picture of the day
tetrapodzoology | January 13, 2009Do you remember that weird old Brontornis picture we looked at back in June? Here it is again...
We're not, on this occasion, interested in the Brontornis, but instead in the freaky long-necked duck-billed monster that's menacing it.. or, that it's menacing (impossible to say). That creature - and, from hereon, that's what I'll call it - is some sort of hypothetical composite. If the artist was trying to depict a hadrosaur, or a plesiosaur, then (to put it mildly) they appear not to have been too worried about accuracy. Anyway, the important thing is that you look at its head. Moving on: do…
tetrapodzoology | January 6, 2009
It's not everyday that you discover a shop named after a group of fairly obscure amphibious lipotyphlans. While in Spain last year, I was intrigued by this shop...
I think it sold clothes or something, though frankly I don't recall checking. Here's a close-up of the animal featured on the signage...
Desmans are members of Talpidae (the same group that includes the moles), and there are only two extant species: the Russian desman Desmana moschata and Pyrenean desman Galemys pyrenaicus (there are loads of fossil species though, in about ten extinct genera). Both have a long, sensitive…
tetrapodzoology | January 1, 2009No time at the moment to complete anything for the blog, dammit. So only time for a picture of the day. Inspired by recent comments made here about the whereabouts of the Krayt dragon skeleton from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Matt Wedel has done a great job of both identifying the skeleton, and of tracking down its whereabouts. As he explains, palaeontologists have actually located the skeleton before (David Reynolds and Michael Ryan did so in 1995), and it was also 're-discovered' by the Lucasfilm people during the making of Episode II: The Clone Wars. Check out Matt's article on SV-…
tetrapodzoology | January 1, 2009Oh crap, it's 2009 already (one of my favourite lines from movies is: "They say time is the fire in which we burn". Quiz: where is it from?). Happy New Year! For no reason at all - other than that I'm reading a lot about seabirds at the moment - here is a neat photo of several Black-headed gulls Chroicocephalus ridibundus, taken by my good friend Tina Whitlock.
Chroicocephalus ridibundus is of course the bird that you probably know better as Larus ridibundus: if you missed the big bun-fight (reference) we had here at Tet Zoo about gull taxonomy - and indeed about taxonomy in general - go see…
tetrapodzoology | December 30, 2008One of the lamest things people do on blogs is (in my humble opinion) write about their own blogroll. I mean: how banal, vapid and insipid can you be? Anyway, on an unrelated note, observant readers will note... that I've just updated my blogroll - hooray! - and have added a brand-spanking-new and extremely exciting Speculative Zoology section. Awesome. Just to remind you how awesome speculative zoology can be, here's a picture I stole from Tim Morris's Speculative Dinosaur Project blog: it features a panoply of future penguins...
Having mentioned speculative sphenisciforms, it would be…
tetrapodzoology | December 21, 2008Here's a picture I left on a wall at the edge of the Sahara...
It wasn't random graffiti: we stayed at an auberge where there was a long tradition of this sort of thing. And if you need a close-up of the little figures on the left...
tetrapodzoology | December 17, 2008Since getting back from Morocco I've had no time to do anything for the blog, dammit. Too much to catch up on. But stuff is coming. Meanwhile, here are some interesting pictures. They depict the same sort of creature, but what is it?
I know, I know: easy.
Next: to the Sahara and back! Camels, sauropods, larks, owls! Azure-winged magpies! Exclamation marks!
tetrapodzoology | November 12, 2008It's reasonably well known that fighting male deer are sometimes unable to extricate themselves after tangling their antlers together. Mammoths - which had more strongly curved tusks that living elephants - sometimes had a similar problem, as demonstrated by the famous fighting mammoths from Crawford, Sioux County, Nebraska...
Yes, this fossil is for real (it's accessioned in Washington, D.C. as USNM 2449). The animals belong to the North American species Mammuthus columbi and must have died after becoming locked together. The fossil has been figured a few times since Boucot (1990) discussed…
tetrapodzoology | November 11, 2008I would not like to be bitten by an African rock python Python sebae. Here's why.
Had previously seen this photo on TV but only recently found a version on the web. Apparently, the 4-m-long snake - which had recently eaten a female impala - is dead and died after trying to pass through the electric fence it is 'attacking'. This all happened on Silent Valley Ranch in the Waterberg mountains of South Africa. A few photos exist showing people touching the dead snake, and it was cut open to reveal the impala inside [go here], so despite my initial scepticism I currently think all of this is…
tetrapodzoology | October 26, 2008
Identify the tetrapod. I think this is easy. You might agree, you might not. But then do something else: state the significance of what you can see. That might not be so easy, but then it might. Incidentally, more mysterious aquatic creatures to come soon (in a somewhat longer post): this time of the Lake Dakataua variety...
UPDATE [added 27-10-2008]: no more guesses please, answer is now below.
tetrapodzoology | October 2, 2008
I have lot of toys. Too many. Here are just some of them. Sorry the image is too small, but if you want bigger pics they're all available on my flickr site. Despite all these new theropods (hmm.. Aerosteon. Hmmm) and recently published papers on plesiosaurs, no time for any articles at the moment. Have been killing myself by staying up working to 2am every morning anyway.
I just finished reading Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth (Mike P. Taylor forced me, at gunpoint, to dispense with my 'I don't read fiction' mantra and read it). What the hell was meant to have happened at the end? And…
tetrapodzoology | September 30, 2008I've said it before: it isn't that I don't like giraffes - quite the contrary - it's just that they have a nasty habit of dying in the most bizarre, fascinating ways. And, because they're such big, obvious, famous animals, when they do die in bizarre and fascinating ways, people tend to record it photographically. So, we've previously seen a giraffe killed in a fight by another giraffe, a giraffe hit by a plane, and a giraffe killed on a road by lions. Giraffes also get struck by lightning sometimes, but nobody's yet photographed this happening to my knowledge. The death featured here is…
tetrapodzoology | September 27, 2008
Here are some neat things I saw this week. You get points for identifying stuff or saying interesting things about it. What you see in the adjacent pictures was visible from my back garden within the last few hours. Amazing stuff, though my rather limited photography meant that I couldn't capture everything that happened. Remember: stuff like this is happening all around you, all the time, every day. You already know that of course, but 95% of the urbanised human population of the world don't know it, and it's difficult to know whether they care, or are interested.
Ooh - neat beasts!…
tetrapodzoology | September 16, 2008
Entelodonts were covered briefly on Tet Zoo back in July 2007 (here), when life was oh so different. Here's a brand-new rendition of Entelodon from the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene of western Europe, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and Japan (it's probably the most widely distributed entelodont), kindly provided by Jaime Chirinos of zooartistica.com and used with permission.
Closely related to Late Eocene-Oligocene Archaeotherium from North America, Entelodon was a large entelodont, with good remains of E. deguilhemi from France showing that it reached 1.3 m at the shoulder, and 65 cm in…
tetrapodzoology | August 27, 2008What with the recent articles here on tree-climbing dinosaurs and dromaeosaur tails it seems appropriate to post this image, taken in a German museum (but unfortunately I can't remember which one: let me know if you do). I don't know anything about the mount, but I guess that the people behind it wanted to present the idea that dromaeosaurs might have been in the habit of climbing on their prey during acts of predation, an idea since discussed more seriously by Manning et al. (2006) (although they proposed that the sickle-claws actually functioned as climbing crampons)...
Incidentally - I'm…
tetrapodzoology | August 14, 2008So, conference season is upon us, and I leave you now for a little while. But here's something to have fun with in the meantime... Back at a conference in 2003, Bob Nicholls (of paleocreations.com) and I wasted time during a lecture by drawing silly pictures. Here's mine, Bob's is below the fold. The question you have to answer is... exactly what were we drawing? Note the scale bars: this is a big animal (err, actually rather too big). The sound effects are speculative.
Those who follow the literature on Mesozoic archosaurs will know what this is about. Remember though, don't spoil it for…
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 6, 2008
Amazing news! This mysterious striped mammal was recently photographed by a camera-trap: I won't say where it was photographed as that'll give the game away. What is it? I'll announce the answer soon, but feel free to guess in the meantime (this is not a hoax: the photo really does genuinely depict a wild mammal). Am now going into conference-preparation mode (56th SVPCA, Dublin), so am not going to be posting anything substantial on the blog for a while. I'll try and keep it ticking over with pictures and such though. Dammit, never got to finish the stuff on squirrels, or tortoises. And now…
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…