tetrapodzoology | March 11, 2007
Most of us have grown up with the idea that the Mesozoic Era was, excepting the Early Triassic, a time when dinosaurs dominated life on land. Or, put another way, a time when dinosaurs were the most ecologically significant and most obvious of all land animals. The familiar generalization, recounted in every book on Mesozoic life, is that dinosaurs were the only diverse big-bodied land vertebrates during the Jurassic and Cretaceous and, for as long as this was the case, other tetrapod groups were unable to achieve big body size. But in the same way that the modern world isn't really '…
tetrapodzoology | March 9, 2007
It's not all dinosaurs, killer eagles, blue whales, vampires and giant feral cats you know... as planned, I did spend Wednesday evening out in the field looking for newts (for the purposes of this discussion, newt = any member of the amphibian clade Salamandridae that is aquatic during the breeding season). Admittedly 'the field' may not quite be the appropriate term, as the newts we were searching for were a rumoured population reported to inhabit an ornamental pond in the middle of Southampton city centre. It's great, the way people look at you, as you march through an urban area with your…
tetrapodzoology | March 6, 2007
It started with a visit to the zoo. Those remarkable African birds, the ground hornbills, got me thinking about Dale Russell's hypothetical thought-experiment (Russell 1987, Russell & Seguin 1982): what if non-avian dinosaurs (specifically, troodontid maniraptorans) had not bought the farm at the end of the Cretaceous but, instead, had continued to evolve? One thing led to another and I ended up both disagreeing with Russell's concept of a human-like erect-bodied short-faced flat-footed tailless dinosauroid, and speculating about what - in my view - a 'real' dinosauroid might look like…
tetrapodzoology | March 4, 2007
A few bits of circumstantial evidence suggest to some that feral cats in Australia are now reaching enormous sizes, equivalent to that of a small leopard. This sounds incredible: how does the evidence hold up?
Tetrapod Zoology exists in a delicate balance. On the one hand I want to try and maintain some sort of credibility as a trained scientist, but on the other hand there is a strong incentive to write about the fantastic, the incredible, and the bizarre, simply because this is what generates the hits. More people will read a post about Godzilla or sasquatch than about tree frogs or small…
tetrapodzoology | March 3, 2007
Coming next: that long-promised post on Australian giant cats. If this stuff is unfamiliar to you, prepare to be surprised. I still can't believe it. After that: the beluwhals, newts (pending fieldwork to be carried out on Wednesday), maybe more feathered dinosaurs.... and rhinogradentians. Spent today watching swimming rats. Only Rattus norvegicus but still cool.
tetrapodzoology | March 2, 2007
In the previous post we looked at the feathers and filament-like structures that covered the bodies of coelurosaurian theropods. While basal coelurosaurs - compsognathids and tyrannosauroids - possessed filament-like 'Stage 1' structures alone, members of Maniraptora (the coelurosaur clade that includes oviraptorosaurs, therizinosauroids, birds, deinonychosaurs and, probably, alvarezsaurids) possessed indisputable vaned feathers. That is, complex feathers that had a distinct central rachis with vanes on either side composed of parallel barbs. What is surprising is how luxuriant some of this…
tetrapodzoology | February 28, 2007
By now most people know that feathers are no longer unique to birds. Thanks mostly to a series of wonderful fossils from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, China, we now know that feathers first appeared in non-avian theropods, and were - later on - inherited by early birds...
What doesn't seem so widely recognised is that several researchers had been predicting the presence of feathers in non-avian theropods for an awfully long time, it's just that these people had been mostly dismissed as cranks indulging in way too much speculation. As it happens, the logic they…
tetrapodzoology | February 25, 2007
One of the most remarkable organs in nature might have one of the most remarkable functions, if the results of a recent study are to be accepted...
I lectured this weekend on the evolutionary history of whales, so am feeling pretty inspired about cetaceans and their history. Actually, it's always a good time to get inspired about the evolution of whales, given that this is such a happening area in vertebrate palaeontology nowadays. Recent years have seen the description of multiple new fossil ziphiids and mysticetes, and a huge amount of new work on stem-group cetaceans like pakicetids and…
tetrapodzoology | February 24, 2007
It's funny what you can find kicking around in the corner of a friend's flat. Full post to follow soon...
tetrapodzoology | February 22, 2007
By now you've probably heard the news: chimpanzees have been reported manufacturing, and using, spears (Gibbons 2007, Pruetz & Bertolani 2007). I'll say that again. Chimps Pan troglodytes make and use spears....
Specifically, the chimps concerned are of the subspecies P. t. verus, a taxon that some researchers (Morin et al. 1994, 1995) have tentatively elevated to specific status. As reported in Current Biology by Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University and Paco Bertolani of the University of Cambridge, the observations concern the 35 chimps of the Fongoli site in Senegal. On more than 20…
tetrapodzoology | February 21, 2007
A story of cheeks, beaks, feathers, bizarre theropod dinosaurs, and truly, truly amazing fossils....
Yesterday I made a special visit to the University of Portsmouth's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences in order to attend a talk by, and meet, Professor Altangerel Perle, the famous Mongolian palaeontologist and finder of awesome Cretaceous dinosaur fossils. From the 1970s onwards, Perle has personally excavated and described such incredible fossils as the fighting Velociraptor and Protoceratops, the alvarezsaurid Mononykus, the unusual giant dromaeosaurid Achillobator, and the…
tetrapodzoology | February 19, 2007
If you like amphibians and non-avian reptiles, Britain is a crappy place to live: we have just three native lizard species, three snakes, three newts, two toads and two frogs. But do we have a few more: are various 'neglected natives' lurking in our midst?
This depauperate herpetofauna mostly owes itself to the fact that Britain was glaciated for most of the time that it was connected to the European mainland, and by the time conditions were more equable there was a window of just a few thousand years before (at about 7000 years ago) the English Channel formed. As a result of all this the…
tetrapodzoology | February 18, 2007Sorry, another one of those really annoying teasers. But, come on, you love it really. Coming later this week...
... at long long last, those lost tree frogs...
... proto-narwhals and the case of the beluwhals...
... the amazing social life of the Green iguana...
... and maybe something on feathered theropods. Plus vampire pterosaurs, Piltdown, plethodontids and more. Oh yeah, and, err, rhinogradentians :) Check back soon, there will probably be something new (he says).
tetrapodzoology | February 17, 2007
So in the previous post - required reading before you get through this one, sorry - we looked at the various hypotheses that have been published on the origin of sanguivory (blood feeding) in vampire bats. We saw that only two hypotheses matched with the phylogenetic pattern of feeding styles seen in phyllostomid bats and their relatives, and of those two theories - one proposing that vampires evolved from oxpecker-like ectoparasite-eaters, and the other proposing that vampires originated as insectivores that switched to wound-feeding - both have shortcomings. However, one final hypothesis…
tetrapodzoology | February 16, 2007
Continuing the vampire theme, I here want to discuss another of those really, really interesting things about vampire bats: namely, how did their blood-feeding behaviour evolve in the first place?
First off, a big thank you to everyone who's been visiting, commenting and generally saying nice things. The Speculative Zoology post in particular generated a lot of recent interest, and as of yesterday Tetrapod Zoology was the third most-hit site in the scienceblogs community (though still way way behind Pharyngula of course). For some reason I'm unable to post new comments on the Speculative…
tetrapodzoology | February 15, 2007
Look what happens when you blog about Godzilla. Huh. Back to normality soon...
tetrapodzoology | February 14, 2007
Imbued with god-like powers, the ever-inspirational Mathew Wedel, aka Dr Vector, has wondered what sort of experiments he might play with the biosphere in order to observe the evolutionary results. Given that I just posted an article the other day on Godzilla, it would be a good idea to avoid the whole speculative zoology area for a while. After all, I don't want to get a reputation. But I have to strike while the proverbial iron is hot and, don't worry, we'll be back to rodents, passerines and small, dull brown lizards soon enough. Sticking only with tetrapods (of course), what neat…
tetrapodzoology | February 14, 2007
Have you ever wanted to know how much gas a sauropod dinosaur might pass in a day? What an echidna smells like when it dies? If it's true that Indian rhinos don't blink? How far a flea might be able to jump in zero gravity?
Probably not. But imagine if you did: the good news is that there is now an open-access internet forum dedicated to the answering of your biological questions. It's Ask A Biologist, the brainchild of Dr David Hone of Munich's Bayerische Staatssammlung fur Palaontologie und Geologie. Though designed mostly for children of school-going age, Ask A Biologist is open to anyone…
tetrapodzoology | February 12, 2007
In the previous post we saw that vampire bats were more diverse and more widespread during the Pleistocene than are they today. Two things stand out (to me) as being particularly interesting; firstly, that some of these vampires seem to have differed in morphology, and therefore presumably in ecology and behaviour, from the living vampire species; and secondly, that some of these vampires survived until very, very recently. Here, we look at these two areas in more detail...
What species were these fossil vampires feeding from? Of the three living vampires, both the Hairy-legged vampire…