tetrapodzoology | November 24, 2008
Another one from the archives, and another one from my rodent phase of 2006 (originally published here): despite efforts, I was simply unable to even scratch the surface of what is the largest extant mammalian 'Order'. Where appropriate I've added updates and have uploaded new images.
Though new rodents are described from all over the place (yes, even from North America and Europe*), I had a recollection of the greatest percentage coming from South America. And indeed there are quite a few (note that some of the following don't have common names), with a randomly-selected list of my…
tetrapodzoology | November 20, 2008Back in 2006 I took part in the 'ten birds' meme. If infected (do people normally speak of being 'infected' by memes?), you were supposed to write about ten birds that you found 'beautiful'. I decided to distort it slightly and make the birds the ten that I found most 'beautifully interesting'. Here's one of them, the others may or may not follow too.
Originally described by DeVis in 1890 as Todopsis kowaldi, Ifrita was independently 'discovered' by Walter Rothschild in 1898 and named by him Ifrita coronata. A passerine endemic to moist montane forests on New Guinea, Ifrita is remarkable for…
tetrapodzoology | November 17, 2008From the archives!
One of the most unusual and interesting of amphibians has to be the Olm (Proteus anguinus), an unusual long-bodied cave-dwelling salamander from SE Europe [adjacent image from the Devon Karst Research Society]. Olms were the first specialised cave-dwelling animals (so-called stygobionts or troglobites) to be discovered, they were traditionally identified as dragon larvae by local people, and they remain mysterious and the source of controversy, debate and discovery. I've had a special affinity for olms since seeing them (live) in the former Yugoslavia in 1987, and after a…
tetrapodzoology | November 12, 2008I've been so busy over the past several weeks that I've totally failed to keep up with several of my favourite blogs. One of them is Andrea Cau's Theropoda, written in Italian but translatable into English thanks to the wonder of google's translator widget (incidentally, my grandmother on my dad's side was Italian). The amount of detail Andrea puts in to his posts is awesome, as are the many novel excellent illustrations he uses (virtually all of which he produces himself). And I've only just seen this, dating from early October...
Andrea posted it here, basically as a guessing game (all…
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 | November 10, 2008Another book review. I've had a lot of them to do lately.
The idea that feathers decorated and insulated the bodies of the small bird-like predatory dinosaurs of the Jurassic and Cretaceous - the coelurosaurs - is no longer a speculation limited to controversial artwork, but the mainstream view [for background info see Feathers and filaments part I and part II]. Spectacular fossils from the Lower Cretaceous rocks of Liaoning Province in north-east China have shown that feathers, and simpler, filament-like 'proto-feathers', were widespread among coelurosaurs, being present in compsognathids…
tetrapodzoology | November 8, 2008We all know that many birds feed their young. Nowadays, many of us are also familiar with the idea that hadrosaurs and other dinosaurs might also have fed their young. Far less well known is the possibility that crocodilians may do this too, at least sometimes. As with those fruit-eating alligators, I have John Brueggen of the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park to thank for the video you see here (and thanks, again, to Tim Isles for bringing this subject to my attention in the first place).
In the video shown here, a female Siamese crocodile Crocodylus siamensis allows her babies to…
tetrapodzoology | November 6, 2008Knowing that members of a certain species sometimes reach a certain size is not always the same as actually seeing images of that certain species at that certain size.
The Puma, Cougar or Mountain lion Puma concolor (other names include panther, painter, catamount, mountain devil, silver lion, brown tiger, red tiger, king cat, Indian devil, purple feather (wtf?), mountain demon, sneak cat, leao and onça vermilha) is a highly variable animal (its historic range extends across much of the length and breadth of the Americas), but an average example from an average population might be anywhere…
tetrapodzoology | November 2, 2008
Thanks to Tet Zoo, I sometimes receive books to review, and earlier on in the year I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of Lewis Smith's Why the Lion Grew Its Mane (Papadakis, 2008). Smith is a science reporter at The Times and in this book, billed as presenting 'a miscellany of recent scientific discoveries from astronomy to zoology', he takes us on a tour of some of the newest, neatest science. Despite its title, Why the Lion Grew Its Mane isn't just about animals, but also includes sections on cutting-edge technology, astronomy, genetics and psychology. I don't know enough about any…
tetrapodzoology | November 1, 2008
Blame Matt Wedel for kindly bringing my attention to this wonderful image; he was clearly inspired by the anuran porn from yesterday. Attempted interspecies matings are more common than people normally think - particularly in captivity of course - and, sad to say, I have detailed files (incidentally, I'm not totally sure that this is an attempted mating: hard to tell!). Am thinking of doing a themed post on the subject, god help me.
tetrapodzoology | October 31, 2008
During the breeding season male frogs are compelled to grab moving objects and engage them in amplexus, the tight 'breeding clasp' that occurs either under the forelimbs (axillary amplexus) or around the waist (inguinal amplexus), depending on the species. Amplexus is assisted by roughened pads of tubercles or even small spikes on the male hand, wrist and/or forearm. If it's obvious that the moving object is not a female of the same species (because it feels wrong or makes an objectionable noise [as male frogs do when grabbed by other males]), the male lets go.
Nevertheless, male Eurasian…
tetrapodzoology | October 30, 2008
Do you remember the photo - provided courtesy of Colin McHenry - showing a variety of crocodilian skulls? I published it in an article on the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting, and here it is again. The challenge was to try and identify the largest skull. Suggestions included Saltwater croc Crocodylus porosus, outsized American croc C. acutus or Slender-snouted croc Mecistops cataphractus, but it's none of those (for the resurrection of the genus Mecistops Gray, 1844 for cataphractus see McAiley et al. 2006). The monster skull is in fact that of a False gharial Tomistoma schlegelii. Yes, a…
tetrapodzoology | October 29, 2008Yay - another one from the archives. This article first appeared on Tet Zoo ver 1 in April 2006 (here). If you've read it before, please have the decency to pretend that you haven't, thanks [excellent macronarian sauropods below from wikipedia].
I've stated before on this blog that I do quite a bit of consultancy work for companies that produce prehistoric animal books for children. In advising and assisting artists as often as I do, I find that they consistently screw up on the same things, every time. One of the biggest problem areas seems to be the hands and feet of sauropod dinosaurs - I…
tetrapodzoology | October 26, 2008
In 1993 a Japanese film crew led by Nadaka Tetsuo succeeded in filming a large animal swimming in the waters of Lake Dakataua on New Britain (the largest island in the Bismarck Archipelago, just north-east of New Guinea). Supposedly, the lake was the haunt of an aquatic creature called the migo or masali, and here - it was claimed - was proof of its existence. Was this, at last, one of cryptozoology's holy grails: definitive footage of a definite monster?
While obscure and quite poorly known, Lake Dakataua and its alleged monster(s) have long been making appearances in the cryptozoological…
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 23, 2008Today sees the formal publication of the bizarre little Chinese maniraptoran theropod Epidexipteryx hui Zhang et al., 2008 from the Daohugou Formation of Ningcheng County, north-eastern China. Unfortunately the publication of this new species is not quite the surprise it should be, as the authors inadvertently submitted their manuscript to the wrong venue a few weeks ago, thereby making the article visible to the whole world some time before it was ready to be published. Anyway, we'll just have to pretend that never happened. Belonging to a recently discovered group called the…
tetrapodzoology | October 21, 2008Yes, it's true. As revealed by my most redoubtable friend and ally Nemo Ramjet, Amerindian people knew of giant flightless azhdarchids long before their possible existence was hypothesised about here at Tet Zoo (follow-ups here and here). Depicting these animals in their artwork, they symbolised them as the great bird Kaloo: this was the most terrifying of all creatures, a stork-headed, long-necked, quadrupedal, flightless bird with long, three-fingered arms and slim legs. Wow.
I am, of course, joking. Nemo discovered an illustrations of Kaloo in a book on mythology and thought that it…
tetrapodzoology | October 20, 2008
Within recent years, the Palaearctic tortoise fauna has undergone a radical change. If you're interested in the recognition and discovery of new species, in controversy and argument about the status of species, in neat evolutionary stuff such as resource polymorphism and resource-mediated dwarfism, and, least of all, in tortoises, then you should find this a fascinating area. I shall point out to start with that I'm referring specifically to the testudinid tortoises of the genus Testudo, an Old World taxon most closely related to the Asian tortoises (Indotestudo) and the Pancake tortoise…
tetrapodzoology | October 17, 2008
Last weekend I and about 40 other people worked together in another effort to rid the shore at Chessel Bay Nature Reserve, Southampton (UK), of rubbish. We didn't succeed of course - if only that were possible - but, as always, picking up humanity's discarded crap gives you plenty to think about. Here are various random impressions. For a more data-heavy look at the menace of plastic waste and its substantial effect on environments, wildlife and human health please see the article I wrote on the same subject back in March.
Actually, this time round the rubbish - though still present in…