mammals
laelaps | January 18, 2010A stuffed fox squirrel (Sciurus niger), photographed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
laelaps | January 17, 2010A dolphin skull, photographed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
laelaps | January 16, 2010The skeleton of a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), photographed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. (Notice the foramina, or small holes, in the upper jaw. In life these housed blood vessels that nourished the whale's baleen plates. They are also useful anatomical clues in determining which fossil whales had baleen.)
laelaps | January 13, 2010A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | January 13, 2010
I heard, but did not see, wolves when I visited Yellowstone National Park this past summer, but the Nature film team had better luck during a winter in the same park. The above clip is a portion of the footage they shot and will be featured in the upcoming documentary "Clash: Encounters of Bears and Wolves." It is set to premiere this coming Sunday on PBS.
grrlscientist | January 13, 2010tags: art, wildlife art, stop-motion painting, Lanjak Dawn, Crowned Flying Lizard, Orang-utan, entertainment, Carel Brest van Kempen, streaming video
This is yet another fascinating stop-motion video of the creation of artist Carel Brest van Kempen's painting, Lanjak Dawn. This is his first major painting to receive the time-lapse treatment. In this piece, a male Crowned Flying Lizard displays to a prospective mate in a Bornean forest while a big male Orang-utan calls from his sleeping nest. Featuring music; I Formed the World with my Tongue, I Cleared the Bar with my Diaphragm and Haloumi,…
laelaps | January 12, 2010Restoration of the skull of Thylacoleo. From The Ancient Life History of the Earth.
Thylacoleo was one strange mammal. A close relative of living koalas, kangaroos, and wombats, the largest species of Thylacoleo were lion-sized carnivores that stalked the Australian continent between 2 million and 45 thousand years ago. Despite its popular nickname "marsupial lion", however, Thylacoleo was quite different from any feline predator. Even though its long forelimbs were tipped with retractable claws its skull more closely resembled that of a koala, with curved incisors set in front of a pair of…
laelaps | January 10, 2010Zeff the Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | January 9, 2010A female mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), photographed in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
laelaps | January 8, 2010A comparison between the complete skull of a Glyptodon and the skull fragments of a fetal specimen. (From Zurita et al, 2009)
Early in 2009 a team of paleontologists led by Philip Gingerich announced the discovery of a baby archaeocete (early whale) embedded inside the skeleton of an adult of the same species. Since these fossils represented a new species of fossil whale to boot the story was immediately picked up by news outlets, but less well-publicized was another discovery made later the same year. In the pages of Comptes Rendus Palevol paleontologists Alfredo Zurita, Angel Mino-Boilinia…
laelaps | January 5, 2010A restoration of Mammalodon by Brian Choo (published in Fitzgerald, 2009).
In the introduction to his 1883 lecture on whales, the English anatomist William Henry Flower said;
Few natural groups present so many remarkable, very obvious, and easily appreciated illustrations of several of the most important general laws which appear to have determined the structure of animal bodies, as that selected for my lecture this evening. We shall find the effects of the two opposing forces--that of heredity or conformation to ancestral characters, and that of adaptation to changed environment, whether…
laelaps | January 2, 2010A red panda (Ailurus fulgens), photographed at Turtleback Zoo in New Jersey.