herpetology
tetrapodzoology | June 8, 2007
Here is a cool photo, taken by either Steve Salisbury or Dino Frey, and previously published in a short article of mine on crocodilians. Initially I was going to use a really neat photo I have of a Cuban crocodile Crocodylus rhombifer leaping vertically from the water to grab a dead hutia, but then I became unsure about copyright and opted for something else. The photo featured here is of an Indopacific/Estuarine/Saltwater crocodile C. porosus. Unlike other Crocodylus, C. porosus possesses twin longitudinal ridges running along the length of the snout, and it lacks postoccipital scutes. It…
tetrapodzoology | May 31, 2007
It has always been rumoured that some snakes grow to sizes that exceed the 10 m record generally accepted as the authenticated maximum: this was for a Reticulated python Python reticulatus shot on Sulawesi in 1912. Numerous stories and anecdotes discuss Reticulated pythons and anacondas Eunectes murinus that far exceed this, with the most famous of these stories being Major Percy Fawcett's 19 m long anaconda that he claimed to have shot in the Brazilian Rio Abuna in 1907 [scene depicted in adjacent image]. Despite its immense length, Fawcett reported that this snake had a width of just 30 cm…
tetrapodzoology | 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 neck. How it lived is still a mystery and there are several competing ideas. It was not a one-off freak: it was widely distributed across Europe and the Middle East for something like 20 million years, and evolved multiple species that differed in size and proportions.
tetrapodzoology | 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, supported anteriorly by a tall vertical spine. A new generic name for this taxon is in press and due to be published soon. If this 'picture of the day' thing is new to you, check out picture 1 here. I previously blogged about tapejarids and their relatives at ver 1 here.
tetrapodzoology | 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 University of Bristol's Barbara Sánchez-Hernández and Mike Benton on the fossil vertebrates from the Galve region of Teruel Province, NE Spain. This is a really rich site, best known for its sauropods and mammals, and it's been the focus of much research since the 1950s. Our new paper - a large synthesis…
tetrapodzoology | 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 pterosaurs, the behaviour of hadrosaurs, and the discovery of multiple (yes, multiple) new large mammal species in the Amazon...
If you live in a northern place where anguids occur, you might regard these lizards as denizens of predominantly subtropical or temperate climates. The vast majority of…
tetrapodzoology | 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, part of it might be that we Brits have such a poor reptile fauna that we hold those few species we do have in special regard, and part of it might be that they're really cute and cool to look at. Slow-worms (there are actually two species: A. fragilis, and A. cephallonica of the Peloponnese and…
tetrapodzoology | 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 minors.
Believe it or don't, turtles are horrifically well-endowed, and if the thought of learning more about the genitals of these oh-so-surprising reptiles doesn't appeal to you, look away now. Last warning. Ok, here we go. To begin with, I have to confess that I actually know very little about the…
tetrapodzoology | 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 photos that resulted, and perhaps accompany some of those photos with a little bit of text. As with previous attempts to produce 'text-lite' posts of this sort, I failed miserably...
What's been happening at Tet Zoo lately I hear you ask? Besides that long-awaited British dinosaurs paper, I've had a few…
tetrapodzoology | 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 armadillo-like generalists. But it's not just their lifestyles that have been the subject of controversy. By following the publication dates of various recent technical papers on these animals, it seems that some aetosaur workers themselves have been acting in a controversial manner...
Aetosaur fossils were…
tetrapodzoology | 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 find such animals just as interesting as the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, giant flightless birds, big cats and whales that I also sometimes write about. I need to get something off my chest, and to those interested in Mesozoic reptiles, you will be pleased to hear that it concerns aetosaurs, the…
tetrapodzoology | March 11, 2007
Most of us have grown up with the idea that the Mesozoic Era was, excepting the Early Triassic, a time when dinosaurs dominated life on land. Or, put another way, a time when dinosaurs were the most ecologically significant and most obvious of all land animals. The familiar generalization, recounted in every book on Mesozoic life, is that dinosaurs were the only diverse big-bodied land vertebrates during the Jurassic and Cretaceous and, for as long as this was the case, other tetrapod groups were unable to achieve big body size. But in the same way that the modern world isn't really '…
tetrapodzoology | March 9, 2007
It's not all dinosaurs, killer eagles, blue whales, vampires and giant feral cats you know... as planned, I did spend Wednesday evening out in the field looking for newts (for the purposes of this discussion, newt = any member of the amphibian clade Salamandridae that is aquatic during the breeding season). Admittedly 'the field' may not quite be the appropriate term, as the newts we were searching for were a rumoured population reported to inhabit an ornamental pond in the middle of Southampton city centre. It's great, the way people look at you, as you march through an urban area with your…
tetrapodzoology | February 19, 2007
If you like amphibians and non-avian reptiles, Britain is a crappy place to live: we have just three native lizard species, three snakes, three newts, two toads and two frogs. But do we have a few more: are various 'neglected natives' lurking in our midst?
This depauperate herpetofauna mostly owes itself to the fact that Britain was glaciated for most of the time that it was connected to the European mainland, and by the time conditions were more equable there was a window of just a few thousand years before (at about 7000 years ago) the English Channel formed. As a result of all this the…