tetrapodzoology | March 21, 2008
Dr David Hone is well known for many scientific achievements. For the description of the new rhynchosaur Fodonyx (Hone & Benton 2007a). For his papers on Cope's rule and macroevolutionary trends in archosaurs (Hone & Benton 2005, Hone et al. 2005). For his PhD work on the phylogenetic position of pterosaurs (Hone & Benton 2007b). For the organisation of the awesome Munich pterosaur meeting. And for the philanthropic wonder that is the Ask A Biologist site. But even such a noble creator can spawn a monster. Yes world, I give you the horror that is lol-sauropods, brain-child of…
tetrapodzoology | March 20, 2008
As explained in the previous article, here's another by-now-outdated effort to report on stuff that's been published recently, or recently-ish. This time: mammals.
Several neat new fossil mammal discoveries have gone unreported in the press so far as I can tell. Deng & Qiu (2007) recently reported the first black rhino - that is, a member of the genus Diceros - from eastern Asia. Similar to the extant black rhino D. bicornis in size, the Chinese animal is from the Late Miocene Liushu Formation of Gansu Province and has been named D. gansuensis. The Liushu Formation has also recently…
tetrapodzoology | March 19, 2008
It was Beelzebufo that finally made up my mind. Long-time readers will have noticed that I generally fail to discuss the exciting stuff that's being announced in the news, even when it's very much relevant to the Tet Zoo remit. Indeed some of you have even commented upon this fact. What's my excuse for this? Well there are a few actually...
-- For starters, once I've decided to blog about something - say, initial bipedalism or European pumas or liolaemine lizards - I need to stick with it and get it out of the way. Because I have a long list of subjects that I plan to blog about, I am not…
tetrapodzoology | March 16, 2008
Regular readers will know that I am an unashamed fan of non-standard theories, aka fringe theories or whacky theories, and of course we looked just recently at the haematotherm theory. Doubtless you've all heard of the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH): that strangely popular notion which promotes the idea that modern humans owe their distinctive features to a marine phase. While it still seems conceivable that at least some fossil hominins foraged on shores and in mangroves, all of the evidence so far put forward to document our aquatic heritage is demonstrably incorrect and fails to fit the…
tetrapodzoology | March 15, 2008
Yes, the globally renowned internet phenomenon that is Ask A Biologist had its official first birthday on Friday 14th. All the AAB contributors got together and had a massive champagne lunch to celebrate...
... no, of course they bloody didn't, but it would be good wouldn't it. I need not say that AAB might be one of the most useful resources on the web: sigh, if only it were better known. So here I am doing my little bit: if you have a burning question that concerns the biological sciences, why not pop over and see if anyone can answer it. You know: how did sauropods sleep, what did…
tetrapodzoology | March 13, 2008
In the previous article (required reading) we looked at European leopards. But the leopard wasn't the only big spotted Panthera species that lived in Europe during the Pleistocene: it was joined by a second, far less well known animal: Panthera gombaszoegensis (originally Leo gombaszoegensis Kretzoi, 1938). This cat seems to have been very jaguar-like and in fact the name 'European jaguar' is often used for it. In fact, it may actually be a jaguar - that is, a member of the species Panthera onca - and some cat experts classify it as an extinct Panthera onca subspecies (Hemmer et al. 2001,…
tetrapodzoology | March 12, 2008
So, on to the contents of my BCiB talk (see previous article for preamble). We began by looking at Homotherium latidens, sometimes called the scimitar cat, scimitar-toothed cat or dirk-toothed cat. H. latidens is one of several Homotherium species that inhabited North America, Eurasia and Africa during the Pleistocene: the different species varied in body size, skull shape, the proportional length of the forelimbs, and in other features. It's repeatedly been suggested that H. latidens might have survived in Britain until as recently as 11,000 years ago (close to the start of the Holocene):…
tetrapodzoology | March 11, 2008
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: one of the best ways to invigorate your enthusiasm about a subject is to attend a conference on it, and to spend at least a couple of days talking with other people about that subject. I've (more or less) just returned from the third Big Cats in Britain conference, held at Tropiquaria at Watchet, north Somerset. What an amazing venue: picture, if you can, a 1930s BBC radio station [adjacent image shows the stonework above the main entrance] surrounded by gigantic towering antennae, the heat radiating from one of the antennae being…
tetrapodzoology | March 6, 2008
Congratulations are in order: well done Dave Hughes, David Marjanović and Allen Hazen in particular. No, the creature shown yesterday is not a squabrat from The Dark Crystal (if there is such a thing), Romer's hellasaur, an old picture of a colugo, a proto-bat, proto-pterosaur, arboreal theropod, antiquated archaeopterygid, tree shrew, climbing duck-possum, arboreal gorgonopsian, proto-ropen, or one of Dougal Dixon's arbrosaurs: it is, instead, the hypothetical stem-haematotherm depicted in Philippe Janvier's 1984 article on the Haematothermia concept. It made an appearance both within the…
tetrapodzoology | March 4, 2008
Yes yes, well done (almost) everyone: yesterday's so-called mystery picture was indeed of a takin calf Budorcas taxicolor, and yes it's the offspring of the individuals that I was talking about seeing at Marwell Zoological Park back in 2006. This particular photo was taken by Graeme Elliott (I think)...
Besides the thickset look of the whole animal, clues that give away the calf's identity include the dark vertebral stripe, the chunky forelimbs, and the big, bulky lateral hooves (or dewclaws). Takins use their big dewclaws to aid their footing on hilly, rocky places. Takins occur today in…
tetrapodzoology | March 3, 2008
You all love the 'identify the mystery animal' posts so much I thought I'd produce a whole string of them. Minimum effort, maximum result ('min eff, max res', as I always say). Go go go!!
tetrapodzoology | March 2, 2008
I spent much of my Saturday doing an interesting thing. Together with another 30 or so people, I went along to my local nature reserve (Chessel Bay Nature Reserve, Southampton) and took part in an effort to clear the shore of its tons upon tons of human crap. Unsatisfied with our constant use of resources, our epic, manic pollution, and our rampant annihilation of other species, we aim to cover as much of the planet's surface as possible in our waste: we are literally doing our very best to swamp natural environments with the discarded shit that we can't be bothered to deal with properly.…
tetrapodzoology | February 28, 2008
Thank you and well done to everyone who had a bash at identifying Ermentrude. For the most part, you were correct: Ermentrude was indeed an iguanian, and within Iguania a tropidurid... or tropidurine... I mean liolaemid... or liolaemine, or liolaemin.. and, within that group, a species of the large South American taxon Liolaemus. What species? Well, that's a bit trickier to answer...
An average of about four new Liolaemus species are described every year, and there are currently around 200 species*, so it can be difficult to keep track of them. Ermentrude was labelled as a 'spotted swift'…
tetrapodzoology | February 26, 2008
This is Ermentrude, or Ermie, the best lizard I ever kept. Despite his name he was a male (I think). He got used to being handled but didn't like having his claws clipped. Strangely, he liked banana and once he ate a load of white butterfly chrysalises. Anyway... can you succeed where so many have failed. Can you identify the species that Ermentrude belonged to? The photos aren't great, but they're all I have...
tetrapodzoology | February 24, 2008
The third Big Cats in Britain (BCiB) conference is almost upon us: it happens from 7th-9th March 2008 at Tropiquaria (Watchet, Somerset). This time round, I'm speaking, and most of my research time is currently being eaten up as I prepare for the meeting (I'm also speaking in the first week of March on 'Britain's changing herpetofauna' for the Southampton Natural History Society... haven't really started preparing that talk yet). My talk is titled 'The deep time history of Britain's felid fauna' and is essentially a palaeontological/archaeological view of British cats. You could argue that…
tetrapodzoology | February 19, 2008
Yet again I am going to have to go quiet-ish on Tet Zoo for a little while as I just cannot put the time into completing the many planned articles. Sigh. One thing approaching on the near horizon is eating up lots of my research time: the third Big Cats in Britain conference, happening in early March, and at which I'm speaking. I'll post details on it over the next few days. For now, I thought I'd enthuse a bit about lizards: like (I'm sure) everyone in the UK interested in zoology, I am watching David Attenborough's Life in Cold Blood series at the moment, and last night's episode (number 3…
tetrapodzoology | February 18, 2008
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: as a life-long zoology nerd, one of my greatest frustrations has always been the fact that there are so many animals that get mentioned - only ever mentioned - but never elaborated upon. I've always liked Axolotls Ambystoma mexicanum, and among the world's unusual amphibians this has got to be one of the most familiar, thanks of course to its widespread use in the pet trade and as a laboratory animal [assortment of captive axolotls show above]. As everyone knows, the Axolotl is neotenous: it retains juvenile characters into sexual…
tetrapodzoology | February 15, 2008
And so, here we are, at the end of it all. Ankylosaur week has come and gone, but oh what a week it was. As I said at the beginning, the whole aim was to save myself work and time by not producing anything new - and this worked, more or less. Did I clear the backlog? Did I hell, but at least I tried...
So which ankylosaur ends the series? Initially I had hoped to cover bizarre little Liaoningosaurus paradoxus but, I won't lie, my choice of taxa has, in part, been inspired by the presence of attractive images and, sad to say, for little Liaoningosaurus I've found squat other than the photo…
tetrapodzoology | February 15, 2008
Another day, another ankylosaur. This time: Silvisaurus condrayi. Known only from the Albian-Cenomanian Dakota Formation of Kansas and described by Theodore H. Eaton in 1960, Silvisaurus is a surprisingly well known, though enigmatic, nodosaurid. Because Eaton provided a life restoration in his paper (albeit it not a very good one - read on. It's shown here), Silvisaurus is one of the few nodosaurids which has been widely depicted in the popular literature. The production of a life restoration, while not regarded as integral to a scientific description, does mean that your animal will get…
tetrapodzoology | February 14, 2008
Welcome to day 5 of ankylosaur week. This time, we look at Panoplosaurus' sister-taxon Edmontonia. Edmontonia was a large (6-7 m long) Campanian-Maastrichtian nodosaurid that lived right across North America...
Two species are presently recognised. The type species, E. longiceps, named by Charles M. Sternberg in 1928 for a specimen from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation of Alberta, is today known from multiple units of both the USA and Alberta [adjacent image shows the Drumheller Edmontonia model].
The second species, E. rugosidens, was first described in 1930 by Charles Gilmore for a specimen…