mammalogy
tetrapodzoology | February 8, 2007
Watch this space. Full post to appear within next few hours. Keep these thoughts in mind; (1) vampire bats increase dramatically in numbers when megafauna (like modern livestock) are abundant; (2) there were lots more megafaunal elements in the Pleistocene than there are today. Hmm...
tetrapodzoology | February 2, 2007
Giraffine giraffes (that is, the giraffid clade that includes Giraffa and its closest relatives) are famous for being long necked, with the usual explanation for the neck being that it evolved to enable these animals to avoid competing with other browsers.
But for this assumption to be experimentally supported you'd have to show that giraffes use their long necks to forage high up, and show that giraffes have a competitive advantage over shorter browsers. Surprisingly, it has been argued that these assumptions don't hold up. In some areas, over 50% of all giraffe browsing is done below 2 m…
tetrapodzoology | January 30, 2007
Sloths. Were there predatory sloths? Sloths that lived in the sea? Sloths that dug immense tunnels? Sloths on Antarctica? Sloths so keen to get to the US of A that they didn't wait for the land bridge, but swam the way instead? Well, let's see...
Today I was asked a question about sloths. Sloths are among my favourite mammals, and hence I feel particularly guilty in not having blogged about them, though I did publish a review article on them fairly recently (Naish 2005). Not only does this distraction allow me to delay yet further those promised posts on blood-feeding birds and bats,…