mammalogy
tetrapodzoology | September 14, 2008
For no particular reason, I was looking through Mary's lemur photos. I saw these and thought them particularly interesting: they show a male Indri Indri indri bark-eating. What makes this individual unusual is that he was missing his left eye (or, at least, had a very damaged left eye). I don't know why and don't know if Mary does either.
As you'll know, indris are the largest extant lemurs, reaching 720 mm in maximum length (snout to tail) and weighing up to 7.5 kg. That's big, but it doesn't approach the sizes reached by some of the extinct species, the biggest of which exceeded 200 kg.…
tetrapodzoology | September 10, 2008
For my shame, I had never been to Ireland prior to last week. That's so crap that I became pretty determined to attend the 56th SVPCA, hosted by the National Museum of Ireland at Dublin, and I'm glad I did. You know, because of the giant deer, hornbills and pliosaurs [montage here shows specimens from the (currently closed) National Museum of Ireland (Natural History). The middle skeleton is a Notoryctes]...
Here I'm going to do a very speedy review of most (but far from all) of the presentations given at the meeting. There was a reasonable amount of non-tetrapod stuff that I won't, of…
tetrapodzoology | September 8, 2008To begin with, I want to thank everyone who continued to visit Tet Zoo while I was away - you managed to keep Tet Zoo in the top 5 on Nature Blog Network - and I was surprised and pleased that several long-running conversations developed in the comments section of the bunny-killing heron article. Awesome, thanks so much. My trip away was great and I had an excellent time, though what wasn't so excellent is that it was literally sandwiched in between two family funerals. I'm ok now though...
For now, all I want to do is showcase the incredible new fossil sperm whale Acrophyseter deinodon,…
tetrapodzoology | August 13, 2008As a kid, among my most favourite books were those of the Casa Editrice AMZ's Animal Life and The Private Lives of Animals series, first published in Italian during the late 1960s and translated into English during the 70s. There are loads of these books, and they all follow the same format: a big painting of the featured animal on the left (with text and a 'Did you know?' feature), and then little paintings reconstructing aspects of daily life on the right. The art is often wonderful, and the poses and scenes from these books have often been faithfully copied by many less gifted artists.…
tetrapodzoology | August 8, 2008
Of course - sorry - it was not a living thylacine, and I'm both impressed and dismayed that the real answer - Zebra duiker or Banded duiker Cephalophus zebra - had been posted within 20 minutes of publication [adjacent photo of C. zebra from the Zebra duiker page on the outstanding Ultimate Ungulate]. Well done Chris (of Catalogue of Organisms) for getting there so quick. I saw the Zebra duiker photo (taken at Sapo National Park in Liberia by a team gathering data on pygmy hippos), on the EDGE blog (here) and thought it would be fun to use for this purpose. And of course now I have a good…
tetrapodzoology | August 3, 2008Unless you've been hiding under a rock, or spending all your time on Tet Zoo, you will almost certainly have heard about the 'Montauk monster', a mysterious carcass that (apparently) washed up on July 13th at Montauk, Long Island, New York. A good photo of the carcass, showing it in right lateral view and without any reference for scale, surfaced on July 30th and has been all over the internet. Given that I only recently devoted a week of posts to sea monsters, it's only fitting that I cover this too. I'm pretty sure that I know what it is, and I'm pleased to see that many other people have…
tetrapodzoology | August 3, 2008Well, here we are at the end of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week. I hope you've all enjoyed it. We're going to finish with a bang by looking at a few - yes, not one, but a few - of the real way-out-there oddballs among the odontocetes. We start with a famous freak individual...
If you've ever read anything about sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus you'll have read the assertion that broken and deformed lower jaws have often been reported in members of this species. It's nice to know this, but why are these broken and deformed lower jaws never figured? Here is perhaps the ultimate…
tetrapodzoology | August 1, 2008Let's face it, all the frickin' weird cetacean skulls we've looked at so far have belonged to frickin' weird cetaceans: sperm whales and river dolphins. Time for something less frickin' weird, though still frickin' weird, if you get my meaning. It's a boring old dolphin. But is it just a boring old dolphin? No, of course not.
Here is the skull of Orcaella brevirostris [the skull shown here is of USNM 199743, image © Smithsonian United States National Museum, courtesy C. McHenry]. Variously termed Irrawaddy or snubfin dolphins, the Orcaella species are entirely tropical and restricted to the…
tetrapodzoology | August 1, 2008You would be forgiven that doubting that this awesome object - displayed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History - is a fossil odontocete skull, but it is. Discovered in Lompoc, California, and as yet unreported in the scientific literature (so far as I can tell), it is the skull of a large predatory sperm whale purportedly closely related to the Japanese Miocene physeterid Brygmophyseter shigensis (but read on).
The extant sperm whale Physeter lacks functional teeth in the upper jaw and in fact even possesses special sockets in the maxillae that house the lower jaw teeth when the…
tetrapodzoology | July 30, 2008More on weird odontocete skulls. This time, another river dolphin: this is the skull of the Amazon river dolphin or Boto Inia geoffrensis, also known as the tonina, bufeo or pink dolphin.
Three generally recognised Inia taxa exist, and views differ as to whether these are subspecies or species. I. g. humboldtiana inhabits the Orinoco basin, I. g. geoffrensis inhabits the better part of the Amazon basin, and I. g. boliviensis (or I. boliviensis) inhabits the Amazon tributaries of Bolivia. A few recent studies have supported species status for I. boliviensis (Banguera-Hinestroza et al. 2002,…
tetrapodzoology | July 29, 2008Yay: day 3 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week. While we've previously been looking at the skulls of extant species, this time we have a fossil (or, actually, a diagram of one: from Muizon 1988). It's Scaphokogia cochlearis from the Miocene Pisco Formation of Peru, described by Muizon (1988). Exhibiting an incredible amount of cranial asymmetry and a wide, round supracranial basin, it's clearly a physeteroid (sperm whale), and the presence of slit-like antorbital notches, absence of nasals and other characters indicate that it's a kogiid (Muizon 1991) (if you need help with the…
tetrapodzoology | July 29, 2008Welcome to day 2 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week, and here we look at one of my favourites: Platanista, the Asian river dolphins or susus. Susu is a Hindi onomatopoetic name based on the exhalation noise these dolphins make, and other local names include susuk, sishuk, shushuk and sishumarch. There are two species: the Indus river dolphin P. minor Owen, 1853 of the Indus and Chenab in Pakistan, and the Ganges river dolphin P. gangetica Roxburgh, 1801 of the Ganges, Meghna and Brahmaputra of India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, the Karnaphuli in Bangladesh, and (possibly) the…
tetrapodzoology | July 27, 2008
Welcome to another of those week-long series of themed posts, produced (ostensibly) to save me from spending time on blogging (other jobs require priority). Previous series have been ankylosaur week and sea monster week. This time round we're looking at seriously frickin' weird cetacean skulls although, actually, we're only going to be looking at odontocetes, as these are (1) the ones I want to write about, and (2) the ones I have neat new photos of. This was, of course, all inspired by the comparative work I recently did on the Tursiops skull. All of the skull photos you're going to be…
tetrapodzoology | July 26, 2008Very late to the party here (the story was first published waaaaaay back on the 18th), but it just seems wrong not to cover this at Tet Zoo. Sincere apologies to the Bleiman brothers at Zooillogix and to John Lynch at Stranger Fruit, both of whom covered the following several days ago, but what the hey, there still might be some people who haven't seen the amazing photos...
Taken by American wildlife photographer Hal Brindley in Kruger National Park, they show that leopards can kill crocodiles when they want to. The leopard tackled the crocodile in the water, pulled it on to land, and…
tetrapodzoology | July 25, 2008We looked previously at a partial skull, collected in northern Africa. Apart from the odd outing when it's been used in teaching, it's been sat in a box on my desk for a couple of years now, forlornly hoping that it might one day earn a place in the peer-reviewed literature. However, that would only apply if it were a fossil, and as we'll see that's contentious.
Anyway, so... what is it?
To begin with, the elongate, pointed rostrum (with stretched premaxillae and maxillae that extend for the entire length of the preserved portion), evidence for a polydont, homodont dentition, enlarged…
tetrapodzoology | July 18, 2008Once upon a time longhorn cattle were abundant and kept by many people; in fact, they were the most abundant domestic cattle, and this breed more than any others was selected for 'improvement' by Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) of Leicestershire, the great pioneer of domestic cattle breeding (note that I'm talking here about English longhorn, not Texas longhorn). Prior to Bakewell's work, cattle of both sexes had been kept together and allowed to breed as and when, but by deliberately selecting certain individuals with certain traits (he was specifically breeding cattle to increase meat yield)…
tetrapodzoology | July 15, 2008I suppose it's not every day you get to appear in a TV series called MonsterQuest. I appear in two places in one episode (first screened last week): once for a little while in the section embedded here, and again much later on. The bit with me starts 2 minutes, 20 seconds in (let's not worry about the bit later on). Things to note: the lion skull that previously featured in one of the articles on the Functional Morphology Conference and (right in the background, covering a small cupboard that contains keys) Steve White's drawing of the big cats of Rancho La Brea...
And am I really an '…
tetrapodzoology | July 12, 2008One last thing for sea monster week... but don't get your hopes up too much. We looked earlier at the Moore's Beach (or Santa Cruz) sea monster, a carcass that was identified as that of a Baird's beaked whale Berardius bairdii. I mentioned the fact that the skull was retained by the California Academy of Sciences. Well, here it is...
As in all beaked whales (or ziphiids), the skull bones posterior to the external nares are elevated, forming a crest that Moore (1968) termed the synvertex.
In most beaked whales, the anterior margin of the synvertex extends dorsally so steeply that it's…
tetrapodzoology | July 8, 2008Welcome to day 2 of sea monster week. This time the featured 'monster' is a beached carcass: it washed ashore at what was then called Moore's Beach (it's now Natural Bridges State Beach), just north-west of Santa Cruz, California, in 1925 and, while identified correctly in virtually all of the cryptozoological literature I've seen, is still identified here and there on the internet (particularly on pro-creationism sites) as an unidentified anomaly that had the experts baffled.
Nope: the real identity of the carcass - usually dubbed the Moore's Beach monster (sometimes the Santa Cruz monster…
tetrapodzoology | July 3, 2008
Time for more borhyaenoids. Finally, we get round to the taxa that you might have seen or read about in prehistoric animal books: the sabre-toothed thylacosmilids, the supposedly bear-like borhyaenids, and the gigantic and even more bear-like proborhyaenids. We previously looked at basal borhyaenoids here, and at the mostly scansorial, mustelid-like hathlyacinids and prothylacinids here. Here we go...
We begin with the borhyaenids (yes, borhyaenid borhyaenoids), a group of about ten genera of superficially dog- or thylacine-like borhyaenoids. The oldest (Nemolestes) is from the Early Eocene…