tetrapodzoology | December 7, 2007
Specializing on locomotor ecology*, my good, long-standing friend Mary Blanchard of the University of Liverpool's Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology has been spending a lot of time on Madagascar over the past several years, and has been looking at a lot of wild lemurs. She has studied the ecology of wild indris Indri indri, Diademed sifakas Propithecus diadema and Grey bamboo lemurs Hapalemur griseus griseus, and has also collected data on the diets of wild Ring-tailed lemurs Lemur catta, Verreaux's sifaka Propithecus verreauxi and Black-and-white ruffed lemurs Varecia variegata…
tetrapodzoology | December 6, 2007
We returned late last night: it was a journey involving koalas, Pallas' cat and Asian golden cat, wolverines, rhinos, anteaters, Ceratosaurus, a toy armadillo, and yet again those bloody ichthyosaurs. Thanks to those who've been leaving comments in my absence, I'll address some of the points in due course. Anyway.. so, Tet Zoo has recently played host to articles on deer and carnivorans and, all too briefly, to weird turtles and red bats. But you know that, eventually, we had to return to anurans right?
Yes, finally, we come to the last group of ranoids, last group of neobatrachians, and…
tetrapodzoology | November 30, 2007
Only time for a picture-of-the-day today, and this neat picture shows an Eastern red bat Lasiurus borealis, a mid-sized vesper bat (wingspan c. 300 mm) that occurs across most of eastern North America, some of northern South America, and parts of the Caribbean (in 2004 an individual was reported from north-east Alberta, which I presume is the northern-most record for this species). Eastern red bats are sexually dimorphic: females have grey frosting on their light brown fur while males are entirely red (this is a female). They are insectivorous, nomadic, migratory bats that roost individually…
tetrapodzoology | November 29, 2007
That weird little face was, indeed, that of a turtle - but it wasn't that of a matamata Chelus fimbriatus, it was instead that of a softshell turtle (a trionychid), and specifically that of a narrow-headed softshell Chitra indica (though read on). Well done Lars, Johannes and Emile, and particularly Hai-Ren. Chitra has to be one of the most amazing turtles: a big to enormous, long-skulled rubbery animal that hardly ever leaves the water.
Unlike all other turtles, softshells have reduced the bony carapace to such an extent that the margins of their shell are flexible: in some species, the…
tetrapodzoology | November 28, 2007
Late in the evening I sat in an airport lounge, finally reading Robert Twigger's book on python hunting, my head full of Robert Appleby's legacy, fossil giraffes, giant mustelids, and the song from the end of Portal. I thought about the wolfhounds I'd seen, the bullfinches, stock doves and plovers; the bones we'd found; the teeth and vertebrae I'd handled or photographed; a futile search for hares and about the leverets I discovered in Germany once; the pile of correspondence I'd gone through; and the work I had yet to do on all those hundreds and hundreds of unlabelled diagrams. I thought…
tetrapodzoology | November 24, 2007
I'm going away for a little while. I leave you with this nice picture of a male Fallow deer Dama dama, taken from Neil Phillips' collection of UK wildlife photos (and used with his permission)...
All deer are bizarre (I'll elaborate on that cryptic comment at some time), but Fallow deer are especially interesting: they differ from most other Old World deer in retaining spots into adulthood, in having a particularly long tail (for a deer) that is used in an unusual urination display, in having big rump patches, in lacking canines (although every now and again there are freaks: see Chapman…
tetrapodzoology | November 23, 2007
On to more of my thoughts about the TV series The Velvet Claw (part I is here). In the previous article, I discussed the art and animation used in the series, all of which was really quite good and very interesting in often featuring fairly obscure creatures...
There's one really important thing I haven't yet mentioned about The Velvet Claw: the fact that both the book and the TV series was written by David Macdonald, director of the Wildlife Conservation Research University at Oxford University and very well known for his many, many publications on biology, ecology and conservation […
tetrapodzoology | November 21, 2007
Those of us interested in the same subject often tend to have experienced the same sort of things. If you share my interests (as you probably do, given that you're here), you've probably watched a lot of Attenborough on TV. You've probably been to at least one of the bigger natural history museums of your country, probably more than once. You've probably spent more time than is considered usual looking at weird reptiles, or bat-eared foxes, or tapirs, or giraffes, or bats, or rhinos, at the zoo. You probably caught and kept weird insects and pond animals as a child. You've probably picked up…
tetrapodzoology | November 19, 2007
If you're like me, you'll know the TV series, and/or the book, well...
Reminiscing about it now, it's impossible to forget how awesome it was. And it was so much more than a history of the carnivorans: it involved dinosaurs, mesonychians, pristichampsines, glyptodonts, future predators, and some plain awesome real-life sequences of carnivorans doing what they do best. I'm hoping to post the full article tonight. And if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about you're definitely in for a surprise!
tetrapodzoology | November 18, 2007
Now, I've described quite a few isolated dinosaur bones in my time. And I've been involved in some pretty hectic media whirlwindy events ('Angloposeidon', aka 'Europe's largest sauropod', was huge news: see here, as was Eotyrannus). But I've never been associated with any PR exercise that was as well orchestrated and successful as the event that surrounded Xenoposeidon. I have lots of thoughts about what an outstanding success the entire media campaign was, but for those you'll have to check SV-POW!
After all that, does it seem at all anticlimactic to return to frogs? No, it does not: right…
tetrapodzoology | November 15, 2007
By now you might have heard the thrilling news that Britain has a brand-new sauropod dinosaur: it's an animal that I've obliquely alluded to many times here at Tet Zoo (since February 2006 in fact), and its study and publication have been many months - in fact years - in the making. Yes, it's (arguably) the world's most amazing sauropod... Xenoposeidon proneneukos Taylor & Naish, 2007, an enigmatic and morphologically bizarre Lower Cretaceous neosauropod from the Wealden Supergroup rocks of East Sussex, described in the new issue of Palaeontology (Taylor & Naish 2007). At last,…
tetrapodzoology | November 12, 2007
While googling for Tetrapod Zoology recently (how vain) I came across a bunch of interesting giraffe images, most of which I'll be recycling here at some stage in the future. I don't know anything about the history of the photo shown here; it looks genuine and I think it speaks for itself. It seems to have been posted around the internet quite a lot already, mostly by people who seem to think that it's amusing - yeah, a dead animal that was hit by a plane, oh my sides...
Anyway, not only is there all the stuff to say about the fossil history of long-necked giraffes (a subject we've covered…
tetrapodzoology | November 11, 2007
Within the immense anuran clade termed Neobatrachia, we've so far gotten through the hyloids (see previous anuran article here: you'll need to read also the articles on basal anurans, transitional anurans, and ghost frogs and so on). All we have left is Ranoidea, but this is the biggest, most diverse, and most complex (and perhaps most interesting) anuran group. So here we go: we are at the beginning of the end...
Ranoidea has always been understood to include ranids ('typical frogs') and all the anurans closer to them than to hyloids, and several derived characters of the skeleton and…
tetrapodzoology | November 8, 2007
So here we are, back with the anurans. In the previous article on neobatrachians (here), we looked at the basic division of the neobatrachians into the mostly New World Hyloidea, and the mostly Old World Ranoidea. While the characters historically used to differentiate hyloids (an arciferal pectoral girdle and procoelous vertebrae) are now understood to be primitive within neobatrachians, recent molecular studies have revealed good support for a clade that more or less corresponds with traditional Hyloidea. Many anuran workers have included within Hyloidea the Australasian southern frogs (or…
tetrapodzoology | November 7, 2007
Again, no time to complete any articles, sorry. Bloody annoying. Attended Witton pterosaur talk yesterday (it included revelations on winged hatchet-headed ptero-squirrels) as well as a Peter Burford talk on Gambian birds. Have found ten mins to post the above: fantastic pic from Matt Wedel (aka Dr Vector). Few quick factoids on Stegosaurus...
Stegosaurus is no longer unique to the USA (now known from Portugal too), it's not definitely the biggest stegosaur (European Upper Jurassic Dacentrurus might have been as big or bigger), it's possibly the only stegosaur that lacked parascapular spines…
tetrapodzoology | November 5, 2007
By now I think you'd have to have been hiding under a rock to miss the news on the accompanying image: taken on September 16th 2007 in north-west Pennsylvania, it depicts a large, rangy mammal, and was photographed with an automatic motion-sensing camera put in place by R. Jacobs. However, it occurred to me that, while the image (and accompany story) might be very familiar to people interested in sasquatch - and to those who get to hear the local news in and around Pennsylvania - there is still likely a huge audience that haven't even heard of it. The photo has become known as the Jacobs…
tetrapodzoology | November 4, 2007
Welcome again to Frog Blog, as Tet Zoo is now affectionately known. In the previous froggy article we got through the so-called transitional anurans, and I finished by introducing the largest, most speciose, most diverse anuran clade: Neobatrachia Reig, 1958. It contains about 96% of all extant anuran species: most of these belong to one of two great assemblages (conventionally dubbed hyloids and ranoids). My aim here - mostly an effort to avoid discussing all the myriad groups that belong to Neobatrachia - was to briefly dash through all of neobatrachian diversity in just one article, but I…
tetrapodzoology | November 1, 2007
Everyone interested in animals must, by law, have set eyes on that iconic image of palaeornithologist Kenneth E. Campbell standing next to a life-sized silhouette of the immense Argentinean teratornithid Argentavis magnificens [the image is shown below]. At the International Bird of Prey Centre, Gloucestershire (UK), I quite liked the wooden silhouette of an Andean condor Vultur gryphus and, in the image here, Tone is standing next to it, looking as much like Campbell as she is able. An actual live Andean condor can just about be seen sitting in the enclosure in the background. An Andean…
tetrapodzoology | October 31, 2007
So here we are: anuran diversity part II - you have to have read part I (here) for the following to make proper sense. Yesterday I showed my video of Tiger the secretary bird (filmed at the International Bird of Prey Centre, Gloucestershire, last week) to anybody that would watch, and in the wee small hours I even completed the first draft of a paper on yet another new Wealden theropod (as always, more on that in due time). I remain perpetually busy with those pesky ichthyosaurs. Oh yeah, and happy wedding anniversary me and Tone (yes, we got married on Halloween. Don't ask). Anyway, anurans…
tetrapodzoology | October 28, 2007
Welcome back, err, me! And, while I could have started with 'here are the things I saw on holiday', I became concerned that my list of bats and raptors might seem a bit mundane in comparison to what certain of my friends have encountered (wait until you see what Carel got to see). Anyway, to business. Tet Zoo regulars will know that I've had a thing about anurans (frogs and toads) recently (go here, here or here); the reasons for this will become clear soon enough. And to make things easier in the articles that will follow, I thought it might be a good idea to produce a short article on…