tetrapodzoology | October 15, 2008
What is this bizarre fuzzy little creature? It's a Black coucal Centropus grillii chick, and what makes it particularly interesting is that it's covered with simple, tubular, unbranched feathers (termed trichoptiles). If you know the literature on the evolutionary development of feathers you will have noticed that trichoptiles look suspiciously similar to the 'stage 1 feathers' hypothesised by Prum and Brush, and yet here they are in a neornithine. They rarely get a mention, despite being described by Shelford (1900), and despite being present elsewhere in cuculiforms and not restricted to…
tetrapodzoology | October 14, 2008
You might not believe me if I told you how much stuff I have going on right now. In, as ever, an effort to put at least something new on the blog, here's a pretty picture taken from a talk I give (or gave) on marine reptiles. Alas, I have yet to finish the Tet Zoo series on sea snakes: part I was here, part II here, I suppose I might republish them here at ver 2 some time. Aipysurus-group hydrophiids also made a brief appearance here. Finally, the 'Rasmussen 2002' alluded to in the picture is...
Rasmussen, A. R. 2002. Phylogenetic analysis of the "true" aquatic elapid snakes Hydrophiinae (…
tetrapodzoology | October 12, 2008I was going to title this post 'How a tyrannosaur was mounted', or 'How to mount a tyrannosaur', but that seemed childish. Eventually I went for a title based on a movie, as that isn't at all childish. If I could travel in time, high on the list of things to do would be visits to see dead animals: I don't just mean tyrannosaurs and azhdarchids, but also such things as thylacines and Passenger pigeons (think kilometre-wide super-flocks that took days to pass overhead, drowned out all other sound with their din, and blotted out the sun). But also high up on the list of priorities would be…
tetrapodzoology | October 8, 2008
It is unfortunate that I just do not have the time to do any 'proper' blog writing at the moment. Winge winge winge. So I'm going to do a bad thing, but something that I've been advised to do, and something that lots of other people do anyway: I'm going to start re-publishing old Tet Zoo articles from ver 1. We'll call this 'From the archives'. If you're a long-time reader then, sorry, you're going to be seeing old stuff that you've seen before. But if you're a new "I've only known about Tet Zoo since it's been on ScienceBlogs" reader, well - ta da! The article here is the very first full-…
tetrapodzoology | October 8, 2008Because antler growth depends fundamentally on health and nutrition as well as age and size, antlers are among the most plastic of all bones. You might be able to appreciate this fact from this photo (courtesy Jon McGowan) showing diversity in English Roe deer Capreolus capreolus, yet even the diversity shown here is far from comprehensive.
Roe deer actually have particularly odd antlers. In addition to a prominent coronet (the roughened 'lip' at the antler's base that separates it from the bony pedicle), and brow, back and top tines (or points) arranged along the rack, they sport weird…
tetrapodzoology | October 6, 2008
If you've been keeping an eye on the newswires you'll have seen that a very exciting new theropod dinosaur was described about a week ago now: Aerosteon riocoloradensis Sereno et al., 2008, an allosaurid allosauroid from the Santonian Anacleto Formation of Mendoza Province, Argentina. Hooray again for open-access publishing: Sereno et al. (2008) is published in PLoS ONE, and as such is 100%, no-holds-barred, open-access for the whole world (Fig. 16 from Sereno et al. (2008) shown here]. There is no question that Aerosteon is a neat animal and a very significant discovery. We have here a non-…
tetrapodzoology | October 3, 2008Both Cryptomundo and Big Cats in Britain have recently showcased the photo you see here.
Taken in Snodland, Kent (UK), earlier this year, it depicts what appears to be a dark, mid-sized felid (NOT a big cat in the proper sense), though the lack of any adequate scale makes its size difficult to judge. Is it just a domestic cat? I want to say that it is, but it just 'looks' larger and more robust, and with chunkier limbs. Superficially, it recalls an African golden cat Profelis aurata, and Loren Coleman has already suggested this (it wouldn't be a big deal if it was, as all manner of exotic…
tetrapodzoology | October 2, 2008
A few years ago Brito et al. (2002) published a brief but very interesting little paper in which they reported frugivory in Broad-snouted caimans Caiman latirostris. Two captive Brazilian animals were observed and photographed feeding on the fruit of Philodendron selloum [photo here is Fig. 1 from Brito et al. (2002)]. They later offered fruit to the caimans again "and frugivory was confirmed with other caimans from the pen" (p. 96: the ambiguous wording indicates that other individuals were happy to accept and eat the fruit as well). Apparently, herbivory has been recorded on quite a few…
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 29, 2008No time for anything new, unfortunately. But I have a lot of old stuff kicking around: here, I've recycled text from my undergrad thesis on ichthyosaurs. I hope you get something out of it. Ichthyosaurs are famous for preserving impressions of soft tissue; these are preserved as black, carbonaceous films, and are known for specimens that come from Solnhofen and Holzmaden in Germany, from Barrow-upon-Soar in England, and from the Wapiti Lake area of British Columbia. Martill (1993) reviewed occurrences of ichthyosaur soft tissue preservation, citing records from the Hettangian, Sinemurian,…
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 26, 2008
After a hiatus of several months I attacked Tet Zoo the book during the small hours of this morning (I started while the repeat of Fossil Detectives was on at 1 am... missed the bit with Jeff Liston and Leedsichthys, did anyone else see it?). For no particular reason I created a wordle from the text of the whole book. It's crap: are all wordles like this? So, apparently, if you want to read a book with exciting words like 'one' and 'new' and 'also', this is the place to go! I like the fact that 'et' and 'al' loom large, and 'might' and 'known'. Where are all the bloody animal names? I see '…
tetrapodzoology | September 25, 2008
If you know anything about the literature on marine cryptids - or sea monsters, or sea serpents, or whatever - you will know of the Long-necked seal, a hypothetical mega-pinniped proposed by Bernard Heuvelmans (1968) as the explanation for sightings of giant long-necked sea (and lake) monsters. Based on a number of apparently reliable eyewitness reports, Heuvelmans suggested that this new species, which he dubbed Megalotaria longicollis, was a highly specialised otariid (Otariidae is the group that includes sea lions and fur seals). Giant compared to its relatives (4.5-19 m long), with an…
tetrapodzoology | September 24, 2008
As always, at least a few people got yesterday's picture correctly identified: it was indeed a Giant armadillo or Tatuasu Priodontes maximus, and specifically the animal's right hand and lower arm. I photographed it at the National Museum of Ireland (Natural History) during SVPCA 2008. A stuffed specimen was on display next to the skeleton, so the scaly leg you could see in the background was indeed a pretty big clue. Armadillo skeletons - like those of all xenarthrans - are so weird and unfamiliar to us euarchontoglirans that it would be easy to write thousands of words on their weirdness.…
tetrapodzoology | September 21, 2008
Long-time readers will know that I am an unashamed fan of both speculative zoology, and of Dougal Dixon's hypothetical 'alternative' animals. Inspired by a comment made here in August by Jenny Islander, I have been having a re-think about the possible evolution of flightless pterosaurs: the fossil record gives no indication that such animals ever existed, and maybe they didn't, but that hasn't stopped people from speculating. The best known hypothetical pterosaurs are those from The New Dinosaurs (Dixon 1988), and among the most bizarre and memorable of them is the Lank Herbafagus…
tetrapodzoology | September 20, 2008
Sorry, another teaser - I haven't yet had time to post the full article (am aiming to do this on Monday). Again, all will be explained as goes the above [incoporating artwork by Mark Witton and yours truly]. Many, many, many thanks to everyone who made the 'name my flightless pterosaur' experiment such a soaraway (ha ha) success - I really enjoyed seeing your suggested names, many of which were excellent and/or very amusing. And the winner is...
Well, in the end I combined two different suggestions: the binomial is Shemhazai ptychocheirus. I don't expect you to agree with this choice, but I…
tetrapodzoology | September 19, 2008
Don't worry, all will be explained in the next article. But first things first: please provide the flightless azhdarchid with a binomial name. The cleverest and most euphonious wins (and I pick the winner). Please explain derivations and etymologies where appropriate. Good luck.
tetrapodzoology | September 18, 2008Regular readers might remember the 'pigeon in the fireplace' incident of March 2007, when a Wood pigeon Columba palumbus fell down my chimney during the small hours of the morning and had to be extricated at great personal cost to my epidermis. As I grabbed the pigeon, I was slightly dismayed that its entire rectricial array (viz, all of its tail feathers) came out in one clean, bloodless mass. The word on the street is that pigeons have very shallowly rooted rectrices and can effectively 'drop' the tail when grabbed by a predator, which is pretty neat I think you'll agree.
So far as I can…