speculative zoology
tetrapodzoology | November 19, 2007
If you're like me, you'll know the TV series, and/or the book, well...
Reminiscing about it now, it's impossible to forget how awesome it was. And it was so much more than a history of the carnivorans: it involved dinosaurs, mesonychians, pristichampsines, glyptodonts, future predators, and some plain awesome real-life sequences of carnivorans doing what they do best. I'm hoping to post the full article tonight. And if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about you're definitely in for a surprise!
tetrapodzoology | October 5, 2007
Time permitting... coming next: that cryptozoology stuff. If I say any more I'll spoil the surprise (there are a few technical errors in the map shown here - it's not meant to be totally accurate. It depicts various extant and recently-extinct Caribbean tetrapods. Well done to anyone who can name all the taxa).
tetrapodzoology | August 5, 2007
Among the most popular of areas I've covered on Tet Zoo ver 2 has been speculative zoology. Those of you who know the articles in question (go here) might recall Steve White's picture of future animals, which I'm posting here again. I've recently learnt that Steve now has his own blog, Thunderlizard, and in this article he explains some of the thinking behind the animals in the piece. I must elaborate on my own contribution some time: surely you all want to hear more about the future evolution of eusocial miniaturised naked mole rats. I blame Chris Lavers (see Lavers 2001)...
The finches are…
tetrapodzoology | March 21, 2007
So, at last, it's that war rhinos post you've all been waiting for...
Remember that all the things I promise will appear eventually, it's just that these things take time. Tetrapod Zoology is becoming an increasingly active site that now generally gets over 1000 hits a day, so to all those who visit regularly, and to those who leave comments, many thanks. Please note that I'm starting to expand the about me section of the site: I've recently added a list of publications and will be adding links to pdfs as and when they become available. On the subject of things becoming available, those of…
tetrapodzoology | March 17, 2007
Readers in the UK might be aware of Primeval, an ITV drama series featuring a time portal that connects the present day with the past. The main premise of the series seems to be that various animals from the past - including a pareiasaur, a gorgonopsian, dodos, a mosasaur, pterosaurs and some giant arthropods - wander through the portal and get into various japes and scrapes in the present. I've cleverly managed to miss the entire series, so I'm not exactly the best person in the world to be talking about it. But due in part to the fact that I'm currently horribly ill, Will and I were in…
tetrapodzoology | March 12, 2007
This one's doing the rounds at the moment, you've probably already seen it. Funnily enough I have an old article on file (well, on my office wall) about a giant Red squirrel Sciurus vulgaris that attacked a bunch of cub scouts back in the 1980s.. it would have been about this size. The article was titled 'Tufty terror slashes sprogs' and was published in that most reliable of academic sources, The Sunday Sport. The author, if I remember correctly, was a Mr Ollocks, first name Bertie.
Thanks to Tony Butcher.
tetrapodzoology | March 6, 2007
It started with a visit to the zoo. Those remarkable African birds, the ground hornbills, got me thinking about Dale Russell's hypothetical thought-experiment (Russell 1987, Russell & Seguin 1982): what if non-avian dinosaurs (specifically, troodontid maniraptorans) had not bought the farm at the end of the Cretaceous but, instead, had continued to evolve? One thing led to another and I ended up both disagreeing with Russell's concept of a human-like erect-bodied short-faced flat-footed tailless dinosauroid, and speculating about what - in my view - a 'real' dinosauroid might look like…
tetrapodzoology | February 15, 2007
Look what happens when you blog about Godzilla. Huh. Back to normality soon...
tetrapodzoology | February 14, 2007
Imbued with god-like powers, the ever-inspirational Mathew Wedel, aka Dr Vector, has wondered what sort of experiments he might play with the biosphere in order to observe the evolutionary results. Given that I just posted an article the other day on Godzilla, it would be a good idea to avoid the whole speculative zoology area for a while. After all, I don't want to get a reputation. But I have to strike while the proverbial iron is hot and, don't worry, we'll be back to rodents, passerines and small, dull brown lizards soon enough. Sticking only with tetrapods (of course), what neat…
tetrapodzoology | February 7, 2007
To begin with, let's get things straight and admit up front that Godzilla is not a real animal, nor was it ever. It's an unfeasibly big late-surviving dinosaur (belonging to the hypothetical taxon Godzillasaurus, according to some), mutated by radiation, with a radioactive heart, and virtually impervious to other gigantic monsters, robots, artillery, laser blasts, lava and fire. Not real. Sorry about that. But by posing questions about fictional entities we can still learn stuff, and you may be surprised to learn that Godzilla has, on occasion, been discussed semi-seriously by various…
tetrapodzoology | February 6, 2007
Sorry: this is one of those annoying teaser posts that lots of people hate me for, but I wanted to post it in order to advertise what's coming next (I'd post it now if I could but I don't have the time). And I promise that the article is, within the context of this blog's theme, going to be relevant. Please check back soon. The vampire bats can wait a bit longer. And to those of you that know Godzilla, you'll know that he's done an awful lot of evolution within recent years (and I'm not talking about the 1998 TriStar Godzilla).