. As some of you might recall, I'm going to avoid using the name of the meeting: it's not that there's anything wrong with the name... it's just that it doesn't exactly do the whole subject of cryptozoology any favours. But, anyway, here are my assorted thoughts. As usual, I'm not going to cover everything, just the…
tetrapodzoology | October 5, 2007
Time permitting... coming next: that cryptozoology stuff. If I say any more I'll spoil the surprise (there are a few technical errors in the map shown here - it's not meant to be totally accurate. It depicts various extant and recently-extinct Caribbean tetrapods. Well done to anyone who can name all the taxa).
tetrapodzoology | September 25, 2007
Without doubt, one of the coolest living animals on the planet is the Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis, a giant flesh-eating lizard that kills water buffalo, eats children, harbours noxious oral bacteria and is impervious to bullets (ok, I made that last bit up)...
Unknown to western science until 1912 (when it was 'discovered' by J. K. H. van Steyn van Hensbroek, and described in the same year by P. A. Ouwens), it reaches a maximum authenticated length of 3.5 m and can weigh about 250 kg (Steel 1996). In contrast to most other monitors, its legs and tail become proportionally short and…
tetrapodzoology | September 24, 2007
So I've done the pterosaur meeting; now you all know all about it. But what about the 55th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, held at the University of Glasgow between August 29th and September 1st, and described for some reason as 'The best conference ever', I hear you cry? After much deliberation I have decided to do a brief rundown of the tetrapod talks: and my intention is to be as brief as possible about talks and their contents, not to review them at length or properly summarise them. As usual, I regret that I'm only covering those talks that appealed to me…
tetrapodzoology | August 3, 2007
The other day I had to prize the skeletal jaws from a dead hedgehog. Well, ok, I didn't have to... And what's with all the Green woodpeckers Picus viridis that are around at the moment? Still, I remain very very busy with day-jobs and conference preparation, but in the interests of - as promised - keeping Tet Zoo ticking over, here is a lovely picture that will have many of you cock-a-hoop with excitement. My god, I'm turning into Mark Witton...
... no, of course not. The picture depicts (left to right) the basal placodont Placodus gigas from Middle Triassic Germany, the cyamodontid…
tetrapodzoology | July 30, 2007
My job at Impossible Pictures finished last week (though I am still doing the odd day here and there and am likely to go back to them in the future). Sigh, so much for digging myself out of that immense financial pit I'm still in. Anyway, today I start work on a new job involving... marine reptiles. I'll say more about it in the future. Partly as a result of this, I post here another picture very kindly supplied by Mike Skrepnick, and used with his permission (image © Mike Skrepnick, used with permission). Created for a new mural at Dinosaur Provincial Park, it depicts a scene in the…
tetrapodzoology | July 21, 2007
It isn't every day that your friends make the cover of Science magazine. Belated congrats to my friend Randy Irmis and his colleagues Sterling Nesbitt, Kevin Padian and others for their neat work on the dinosauromorph assemblage of Hayden Quarry, New Mexico (Irmis et al. 2007). Exciting stuff. Why? Well...
At Hayden Quarry, Norian-aged sediments of the Chinle Formation preserve temnospondyls, drepanosaurids, aetosaurs and diverse other crurotarsans, and dinosauromorphs. The big deal is this: despite the Late Triassic date of the assemblage, Irmis et al. (2007) have been able to demonstrate…
tetrapodzoology | July 12, 2007
Hooray: another of those articles that I've been promising to publish for weeks and weeks.
Thanks mostly to the importance of the species in the international pet trade, the Green iguana Iguana iguana is typically imagined as a rather uninspiring lizard that sits around on branches all day long, occasionally munching on salad or sitting in its water bowl. It's true that some captive individuals become remarkably charismatic and idiosyncratic, but for the most part the Green iguana is generally thought of as a rather dull animal that doesn't really do much of interest. Today we're going to…
tetrapodzoology | July 9, 2007
At last, I fulfill those promises of more temnospondyls. Last time we looked at the edopoids, perhaps the most basal temnospondyl clade: here we look at the rest of the basal forms. Scary predators, marine piscivores, late-surviving relics, and some unfortunate beasts burned alive in forest fires...
Studies on temnospondyl phylogeny mostly agree that 'post-edopoid' temnospondyls form a clade, the most basal members of which include Capetus, Dendrerpeton and Balanerpeton (Milner & Sequeira 1994, 1998, Holmes et al. 1998, Ruta et al. 2003a, b) [though some workers have found some of these…
tetrapodzoology | July 4, 2007
Today I submitted another one of those long-delayed manuscripts. Yay. I also got to work preparing one of the three conference talks I'm supposed to be giving this year - how the hell I'm going to pull off all three I'm not sure. Anyway, leaving well alone the whole picture-of-the-day debacle, it's time for a proper post. Last time we looked at the edopoids, one of the most basal clades of temnospondyls, and in the next post I plan to write about some of the other basal temnospondyls.
Ever trying to recycling old text that sits, un-used, on disks, drives and memory-sticks, here I'm going to…
tetrapodzoology | June 29, 2007
Like plethodontid salamanders, Wealden dinosaurs, and rhinogradentians, the remarkably successful and diverse tetrapods known as temnospondyls have been riding the Tet Zoo wagon right since the earliest posts of ver 1. But, to my shame, I've never gotten round to completing one of the ten or so posts that I plan to publish on them. If you're interested in tetrapod evolutionary history and haven't heard of temnospondyls before, it's time to get learning, as they were one of the most diverse, abundant and ecologically significant tetrapod groups of the Palaeozoic and early Mesozoic [adjacent…
tetrapodzoology | June 18, 2007
In an effort to get through all the blog posts I've started but have yet to finish, I thought I may as well start with this one on, of course, plethodontid salamanders (aka lungless salamanders). It started life as part of the same article as the ver 1 post here: this was essentially an introduction to plethodontid diversity and phylogeny. In particular I waxed lyrical about the huge number of new species that have been named since 1985 (many of which come from well-studied regions of North America), and I frothed at the mouth with excitement over the recently described Korean crevice…
tetrapodzoology | June 15, 2007
Among the most surreal snakes are (in my opinion) the turtle-headed sea snakes, or Aipysurus-group hydrophiids...
They are specialist predators of fish eggs: with their reduced compliment of stiffened labial scales, they scrape the eggs off rocks, and also use the spike on the snout tip to dig eggs out of the substrate. Their jaw musculature is unique (probably because they employ suction to get the eggs into the mouth), and they have a strongly reduced dentition. I published two articles on sea snakes on ver 1 here and here, and have yet to get round to publishing the promised third article…