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 31, 2008Seabirds are undeniably cool. They often look neat, they often have very cool names (witness such examples as Macronectes, Oceanodroma and Cerorhinca), and their biology is often amazing. They include some of the largest and longest-lived of birds, the most numerous (there might be over 50 million Wilson's storm-petrels Oceanites oceanicus in the world), and the most wide-ranging. While crossing the English Channel recently, I kept a look out above-deck for, well, whatever.
And I was rewarded with excellent views of Northern gannet Morus bassanus [adjacent pic from wikipedia]. Together with…
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 29, 2008
Over the course of my research career I have, like so many scientists, accrued a ridiculous list of 'semi-complete', 'near-complete' and 'essentially complete' research projects, all of which are sitting there, awaiting that extra investment of time and effort required to get them to the submission stage. A colleague recently accused me of being a lazy bastard because I have still not published a paper on a specimen that I've had in my care for over five years now: it's a new small theropod from the Santana Formation, definitely distinct from the other named Santana Formation theropods (…
tetrapodzoology | December 23, 2008Here's the Tet Zoo Christmas card. As always, it's strikingly Christmassy in theme and content (for 2007 go here and for 2006 go here). What does it all mean? Why, you're a Tet Zoo reader: you don't need to ask that! After all, you already realise the significance of qilins, cadborosaurs and Tecolutla monsters. Tizhureks and cetodipterans have yet to appear here I'm afraid, but they'll definitely be making an appearance next year. And David Marjanovic has already noted that Atlantisia is preoccupied by the generic name of the Inaccessible Island rail Atlantisia rogersi, but that's a…
tetrapodzoology | December 23, 2008
Welcome to my final set of musing and recollections about our recent Moroccan trip, led by Nizar Ibrahim. Mostly I'll be talking here about the amazing desert birds we got to see, but I also have stuff to say about the mammals, and - of course - about the fossils...
One of the birds I most wanted to see - in fact it was top of my list - was the remarkable Greater hoopoe lark Alaemon alaudipes [see photo at top here for Richard's photo of one of these birds], and eventually we were to see four or five of these (though never more than one at the same time). Alaemon occurs across Africa and is…
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 20, 2008
More musings from the Morocco trip. So, we travelled over the Atlas Mountains and were soon up at the snowline. We joked about seeing lions and bears, but did see a Barbary partridge Alectoris barbara (another first) and a representative of the strikingly blue Blue tit subspecies Cyanistes caeruleus ultramarinus. If you've been keeping up with parid taxonomy you'll know that some workers now regard this blue tit of north-west Africa and the Canaries as a distinct species, the Ultramarine or Afrocanarian tit C. ultramarinus (but note that not all the blue tits of the Canaries belong to this…
tetrapodzoology | December 19, 2008
Several weeks ago, I and a group of colleagues from the University of Portsmouth (Dave Martill, Robert Loveridge and Richard Hing) set off on a trip to the Cretaceous exposures of Morocco. We were to be joined by Nizar Ibrahim from University College Dublin - our team leader - and by Samir Zouhri and Lahssen Baidder from the University of Casablanca. Our primary aim was to discover Cretaceous dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other fossil reptiles, but we were also interested in studying the region's geology, and to learn about the sedimentology, palaeoenvironment and taphonomic setting of the rocks…
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 | December 16, 2008Over the past month Tet Zoo has been totally different. In what way has it been "totally different", I hear you ask. The answer: I have been absent, with all of the posts having been scheduled in advance of my departure. Many thanks to everyone for reading stuff and for leaving comments in my absence. Together with members of a joint team from the University of Portsmouth, University College Dublin and University of Casablanca, I've been exploring the Cretaceous rocks of the Kem Kem Formation in Morocco. We discovered loads of stuff, some of it very significant (in fact the results of our…
tetrapodzoology | December 15, 2008I like ducks, and I particularly like steamer ducks. Again, here we revisit some Tet Zoo ver 1 text that was originally published in 2006 as part of the Ten Birds Meme.
The most widely distributed of the four Tachyeres species*, the Flying steamer duck T. patachonicus inhabits both the fresh and marine waters of the Falklands and southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. While all other steamer-ducks are flightless, T. patachonicus is (obviously) not, and in contrast to its flightless relatives it has proportionally bigger pectoral muscles and lower wing loadings. But what makes the species…
tetrapodzoology | December 12, 2008All three tetrapods shown here all work on tetrapods. But what the hell Dave Martill was doing I can't recall. Eric Buffetaut appears over my shoulder. I look bemused.
Mo Hussan - of The Disillusioned Taxonomist - took this photo on the Isle of Wight. Thanks Mo, I think. Something about Tet Zoo has been different over the past couple of weeks - have you noticed what it is?
tetrapodzoology | December 10, 2008More from the archives - and again this is from the Ten Bird Meme of 2006.
If convergence is one of the most interesting evolutionary phenomena, then the Ground tit Pseudopodoces humilis should become a text-book example of it, on par with thylacines vs wolves and ichthyosaurs vs dolphins [adjacent photo from here]. Described in 1871 by A. Hume, the Ground tit is a weak-flying brown passerine of the Tibetan plateau, often superficially likened to a wheatear. But for most of the time that we've known of it, it has not gone by the name Ground tit at all: rather, it has been termed Hume's…
tetrapodzoology | December 8, 2008Another article from the archives, written back on April 19th 2006. Two days earlier I'd sat up watching BBC4's night of primate documentaries, and that where our story begins...
I've sat up and watched such things as 'Natural History Night' and 'Dr Who Night' before - usually they're a con, the programmes fizzling out round about 10-30, but 'Primates Night' (err, if that's what it was called) wasn't so thrifty, keeping me in front of the TV until past 01-00 at least. And it was brilliant - the best assortment of TV programmes I've seen since, well, ever.
The first episode of the BBC series…
tetrapodzoology | December 5, 2008Here's an interesting photo provided by Markus Bühler (of Bestiarium): it shows a bull Asian elephant Elephas maximus at Hagenbeck Zoo, Hamburg.
The picture is neat for a few reasons. For one, it emphasises the agility of elephants: despite their size and 'graviportal' specialisations, they can still do some pretty impressive bending and stooping. They're not bad at climbing slopes, albeit ones much shallower than the zoo trench shown here. Actually, people have reported (and even illustrated) elephants clambering down precipitous slopes. Tennent (1867) showed an Asian elephant clambering…
tetrapodzoology | December 3, 2008
Another bit of text from the Ten Bird Meme of 2006. This time: well, you already know... also called the Shoe-billed stork, She-billed stork [not a typo], Whale-bill or Whale-headed stork, Balaeniceps rex is a long-legged big-billed waterbird of central Africa, and a specialist denizen of papyrus swamps. Though known to the ancient Egyptians, it wasn't described by science until John Gould named it in 1851. Before that time it was a cryptid, as an 1840 sighting of this as-of-then-unidentified bird had been published by Ferdinand Werne in 1849 (Shuker 1991).
Standing 1.4 m tall, the Shoebill…
tetrapodzoology | December 1, 2008
Another one from the archives. It's one of several articles I wrote in 2006 on obscure tropical rodents, was originally published here, and appears here with new pics and a few new details...
If you've read Scott Weidensaul's excellent book The Ghost With Trembling Wings (2002), you'll recall the story of Louise Emmons and the giant Peruvian rodent she discovered. But before I get to that, let me say that The Ghost With Trembling Wings isn't about ghosts at all, but about the search for cryptic or supposedly extinct species. Think thylacines, British big cats, Ivory-billed woodpeckers, Cone-…
tetrapodzoology | November 26, 2008I think everyone seriously interested in animals collects dead animals, or bits of dead animals. Over the years I've built up a reasonably good collection of bones, teeth, antlers and carcasses, most of which are used 'academically' (in teaching and research) and not just kept for fun. Some of the specimens I have are amazing, like the robin Erithacus rubecula still attached to the twig and the wind-dried squirrel (both discussed here on Tet Zoo ver 1). One specimen above all others might be regarded as the centre-piece of my collection...
This is a mummified fox Vulpes vulpes. Its right…