mammalogy
tetrapodzoology | April 18, 2007
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we keep coming back to the subject of flightless bats. Besides fictional future predators and night stalkers, there never have been any flightless bats so far as we know.
Whenever this subject is discussed however, we have to pay appropriate homage to the most strongly terrestrial bats that we know of: the vampires, and the short-tailed bats (or mystacinids). Vampires were done to death here earlier on in the year (go here)... now, at last, it's the turn of the mystacinids.
New Zealand has - or had - more than its fair share of neat tetrapods,…
tetrapodzoology | April 14, 2007
I'm out in the field tomorrow: whether I blog on what happens will depend on... what happens. Think snakes, sea caves and mammal tracking. Until then, here is a mystery...
What do these horns belong to? They're part of Jon McGowan's collection: he acquired them some years ago from an antique shop (the same sort of place where he previously obtained a head of the remarkable Osborn's caribou), so provenance data of any sort is lacking. While this animal is clearly a bovid, beyond that we're having trouble identifying it. As you can see from the ruler, it's not particularly big: we estimate…
tetrapodzoology | April 1, 2007
In the previous post we looked at the diversity of the rhinogradentians (aka rhinogrades or snouters) belonging to the so-called monorrhinan or uni-snouter division, and we also started to go through the asclerorrhinan or soft-nosed snouter division. Here, in the second post on this much-discussed and highly popular subject, we finish our tour of asclerorrhinans before going on to look at the last and most anatomically complex group, the polyrrhinans or multi-snouters. We finish by looking at the modern-day renaissance in rhinogradentian research: an endeavour which has resulting in the…
tetrapodzoology | March 31, 2007
I am always surprised when I meet zoologists who aren't familiar with Harald Stumpke's* famous 1957 book Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia, a volume translated into English by Leigh Chadwick in 1967 as The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades (and referred to from hereon as 'Stumpke 1967'). For the few who don't know, this legendary text discusses in marvellous detail the biology, lifestyle and evolution of the snouters (aka rhinogrades or rhinogradentians), a bizarre and unique group of small mammals originally thought endemic to the south Pacific Hi-yi-yi archipelago, an island group…
tetrapodzoology | March 30, 2007
One last post on British felids, and if you're bored or uninterested in cats.. well, sorry. Rhinogradentians next (though with a nod to Cretaceous zygodactyl birds, burrowing ornithopods, prosauropods, and the new azhdarchoid pterosaurs that Dave Martill and Mark Witton showed me today). Anyway, in the previous post on the mastiff cat hypothesis I included some discussion of the small, black felids we now know we have in the country. They are named Kellas cats due to the fact that the first specimen to be obtained, a male shot dead in 1983 by Tomas Christie, came from near Kellas in West…
tetrapodzoology | March 29, 2007
In the previous post I discussed some of the interesting goings-on that happened at the 1st Annual Big Cats in Britain Conference, held at Hull between the 23rd and 25th March. If you found any of the stuff I covered interesting, then you'll be pleased and (hopefully) intrigued to know that I didn't even get round to writing about the stuff I found really interesting. As promised, there are some revelations which - if valid - are just jaw-slackeningly amazing...
In the previous post I wrote briefly about Kellas cats, a population of melanistic felids first discovered in 1984 and now known…
tetrapodzoology | March 28, 2007
I've said it before, but it's worth saying again: we live in exciting times. When new Cretaceous theropod dinosaurs and bizarre fossil lizards come out of the woodwork thick and fast; when highly obscure, recently discovered birds are relocated or reported for just the second or third time; and when new technology and forms of analysis allow us to realise - for the first time - that ordinary animals do the most extraordinary things. I'm referring there to a whole slew of recent discoveries that I'd blog about if I had time. I don't. And I'm here, as you know full well, to write about cats.…
tetrapodzoology | March 21, 2007
So, at last, it's that war rhinos post you've all been waiting for...
Remember that all the things I promise will appear eventually, it's just that these things take time. Tetrapod Zoology is becoming an increasingly active site that now generally gets over 1000 hits a day, so to all those who visit regularly, and to those who leave comments, many thanks. Please note that I'm starting to expand the about me section of the site: I've recently added a list of publications and will be adding links to pdfs as and when they become available. On the subject of things becoming available, those of…
tetrapodzoology | March 16, 2007
The naming of any new large mammal species is always an exciting event, and within the past few days you've probably heard much in the news about the formal recognition of a new species of extant big cat: the Indonesian clouded leopard Neofelis diardi (that's not its formal common name by the way, but it'll do for the time being). However, I confess to being somewhat confused...
You'd think from some of the global media that (1) N. diardi has only just been discovered, and (2) the study announcing its discovery has only just been published. On the first count, I note that the wording used by…
tetrapodzoology | March 14, 2007
Those of you interested in the whole Australian mega-cats issue may recall my discussion of the Lithgow footage, filmed in 2001 by Gail Pound and her husband Wayne on their camcorder. I first saw the footage at a 2006 conference where it was shown and discussed by Australian cryptozoologist Paul Cropper...
To remind you, here is what I said about the footage in that previous blog post...
We start with a daytime shot of a perfectly normal grey domestic cat, sat on a shrub-covered hillside near a stand of trees. Then the camera pans to the right. From behind the trees slowly emerges a big…
tetrapodzoology | March 13, 2007
Predators don't just kill 'prey' species; they also kill other predators whenever given the chance. Lions kill hyenas and cheetahs, tigers kill dholes, dholes kill tigers, wolves kill bears, otters kill mink... dinosaurs kill dinosaurs...
For various reasons my early plan to produce a new blog post every day has fallen by the wayside, as well it might given that this would cause me to spend what 'computer time' I have doing blog writing and nothing else. So in the interests of churning out new material, I have for a while been recycling old texts wherever possible. Several years ago, Dave…
tetrapodzoology | March 12, 2007
This one's doing the rounds at the moment, you've probably already seen it. Funnily enough I have an old article on file (well, on my office wall) about a giant Red squirrel Sciurus vulgaris that attacked a bunch of cub scouts back in the 1980s.. it would have been about this size. The article was titled 'Tufty terror slashes sprogs' and was published in that most reliable of academic sources, The Sunday Sport. The author, if I remember correctly, was a Mr Ollocks, first name Bertie.
Thanks to Tony Butcher.
tetrapodzoology | March 4, 2007
A few bits of circumstantial evidence suggest to some that feral cats in Australia are now reaching enormous sizes, equivalent to that of a small leopard. This sounds incredible: how does the evidence hold up?
Tetrapod Zoology exists in a delicate balance. On the one hand I want to try and maintain some sort of credibility as a trained scientist, but on the other hand there is a strong incentive to write about the fantastic, the incredible, and the bizarre, simply because this is what generates the hits. More people will read a post about Godzilla or sasquatch than about tree frogs or small…
tetrapodzoology | February 25, 2007
One of the most remarkable organs in nature might have one of the most remarkable functions, if the results of a recent study are to be accepted...
I lectured this weekend on the evolutionary history of whales, so am feeling pretty inspired about cetaceans and their history. Actually, it's always a good time to get inspired about the evolution of whales, given that this is such a happening area in vertebrate palaeontology nowadays. Recent years have seen the description of multiple new fossil ziphiids and mysticetes, and a huge amount of new work on stem-group cetaceans like pakicetids and…
tetrapodzoology | February 22, 2007
By now you've probably heard the news: chimpanzees have been reported manufacturing, and using, spears (Gibbons 2007, Pruetz & Bertolani 2007). I'll say that again. Chimps Pan troglodytes make and use spears....
Specifically, the chimps concerned are of the subspecies P. t. verus, a taxon that some researchers (Morin et al. 1994, 1995) have tentatively elevated to specific status. As reported in Current Biology by Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University and Paco Bertolani of the University of Cambridge, the observations concern the 35 chimps of the Fongoli site in Senegal. On more than 20…
tetrapodzoology | February 17, 2007
So in the previous post - required reading before you get through this one, sorry - we looked at the various hypotheses that have been published on the origin of sanguivory (blood feeding) in vampire bats. We saw that only two hypotheses matched with the phylogenetic pattern of feeding styles seen in phyllostomid bats and their relatives, and of those two theories - one proposing that vampires evolved from oxpecker-like ectoparasite-eaters, and the other proposing that vampires originated as insectivores that switched to wound-feeding - both have shortcomings. However, one final hypothesis…
tetrapodzoology | February 16, 2007
Continuing the vampire theme, I here want to discuss another of those really, really interesting things about vampire bats: namely, how did their blood-feeding behaviour evolve in the first place?
First off, a big thank you to everyone who's been visiting, commenting and generally saying nice things. The Speculative Zoology post in particular generated a lot of recent interest, and as of yesterday Tetrapod Zoology was the third most-hit site in the scienceblogs community (though still way way behind Pharyngula of course). For some reason I'm unable to post new comments on the Speculative…
tetrapodzoology | February 12, 2007
In the previous post we saw that vampire bats were more diverse and more widespread during the Pleistocene than are they today. Two things stand out (to me) as being particularly interesting; firstly, that some of these vampires seem to have differed in morphology, and therefore presumably in ecology and behaviour, from the living vampire species; and secondly, that some of these vampires survived until very, very recently. Here, we look at these two areas in more detail...
What species were these fossil vampires feeding from? Of the three living vampires, both the Hairy-legged vampire…
tetrapodzoology | February 11, 2007
In the previous post we looked at the biology and behaviour of vampire bats. This time we're going to take things a little bit further...
Prior to the spread of people and domestic livestock, it is thought that vampires (here we're mostly talking about the Common vampire Desmodus rotundus) most likely fed on capybaras, tapirs, peccaries, deer and birds, though we also know that they sometimes feed on fruit bats and reptiles. Populations that live on islands off the Peruvian and Chilean coasts feed on seabirds and sealions. Now that the Americas are full of millions of cattle, horses,…
tetrapodzoology | February 8, 2007
I am fascinated by bats, and I wish I knew more about them. And among the most fascinating of bats are one of the few groups that all people around the world have heard of: the vampires....
Various non-sanguivorous bats are regarded as vampires by various people in various parts of the world, but true vampires - the only truly sanguivorous bats and indeed only sanguivorous mammals - are unique to the American tropics. Though often classified in their own microbat family, Desmodontidae, it is universally agreed today that vampires are part of the American leaf-nosed bat family Phyllostomidae…