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 | September 14, 2008
For a long time now I have been, shall we say, gently encouraged by two of my friends to write about a subject that is both familiar, and yet also strangely alien and poorly understood. Sleep behaviour. We still know comparatively little about this subject: not only about the big stuff like its function, but even about its distribution within animals. I am not, by the way, about to tackle the big questions about sleep, nor am I going to discuss the different types of sleep (e.g., REM vs NREM sleep) and on how they differ from creature to creature. Instead I'm interested in the more…
tetrapodzoology | September 14, 2008
For no particular reason, I was looking through Mary's lemur photos. I saw these and thought them particularly interesting: they show a male Indri Indri indri bark-eating. What makes this individual unusual is that he was missing his left eye (or, at least, had a very damaged left eye). I don't know why and don't know if Mary does either.
As you'll know, indris are the largest extant lemurs, reaching 720 mm in maximum length (snout to tail) and weighing up to 7.5 kg. That's big, but it doesn't approach the sizes reached by some of the extinct species, the biggest of which exceeded 200 kg.…
tetrapodzoology | September 13, 2008
Helveticosaurus zollingeri is an unusual and poorly known diapsid from the Middle Triassic rocks of Monte san Giorgio, Switzerland. First described in 1955, it was initially identified as a primitive placodont and regarded as the only representative of the basal placodont group Helveticosauroidea. But this isn't correct and Helveticosaurus lacks the features unique to both Placodontia and to Sauropterygia (Rieppel 1989).
Helveticosaurus was long-bodied and it had a long, flexible tail and - like mesosaurs, claudiosaurs, thalattosaurs and hupehsuchians - it was probably an axial undulatory…
tetrapodzoology | September 11, 2008
I've just been doing - if you will - Parasaurolophus for the day job. As in, writing about the history of its discovery and interpretation. William Parks first described Parasaurolophus walkeri (the first of several species to be named) in 1922, and noted in his paper that the skeleton was odd in possessing a weird roughened pad on the neural spine of one of the dorsal vertebrae. He proposed that this structure might have been connected to the tip of the bizarre tube-like crest: it was already thought by this time (thanks to Barnum Brown's Corythosaurus of 1914 and other specimens) that the…
tetrapodzoology | September 10, 2008
For my shame, I had never been to Ireland prior to last week. That's so crap that I became pretty determined to attend the 56th SVPCA, hosted by the National Museum of Ireland at Dublin, and I'm glad I did. You know, because of the giant deer, hornbills and pliosaurs [montage here shows specimens from the (currently closed) National Museum of Ireland (Natural History). The middle skeleton is a Notoryctes]...
Here I'm going to do a very speedy review of most (but far from all) of the presentations given at the meeting. There was a reasonable amount of non-tetrapod stuff that I won't, of…
tetrapodzoology | September 8, 2008To begin with, I want to thank everyone who continued to visit Tet Zoo while I was away - you managed to keep Tet Zoo in the top 5 on Nature Blog Network - and I was surprised and pleased that several long-running conversations developed in the comments section of the bunny-killing heron article. Awesome, thanks so much. My trip away was great and I had an excellent time, though what wasn't so excellent is that it was literally sandwiched in between two family funerals. I'm ok now though...
For now, all I want to do is showcase the incredible new fossil sperm whale Acrophyseter deinodon,…
tetrapodzoology | August 31, 2008
I'm now leaving, again, this time for SVPCA. I'm hoping that I might be able to do some blogging from the conference, but the last time I said this (the Munich Flugsaurier conference back in September 2007) there was neither the time nor opportunity for it, so don't get your hopes up. Thanks to SVPCA and other matters, I've obviously been unable to put anything substantial on the blog for a while now... making Tet Zoo all too much like a normal blog... and for personal (family-related) reasons, it's been a strange and sad week here. We're all in need of time off that we can't afford to take…
tetrapodzoology | August 28, 2008
Thanks to the latest issue (no. 240) of Fortean Times I've just learnt of the remarkable case whereby an unlucky Canada goose Branta canadensis was, allegedly, hit by a meteoroid (Anon. 2008). The story goes that Derbyshire postman Adrian Mannion was 'having a morning cuppa with his wife Fiona' (I'm not quite sure what a cuppa is, but assume it's a sexual act of some sort) when a rock fell, from space, onto their driveway. It was followed by the goose, which hit the roof of their car. This story was reported in that most reliable of sources, The Sun newspaper, back in February (it's here).…
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 25, 2008
One of the few things that everybody knows about dromaeosaurs - the sickle-clawed maniraptoran theropods best represented by Velociraptor from Mongolia and Deinonychus from Montana - is that they possessed a peculiar tail. Super-long zygapophyses and chevrons formed a bizarre, inter-twined array of body rods that ran the length of the tail and apparently assisted in its function as a dynamic stabiliser [image, © Greg Paul, shows Velociraptor versus two troodontids].
In describing this remarkable conformation in Deinonychus, Ostrom (1969) suggested that these bundles of bony rods would have…
tetrapodzoology | August 25, 2008
I have not forgotten that 2008 is Year of the Frog: if you have, or if you didn't know this, please go back to December 2007 and read the explanatory article here. Some of you will also recall the EDGE project (EDGE = Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered), and here we look at an anuran that's one of many on the EDGE list.
Myobatrachids, or southern frogs, or Australo-Papuan frogs, include some of the most incredible and bizarre of anurans. The Turtle frog Myobatrachus gouldii looks like a toy, is apparently sometimes mistaken for a baby turtle, and is one of just a few anuran…
tetrapodzoology | August 22, 2008
Well, what an interesting time I've had. Firstly, many thanks to everyone who left a comment - however silly or clueless - on the 'novel Mesozoic archosaur' I posted here a few weeks ago. As those in the know correctly stated, the cartoons depict the Brazilian Cretaceous theropod Irritator challengeri in its original guise as a gigantic flightless pterosaur. Now known without doubt to be a spinosaurine spinosaurid (Sues et al. 2002), Irritator was - astonishingly - first published (Martill et al. 1996) as a coelurosaur and as part of Tom Holtz's Bullatosauria (a since-disbanded…
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 12, 2008The Great spotted woodpecker shown here yesterday was, I think, an unusual individual, and thanks to everyone who had a go at explaining what it was that made her so odd. Unfortunately no-one got it right. Several of you noted that she appeared to be tridactyl on at least one foot, whereas she should be four-toed, with two toes pointing forwards and two pointing backwards (the zygodactyl arrangement). Incidentally, the common assumption that the zygodactyl foot is a climbing specialisation is probably not right (Bock & Miller 1959), but that'll have to be a subject for another time.…
tetrapodzoology | August 11, 2008Here's a sadly deceased female Great spotted woodpecker Picoides major I recently photographed in a private collection. She was a very unusual woodpecker. Any ideas why?
The Great spotted woodpecker has an immense range, extending from western Europe (though Ireland lucks out) all the way to Japan and the Kamchatka Peninsula. It also occurs on the Canary Islands, in north-west Africa, in Turkey and the Causasus, and in eastern China down to Burma and north-east India (Winkler et al. 1995). Great spotted woodpeckers across this range vary in overall size, bill length and robustness, and in…
tetrapodzoology | August 8, 2008
Of course - sorry - it was not a living thylacine, and I'm both impressed and dismayed that the real answer - Zebra duiker or Banded duiker Cephalophus zebra - had been posted within 20 minutes of publication [adjacent photo of C. zebra from the Zebra duiker page on the outstanding Ultimate Ungulate]. Well done Chris (of Catalogue of Organisms) for getting there so quick. I saw the Zebra duiker photo (taken at Sapo National Park in Liberia by a team gathering data on pygmy hippos), on the EDGE blog (here) and thought it would be fun to use for this purpose. And of course now I have a good…
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 | August 3, 2008Unless you've been hiding under a rock, or spending all your time on Tet Zoo, you will almost certainly have heard about the 'Montauk monster', a mysterious carcass that (apparently) washed up on July 13th at Montauk, Long Island, New York. A good photo of the carcass, showing it in right lateral view and without any reference for scale, surfaced on July 30th and has been all over the internet. Given that I only recently devoted a week of posts to sea monsters, it's only fitting that I cover this too. I'm pretty sure that I know what it is, and I'm pleased to see that many other people have…