tetrapodzoology | July 8, 2008
Faked tadpole monsters and misidentified dead whales are one thing - are there any real sea monster mysteries left out there? The good news is yes, but as we'll see it's not just the identity of the creatures concerned that is mysterious. This is day 3 of sea monster week, and we here look at a case brought to attention by Dwight Smith and Gary Mangiacopra (their article is essentially the only one I consulted while writing the following). It concerns a photo that's been republished twice since its first appearance in a Californian newspaper, and must have been seen by thousands, if not…
tetrapodzoology | July 8, 2008Welcome to day 2 of sea monster week. This time the featured 'monster' is a beached carcass: it washed ashore at what was then called Moore's Beach (it's now Natural Bridges State Beach), just north-west of Santa Cruz, California, in 1925 and, while identified correctly in virtually all of the cryptozoological literature I've seen, is still identified here and there on the internet (particularly on pro-creationism sites) as an unidentified anomaly that had the experts baffled.
Nope: the real identity of the carcass - usually dubbed the Moore's Beach monster (sometimes the Santa Cruz monster…
tetrapodzoology | July 7, 2008
Welcome to sea monster week. Yes, a whole week devoted to the discussion and evaluation of photos purportedly showing marine cryptids, or carcasses of them. Why do this? I'm not entirely sure, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. We begin with a fantastic image that - hopefully - you've seen here and there yet may know little about (again, to those who know the cryptozoological literature, I apologise for insulting your intelligence). Judging from comments I've seen on the internet, people nowadays assume that this image is a photoshop job unique to the digital age, whereas in fact it…
tetrapodzoology | July 6, 2008
You blog readers are so fickle. Write several thousand words on a spectacular group of carnivorous mammals that have never previously been the subject of any sort of semi-popular review, and get bugger all attention. Write about 50 words and post two pictures, and - hey - the whole world goes nuts. Anyway, thanks to everyone who had a guess on the 'mystery' fossil. Some of you were pretty close to the mark, but evidently no-one who commented has checked Naish et al. (2007), the bird chapter of Martill et al.'s CUP volume The Crato Fossil Beds of Brazil (previously discussed in this article…
tetrapodzoology | July 5, 2008Here's a fossil I described recently. Does anyone want to have a go at identifying it? Don't worry, I know what it is (or, at least, I and my colleagues think I do), but why not go ahead and have fun. Note the scale bar...
Here's a close-up of part of it...
Coming next: SEA MONSTER WEEK!
tetrapodzoology | July 3, 2008
Time for more borhyaenoids. Finally, we get round to the taxa that you might have seen or read about in prehistoric animal books: the sabre-toothed thylacosmilids, the supposedly bear-like borhyaenids, and the gigantic and even more bear-like proborhyaenids. We previously looked at basal borhyaenoids here, and at the mostly scansorial, mustelid-like hathlyacinids and prothylacinids here. Here we go...
We begin with the borhyaenids (yes, borhyaenid borhyaenoids), a group of about ten genera of superficially dog- or thylacine-like borhyaenoids. The oldest (Nemolestes) is from the Early Eocene…
tetrapodzoology | July 1, 2008
Distractions distractions distractions. Mayfly chameleons. Sea monster carcasses. Avian supertrees. Fake tiger photos. New pterosaurs. Frogs. But... must... complete... borhyaenoid... articles... For the intro, go here. Time now to crack on with hathlyacynids and prothylacinids. If you don't care, let me note that this is (to my knowledge) the biggest amount of information yet made available on these animals outside of the technical literature. Yes yes, I feel your love, thank you...
Hathlyacynidae is the biggest and longest-lived borhyaenoid clade, with members that range in age from Late…
tetrapodzoology | June 29, 2008
By now I hope it's clear, even to novices with no special interest in the extinct wildlife of the Cenozoic, that ancient South America had what we might technically call a Really Awesome Faunal Assemblage. Astrapotheres, sebecosuchians, phorusrhacids, teratorns, gigantic caimans, madtsoiid snakes, sloths, glyptodonts... and this is only half of it, there's so much more. It occurred to me a while back that it would be only fair and proper to cover yet another of South America's extinct Cenozoic groups, and yet again it's a bunch of animals on which comparatively little information is freely…
tetrapodzoology | June 26, 2008There's a big crossover, sure, but I often wonder if everyone who visits Tet Zoo also visits SV-POW! Today is the day we put that to the test. To find out more about this image....
.... you must, by law, go here.
Next: oh no, it's the giant killer opossums!
tetrapodzoology | June 25, 2008I was recently asked a reasonable and intelligent question on elephants. One thing led to another, and after a bit of research I discovered the fascinating world of elephant masturbation. If you want to collect sperm from a (captive) elephant, how do you do it? Luckily youtube provides the answer. It seems that manual stimulation of the penis (1) just doesn't do it for elephants, and (2) is physically dangerous (read on), so you have to stick your arm into the animal's rectum and vigorously stimulate its prostate gland. How vigorously? Watch the video. The eventual result - and I'm not…
tetrapodzoology | June 24, 2008
Here I am again, derailing the Tet Zoo publishing schedule, but while I have them on my mind I may as well deal with them now. It'll be brief (no, it wasn't). GOLDEN MOLES!!!1!, or chrysochlorids. If you think true moles, or talpids, are weird (think about it for a minute: they are), you ain't seen nothin' yet. Golden moles are an entirely African group of shiny-furred, fossorial mammals with vestigial eyes (sometimes grown over with haired skin), concealed ears that lack pinnae, a robust snout that terminates in a fleshy pad, and extremely unusual, specialised forelimbs. How 'extremely…
tetrapodzoology | June 23, 2008
Phil Budd (of the Southampton Natural History Society) recently gave me a dead mole Talpa europaea, and here it is. It isn't the first mole for my collection: I have another one that I skeletonised long ago. Moles really are amazing. Their forelimb and pectoral anatomy has to be seen to be believed, and is so modified relative to what's typical for mammals that even some experienced people struggle to identify elements of the mole forelimb skeleton. The short-shafted humerus sports immense expansions and crests for hypertrophied musculature, the sternum is highly elongate and deeply keeled,…
tetrapodzoology | June 21, 2008
You wouldn't know it from Tet Zoo's content, but for many, many months now I've been working continually on ichthyosaurs, the 'fish lizards' of the Mesozoic. I'm not ready to talk about the project yet, but will do at some stage. An awful lot has happened on ichthyosaurs since the late 1990s, mostly thanks to the research of Ryosuke* Motani and Michael Maisch and their collagues, but to be honest things have become quieter in the last few years and we certainly are not in any sort of 'ichthyosaur research renaissance' as we are with plesiosaurs, dinosaurs, pterosaurs and Mesozoic…
tetrapodzoology | June 20, 2008
This is the third time that Tet Zoo has featured a dead giraffe (for the first time go here, and for the second go here). It's not that I don't like giraffes - quite the contrary - it's just that anything and everything about them is fascinating. Lions Panthera leo are incredibly adaptable, and seem not only to develop special techniques that allow them to successfully tackle such formidable prey, but also to take advantage of special conditions that put the prey at a disadvantage. It is widely reported that lions have learnt that giraffes are disadvantaged when forced onto paved roads: they…
tetrapodzoology | June 18, 2008
As if the revelations about Brontornis and all that new work on the ameghinornithids weren't enough, 2007 also saw the publication of a long-awaited new study on the age of Titanis walleri, North America's only phorusrhacid, and - supposedly - a species that survived until as recently as 15,000 years ago. Yes, it's time to crack on with more terror birds, or phorusrhacids. It's a story of ancient island-hopping, of the proposed re-evolution of clawed forelimbs, and of Raven, the giant claw-handed bird of Native American folklore...
Titanis walleri Brodkorb, 1963 is one of the largest and…
tetrapodzoology | June 17, 2008Shame, shame, shame, oh shame on me. I saw the following on John Conway's Philosophica Neopalaeontographica and have become so obsessed with it that, here I am, stealing it. It's not, even, really about tetrapods...
... and the accompanying paper (available as a free pdf) is available here. As John says, the word chicken will never seem the same again. Hang around a bit longer, phorusrhacids next... again...
tetrapodzoology | June 15, 2008
The image depicted in the previous brief post is one of those famous iconic photos that many people have seen but few know anything about: it's an alleged yeti track, photographed by Eric Shipton and Michael Ward on the 8th November 1951 on Menlung Glacier during their exploration of the Gauri Sanker range in the Himalayas (Heuvelmans 1995). Together with the Sherpa Sen Tensing, Shipton and Ward apparently followed a trail of large, human-like tracks for about a mile but, unfortunately, only photographed one track. There have been several efforts to interpret this track as one made by a…
tetrapodzoology | June 14, 2008
A very famous image, and you probably know what it is. But - really.. look at it very closely, what is it really? No, this is not a trick question: I'm just proposing that people really look in detail at all of its features. More terror birds soon, also tree-climbing dinosaurs, the last anurans, squirrels, and more lake monsters.
tetrapodzoology | June 13, 2008
You'll recall me saying recently that 2007 was a good year for publications on phorusrhacids, aka terror birds. And as I discussed in the previous post, one of the most interesting contentions made about phorusrhacids last year was that one of the most remarkable members of the group (super-robust Brontornis from the Miocene) is actually not a phorusrhacid at all. Here we look at recent work on a group of birds that, while initially suggested to be part of the phorusrhacid radiation, now, also, seem not to be. They are the ameghinornithids...
Originally named as a phorusrhacid 'subfamily'…
tetrapodzoology | June 12, 2008
Contrary to plans (you know how it is), I haven't had time to finish the phorusrhacid theme I started on Tuesday. Because it's important to keep it in mind, I feel we need a reminder about the fact that 2008 is Year of the Frog, and hats off to Carel for discussing this recently, and of course to Jeff Davis of Frog Matters for continuing to fight the fight...
Among the latest froggy news is the auctioning of the name of a new species of Mannophryne (go here): you have until July 1 2009 to get an aromobatid species named after you (aromobatids are a recently recognised clade of dendrobatoid…