tetrapodzoology | February 12, 2008
Panoplosaurus mirus was a large nodosaurid (reaching 6 m) and a particularly close relative of the even larger Edmontonia (for a quick intro to nodosaurids see the day 2 article). One of several Canadian dinosaurs from the Campanian Dinosaur Park Formation named by Lawrence Lambe, Panoplosaurus was described in 1919 for a skeleton collected by Charles M. Sternberg. As in Edmontonia but unlike other nodosaurids, Panoplosaurus lacked premaxillary teeth and grew an oval scute in the cheek cavity adjacent to its teeth. These nodosaurids must, therefore, have possessed fleshy cheeks (an…
tetrapodzoology | February 11, 2008
Originally discovered in 1987 by Bradford Riney during a palaeontological surveying trip, the only known specimen of Aletopelta coombsi [shown here] is from an outcrop of the Campanian Point Loma Formation at Carlsbad, California. It's one of several ankylosaur specimens whose remains come from marine sediments: an occurrence which has led several palaeontologists to suggest that some ankylosaurs frequented beaches, or even that they swam in the shallows eating marine plants, like armour-plated manatees. Of course these ideas are possible but difficult to confirm (actually, it might be…
tetrapodzoology | February 11, 2008
Welcome to day 2 of the 'ankylosaur week' series - for the background on this go see day 1 on Hungarosaurus. Before talking about today's ankylosaur, here's a quick 'everything you wanted to know about ankylosaurs but were afraid to ask'. Ankylosaurs were ornithischian dinosaurs from the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they have a highly modified skull where the sutures are closed, the external openings are mostly or entirely closed, the dorsal surface is covered with thick bony layers and bony bosses, and the small teeth are inset from the jaw margins. Horns often project from the cheek and rear…
tetrapodzoology | February 10, 2008
My to-do list has once again reached epic proportions, and includes three technical projects that now need urgent attention, about ten editorial jobs that need to be dealt with, several overdue book reviews, a lot of consultancy work, and a book synopsis. Plus of course this is all done in 'spare time' given family life and the day-job. In an effort to catch up with this back-log I'm going to let Tet Zoo lay fallow for a week, sort of. We haven't really had enough dinosaurs on Tet Zoo lately and, frankly, most of the stuff that I have lined up for the near future isn't on dinosaurs either,…
tetrapodzoology | February 7, 2008
Time to do more astrapotheres. In the preceding article, we more or less introduced astrapotheres, had a quick look at their diversity, and ran through some of the basal forms. Here we get to the good stuff on astrapotheriid astrapotheres, on lifestyles, and on that question that keeps us all awake at night: just what the hell are astrapotheres anyway?
Astrapotheriid astrapotheres - the astrapotheres with particularly big canine tusks, a specialised narial region and other characters - appear to consist of two clades: Astrapotheriinae and Uruguaytheriinae. Besides Astrapotherium,…
tetrapodzoology | February 6, 2008
While googling for astrapothere images recently I came across the image used here: wow! This is a life-sized reconstruction of the gigantic Miocene alligatoroid Purussaurus, first named in 1892 for P. brasiliensis from the Upper Miocene Solimões Formation of Brazil. Most of the salient features that are diagnostic for Purussaurus can be seen in the reconstruction: the snout is incredibly deep, wide, rounded at its tip, and decorated with bumps and ridges, the dorsal surface of the snout is strongly concave, the external bony nostril opening was proportionally huge and anteroposteriorly…
tetrapodzoology | February 3, 2008Anyone even vaguely interested in fossil mammals has the same problem at some time or another. You repeatedly encounter the same bizarre and fascinating beasts, long to know more about them, and yet have to endure a lifetime of frustration in the absence of any good, comprehensive information. Typically, one species in the group - usually, the most geologically recent, or the biggest, or the first-named - is figured and mentioned in all of the books, while all of the others languish in obscurity and may as well not exist.
An excellent example of this sort of thing is provided by the…
tetrapodzoology | January 30, 2008
Long time readers will, I'm sure, recall Tet Zoo's role as whistle-blower back in April 2007. The article that started all the trouble - The armadillodile diaries, a story of science ethics - was posted here. Well, as you'll know if you've seen today's Nature, a new article by Rex Dalton brings this story to wider attention...
For those who haven't read the original Tet Zoo article and can't be bothered to do so now, the story is - to put it very briefly - that Spencer Lucas and some of his colleagues (Andy Heckert, Justin Spielmann and Adrian Hunt) at the New Mexico Museum of Natural…
tetrapodzoology | January 30, 2008
Will and I looked at some really awesome creatures on our recent visit to the Blue Reef Aquarium at Southsea (Portsmouth, UK)... but most of them weren't tetrapods so I won't be blogging about them. Sturgeons, wobbegongs, remoras, horseshoe crabs, four-eyed fish, Pacific giant octopus, moray eels. I actually spent ages trying to get a good photo of a wobbegong but couldn't. Anyway, I had better luck in photographing the Snapping turtle Chelydra serpentina shown here - though it took ages as it wouldn't keep still. I like my photos for several reasons. The adjacent one, for example, shows the…
tetrapodzoology | January 27, 2008
Keeping promises isn't always easy, but - following what is hopefully a forgiveable hiatus - here we get back to that short series on obscure island-dwelling, recently extinct animals. It started with a map of the Caribbean. Then we got through (some of the) island otters and canids, and then more of the canids... the good news is that here we have that long-awaited, much-asked-for 'titan-hawks and monster pigeons' article. The bad news: I got carried away on the titan-hawks and other raptors, and the pigeons will have to wait, sorry...
It now seems that big raptors were important predators…
tetrapodzoology | January 26, 2008
2007 - Tet Zoo's second year of operation - has come and gone. The previous article was a brief personal review of the year, and here's more of the same (sort of) if you can handle it...
As if Tet Zoo wasn't enough to deal with, in September my partners-in-crime Mike P. Taylor and Matt Wedel [shown here; Mike is the less big one] decided, with me, to start up a new zoological blog, but this time devoted to something a little more specific: namely, sauropod vertebrae (and nothing else, pretty much). So on October 1st, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, or SV-POW!, was born. Despite…
tetrapodzoology | January 24, 2008
January 21st 2008 was Tet Zoo's second birthday, but due to its clashing with the launch of the EDGE amphibian site I didn't have the chance to write about it. So, better late than never, I'm doing that now. It's time to reminiscence on a year gone by, on a year when so much happened in the world of Tetrapod Zoology...
The move to Science Blogs
The real personal big deal for 2007 was, of course, the migration of this blog to the wonderful world of Science Blogs. I initially decided that this wouldn't change my blogging habits, but eventually it did, as the constant quest for more hits has…
tetrapodzoology | January 22, 2008
Time to resort to posting images, with minimal use of text, once more. Previously we had giraffes vs planes: these pictures - which are widely available on the web and unfortunately don't come with any details* - pretty much speak for themselves. In the image at top, an unfortunate seabird has clearly met its demise on the nose-cone of... some sort of plane (my powers of identification don't extend outside the subject of tetrapod zoology). I assume that the bird is an albatross, probably a Wandering albatross Diomedea exulans, or perhaps a Short-tailed albatross Phoebastria albatrus (though…
tetrapodzoology | January 21, 2008
A major global conservation effort, aiming to bring to better attention the chronic plight of the world's amphibian species, was launched at the start of this year. You might have heard of it: the Year of the Frog movement. And, today, a second project aimed at conserving the world's endangered amphibians launches: the EDGE amphibian project, a website designed by the Zoological Society of London to draw attention to amphibian species that are not just globally endangered, but are also evolutionarily distinct...
As you might have guessed, 'EDGE' stands for Evolutionarily Distinct and…
tetrapodzoology | January 18, 2008
Those of you with particularly good memories might recall the little references I've been making here and there to a 'big, personally-relevant publication', and those asides to new papers about pleurodires and enantiornithines. Following horrific delays (caused by amphibians, dinosaur growth rates, ichthyosaurs and conferences) I am, finally, pleased to announce that Cambridge University Press' huge new book, The Crato Fossil Beds of Brazil: Window into an Ancient World (Martill et al. 2007), was published in December 2007 and is now available. If you're interested in Cretaceous anurans,…
tetrapodzoology | January 16, 2008
Or - alternative title to this article - 'It will be the best conference of all time' (no hyperbole at all). Do you like dinosaurs? Are you particularly interested in our changing ideas about dinosaurs, about key discoveries and concepts, or about the evolution of our ideas, reconstructions and theories about dinosaurs? If the answer is yes then get ready to come to London in May 2008 for Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective...
On May 6th and 7th this year, Burlington House in Piccadilly (London) will be hosting this most prestigious of meetings. We've arranged it through the History of…
tetrapodzoology | January 15, 2008
It seems that this story is already all over the internet - I would have posted on it sooner this morning but was busy with amphibians! Anyway... back in 2005 Mary Schweitzer and colleagues dropped a bombshell into the world of dinosaur palaeontology: they reported the discovery of medullary bone within a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen (Schweitzer et al. 2005). Medullary bone is a specialized, densely mineralized, highly vascularized tissue laid down on the endosteal surface of long bones: its formation is triggered by hormones that are produced during ovulation, and it functions as a calcium…
tetrapodzoology | January 13, 2008
In the previous article, we covered Mesozoic stem-caudates, the cryptobranchoids, and the sirens. The latter are almost certainly part of the most diverse salamander clade, Salamandroidea (also named Salamandriformes or Diadectosalamandroidei), aka the 'internally fertilizing salamanders', or IFS clade (Larson & Dimmick 1993). You can guess from the name what makes the IFS clade a big deal (more on that in a second). Yes, I know you've all been waiting for this - it's finally time to cover the amphiumas, mudpuppies, waterdogs and olms, the mole salamanders, the lungless salamanders. Aww…
tetrapodzoology | January 12, 2008
Did I mention that 2008 is Year of the Frog? Just kidding. In actuality, the conservation effort so many of us are now involved in doesn't just concern anurans (frogs and toads), but all the living amphibian groups: as you'll know, there are, besides anurans, two other such groups. We looked previously at the bizarre caecilians. This time round we get through the last group of the three: the caudates, or salamanders, of which there are about 560 living species. Again, these animals are anything but boring. Yes, this is that group that, believe it or don't, includes species that have evolved…
tetrapodzoology | January 11, 2008
Thanks to everyone who offered an opinion and submitted their thoughts on that photo - and there were no silly answers, because I feel the real answer was not necessarily easy. As some of you correctly determined, the cat was actually not an unfamiliar or obscure species - just the opposite - it's just that it represented a body shape and/or geographical variant of this species that we're not used to seeing...
The proportionally long tail shows that this can't be a small cat like a golden cat; it's difficult to be sure from the photo, but the cat also looks much larger than a golden cat […