tetrapodzoology | August 3, 2008Well, here we are at the end of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week. I hope you've all enjoyed it. We're going to finish with a bang by looking at a few - yes, not one, but a few - of the real way-out-there oddballs among the odontocetes. We start with a famous freak individual...
If you've ever read anything about sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus you'll have read the assertion that broken and deformed lower jaws have often been reported in members of this species. It's nice to know this, but why are these broken and deformed lower jaws never figured? Here is perhaps the ultimate…
tetrapodzoology | August 1, 2008Let's face it, all the frickin' weird cetacean skulls we've looked at so far have belonged to frickin' weird cetaceans: sperm whales and river dolphins. Time for something less frickin' weird, though still frickin' weird, if you get my meaning. It's a boring old dolphin. But is it just a boring old dolphin? No, of course not.
Here is the skull of Orcaella brevirostris [the skull shown here is of USNM 199743, image © Smithsonian United States National Museum, courtesy C. McHenry]. Variously termed Irrawaddy or snubfin dolphins, the Orcaella species are entirely tropical and restricted to the…
tetrapodzoology | August 1, 2008You would be forgiven that doubting that this awesome object - displayed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History - is a fossil odontocete skull, but it is. Discovered in Lompoc, California, and as yet unreported in the scientific literature (so far as I can tell), it is the skull of a large predatory sperm whale purportedly closely related to the Japanese Miocene physeterid Brygmophyseter shigensis (but read on).
The extant sperm whale Physeter lacks functional teeth in the upper jaw and in fact even possesses special sockets in the maxillae that house the lower jaw teeth when the…
tetrapodzoology | July 30, 2008More on weird odontocete skulls. This time, another river dolphin: this is the skull of the Amazon river dolphin or Boto Inia geoffrensis, also known as the tonina, bufeo or pink dolphin.
Three generally recognised Inia taxa exist, and views differ as to whether these are subspecies or species. I. g. humboldtiana inhabits the Orinoco basin, I. g. geoffrensis inhabits the better part of the Amazon basin, and I. g. boliviensis (or I. boliviensis) inhabits the Amazon tributaries of Bolivia. A few recent studies have supported species status for I. boliviensis (Banguera-Hinestroza et al. 2002,…
tetrapodzoology | July 29, 2008Yay: day 3 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week. While we've previously been looking at the skulls of extant species, this time we have a fossil (or, actually, a diagram of one: from Muizon 1988). It's Scaphokogia cochlearis from the Miocene Pisco Formation of Peru, described by Muizon (1988). Exhibiting an incredible amount of cranial asymmetry and a wide, round supracranial basin, it's clearly a physeteroid (sperm whale), and the presence of slit-like antorbital notches, absence of nasals and other characters indicate that it's a kogiid (Muizon 1991) (if you need help with the…
tetrapodzoology | July 29, 2008Welcome to day 2 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week, and here we look at one of my favourites: Platanista, the Asian river dolphins or susus. Susu is a Hindi onomatopoetic name based on the exhalation noise these dolphins make, and other local names include susuk, sishuk, shushuk and sishumarch. There are two species: the Indus river dolphin P. minor Owen, 1853 of the Indus and Chenab in Pakistan, and the Ganges river dolphin P. gangetica Roxburgh, 1801 of the Ganges, Meghna and Brahmaputra of India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, the Karnaphuli in Bangladesh, and (possibly) the…
tetrapodzoology | July 27, 2008
Welcome to another of those week-long series of themed posts, produced (ostensibly) to save me from spending time on blogging (other jobs require priority). Previous series have been ankylosaur week and sea monster week. This time round we're looking at seriously frickin' weird cetacean skulls although, actually, we're only going to be looking at odontocetes, as these are (1) the ones I want to write about, and (2) the ones I have neat new photos of. This was, of course, all inspired by the comparative work I recently did on the Tursiops skull. All of the skull photos you're going to be…
tetrapodzoology | July 26, 2008Very late to the party here (the story was first published waaaaaay back on the 18th), but it just seems wrong not to cover this at Tet Zoo. Sincere apologies to the Bleiman brothers at Zooillogix and to John Lynch at Stranger Fruit, both of whom covered the following several days ago, but what the hey, there still might be some people who haven't seen the amazing photos...
Taken by American wildlife photographer Hal Brindley in Kruger National Park, they show that leopards can kill crocodiles when they want to. The leopard tackled the crocodile in the water, pulled it on to land, and…
tetrapodzoology | July 25, 2008We looked previously at a partial skull, collected in northern Africa. Apart from the odd outing when it's been used in teaching, it's been sat in a box on my desk for a couple of years now, forlornly hoping that it might one day earn a place in the peer-reviewed literature. However, that would only apply if it were a fossil, and as we'll see that's contentious.
Anyway, so... what is it?
To begin with, the elongate, pointed rostrum (with stretched premaxillae and maxillae that extend for the entire length of the preserved portion), evidence for a polydont, homodont dentition, enlarged…
tetrapodzoology | July 22, 2008This incomplete fossil skull was collected from the coast of northern Africa by Dave Martill and is suspected to represent a new species. It's one of those annoying back-burner projects that sits there on your desk for months and months.. eventually the months turn into years and still have you haven't gotten round to dealing with it.. Anyway, work on it is far from complete but I've had a go at identifying it. Who wants to try their luck © and have a go at doing likewise...
In the composite here, it's shown in left lateral and dorsal view. Note the ruler...
Here it is in palatal view,…
tetrapodzoology | July 20, 2008
The idea that non-avian dinosaurs might have been able to climb trees is (I assume) not all that familiar to people outside the field of dinosaur research, but within the field of dinosaur research it has become an increasingly familiar idea within recent decades. Thanks to the discovery of such theropods as Microraptor and Epidendrosaurus, we do now have small forms exhibiting some features suggestive of a tree-climbing (or scansorial) way of life. Perhaps surprisingly however, the idea that dinosaurs might have climbed trees goes back a long way, and well pre-dates the dinosaur renaissance…
tetrapodzoology | July 18, 2008Once upon a time longhorn cattle were abundant and kept by many people; in fact, they were the most abundant domestic cattle, and this breed more than any others was selected for 'improvement' by Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) of Leicestershire, the great pioneer of domestic cattle breeding (note that I'm talking here about English longhorn, not Texas longhorn). Prior to Bakewell's work, cattle of both sexes had been kept together and allowed to breed as and when, but by deliberately selecting certain individuals with certain traits (he was specifically breeding cattle to increase meat yield)…
tetrapodzoology | July 17, 2008
The original title for this article was going to be 'Sorry Heteralocha, but you ain't that special'. I ended up deciding against that, however, as I realised that few readers would know what the hell I was on about, nor indeed what Heteralocha is. Heteralocha (Heteralocha acutirostris to be precise) is the Huia, a large wattlebird (callaeid), endemic to New Zealand, that became extinct some time around 1907 (though a few sightings occurred well after this date, leading some to speculate that it might have hung on for longer). What makes the Huia famous is that males and females differed…
tetrapodzoology | July 15, 2008I suppose it's not every day you get to appear in a TV series called MonsterQuest. I appear in two places in one episode (first screened last week): once for a little while in the section embedded here, and again much later on. The bit with me starts 2 minutes, 20 seconds in (let's not worry about the bit later on). Things to note: the lion skull that previously featured in one of the articles on the Functional Morphology Conference and (right in the background, covering a small cupboard that contains keys) Steve White's drawing of the big cats of Rancho La Brea...
And am I really an '…
tetrapodzoology | July 15, 2008Better late than never, I've only recently gotten hold of Zhou et al.'s paper on the enantiornithine bird Pengornis houi, published online in Journal of Anatomy back in January but now available in hard-copy. I must say that I really dislike the new trend of publishing things in special, online versions prior to their 'proper' publication. Anyway... Pengornis (which is from the Lower Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation of Dapingfang, Liaoning, China) is particularly interesting for several reasons...
It's very well preserved, with one of the best-preserved skulls of any Mesozoic bird [skull…
tetrapodzoology | July 13, 2008
It's going to be a busy week, and already I've been totally unable to finish any of the planned articles. But I'll do what I can. In an effort to produce something short and sweet, here's a look at a question I've been pondering for a while: why do some owls have ear tufts? There are currently round about 225 living owl species, and of those about 50 have what we commonly call ear tufts. As with so many structures present in animals, we have little idea as to what these are for, and little hypothesis testing has been done. However, several very interesting hypotheses exist...
My favourite…
tetrapodzoology | July 12, 2008One last thing for sea monster week... but don't get your hopes up too much. We looked earlier at the Moore's Beach (or Santa Cruz) sea monster, a carcass that was identified as that of a Baird's beaked whale Berardius bairdii. I mentioned the fact that the skull was retained by the California Academy of Sciences. Well, here it is...
As in all beaked whales (or ziphiids), the skull bones posterior to the external nares are elevated, forming a crest that Moore (1968) termed the synvertex.
In most beaked whales, the anterior margin of the synvertex extends dorsally so steeply that it's…
tetrapodzoology | July 11, 2008
Better late than never; I was at the office of a London-based publishing company yesterday, so didn't have time to get anything ready before today. I know you'll all forgive me. Anyway... so, how to finish sea monster week? With a predictable and familiar set of images that you've seen a hundred times before? Maybe. Or with a striking photo (or series of photos) that will blow you away in offering hitherto unappreciated, obvious evidence for the reality of giant marine cryptids? Well, I wish...
My original, rather boring plan, was to finish sea monster week (this article is part 5) with a…
tetrapodzoology | July 9, 2008
Yay for day.... (counts) ... four of sea monster week. This time another familiar carcass image... well, familiar to me anyway. This remarkable object/shapeless hunk is the Tecolutla monster, collected from Palmar de Susana between Tecolutla and Nautla, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1969. Initially encountered by a group of farmers who chanced upon it in the dead of night* (apparently when it was still alive), they kept it secret for a week but eventually informed the Tecolutla mayor, Professor César Guerrero. Believing it to be a crashed plane (this story gets better and better), he organised a…