mammals
laelaps | December 24, 2009A female pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) and two fawns, photographed in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
laelaps | December 22, 2009One of Charles R. Knight's wonderful paintings of woolly mammoths walking through the snow of ancient Europe. On display at the Field Museum in Chicago.
When did the last woolly mammoths die?
There is no easy answer to the question. In its heyday the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) was distributed across much of the northern hemisphere, from southern Spain to the eastern United States, and the entire species did not simply lay down and die at one particular moment. Some populations (such as the "dwarf" mammoths of Wrangel Island) survived until about 4,000 years ago, but most of the…
laelaps | December 22, 2009A pair of playing grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
edyong | December 20, 2009Safaris are all about the big game. But even though elephants, leopards and rhinos (oh my!) fill your lens and retinas on a daily basis, it's still just as wonderful to watch a squirrel scamper through a tree. This species is known in South Africa simply as a tree squirrel, or Smith's bush squirrel more broadly. Its golden coat with tinges of rust and green make it a far more handsome creature than the common grey squirrels that run through London's parks. It lacks none of their characteristic agility either, as the video below will demonstrate. I spent a good half-hour watching this…
laelaps | December 17, 2009A giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.
laelaps | December 16, 2009A comparison of the third molars from three species of Pakicetus as viewed from the back. (From Cooper et al., 2009)
Crack open just about any recent popular overview of evolution (namely Why Evolution is True, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters) and somewhere inside you will find a string of skeletal whales. Starting with either Indohyus or Pakicetus, the illustration will feature a graded series of forms that connect modern whales with their terrestrial ancestors. A caveat may be included in the text to say that we cannot be absolutely sure…
laelaps | December 16, 2009A giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.
laelaps | December 15, 2009Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata), photographed at the Central Park Zoo, NY.
laelaps | December 9, 2009A male pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), photographed on the side of a Wyoming highway.
edyong | December 8, 2009On Nicobar Island, in the Indian Ocean, a most unusual hunting party is searching for food. Through the branches of the forest, the tiny Nicobar treeshrew scuttles about searching for insects. They're followed by the racket-tailed drongo, a small bird that picks off juicy morsels flushed out by the foraging treeshrews. So far, this isn't unusual - many distantly related animals forage together, either because they net more food or because they can watch out for predators.
But this alliance has a third an altogether more surprising member - a sparrowhawk. This bird of prey is five times…
edyong | December 7, 2009Many human languages achieve great diversity by combining basic words into compound ones - German is a classic example of this. We're not the only species that does this. Campbell's monkeys have just six basic types of calls but they have combined them into one of the richest and most sophisticated of animal vocabularies.
By chaining calls together in ways that drastically alter their meaning, they can communicate to each other about other falling trees, rival groups, harmless animals and potential threats. They can signal the presence of an unspecified threat, a leopard or an eagle, and…
edyong | December 6, 2009
There's nothing like going on safari, rounding a corner in your open-top jeep and catching a glimpse of your first wild animals. Which will almost certainly be impala. Much camera-clicking, oohing and aahing ensues.
Three days later... you have seen enough impala for a lifetime. They are everywhere. Sometimes, you'll drive for an hour, see nothing at all, catch a glimpse of movement, hurry towards it only to find yet another herd of impala. You start to resent the impala for not being something more interesting, for deigning to be commonplace when they could be, say, hunting dogs. You…