Apologies to all for total lack of proper posts recently - I am just too busy. However, several posts will - in theory - appear very soon, and I hope that they will prove really, really interesting (especially to people interested in our views on the diversity of extant mammals. And please don't try and guess: I'm not telling). The theme for today's picture of the day is, obviously, rhinos.. again. This photo shows a Ceratotherium simum, the animal that (for an as-yet-unknown reason) we call the White rhino (and, no, that stuff about 'white' being a corruption of 'wide', 'wijd', 'weit' or…

A not-particularly-realistic model of the Triassic protorosaur Tanystropheus. This animal is best known for its bizarre elongate neck: this consisted of 12 tube-like vertebrae. There wasn't much flexibility between them, which raises the question as to how, and how much, the animal could bend its neck. How it lived is still a mystery and there are several competing ideas. It was not a one-off freak: it was widely distributed across Europe and the Middle East for something like 20 million years, and evolved multiple species that differed in size and proportions.

The skull of the immense Pleistocene rhino Elasmotherium sibiricum, with reconstructed horn, as displayed at the Natural History Museum in London. Relatively well known as fossil rhinos go, E. sibiricum is the largest and best known species of the diverse rhinocerotid clade Elasmotheriina. I have a post planned on elasmotheres, it's called 'Giant unicorn rhino and pals', but I don't know when I'll get round to posting it. I have rhinos on my mind at the moment: on Wednesday I'm attending Save the Rhino's Mayday event at the Zoological Society's meeting hall at Regent's Park.

This image shows a life-sized restoration of the South American tapejarid pterosaur Tapejara imperator as displayed at the Karlsruhe Museum fur Naturkunde. This remarkable pterosaur was named by Diogenes de Almeida Campos and Alex Kellner in 1997 and is famous for its immense sail-like crest, supported anteriorly by a tall vertical spine. A new generic name for this taxon is in press and due to be published soon. If this 'picture of the day' thing is new to you, check out picture 1 here. I previously blogged about tapejarids and their relatives at ver 1 here.

Following a recent phone discussion with Dave Hone of Ask A Biologist, I'm going to try something really lame in a desperate effort to boost my number of hits. Shudder. I am going to start posting a new picture every day. Yes, every day. The pictures might be of anything, so long as they are within the Tet Zoo remit of course. This will not impact the number/quality/timing of those super-lengthy 'proper' posts you all visit for. So here we are with # 1. It features a dromaeosaur coughing up a pellet: a possibility suggested by the discovery of a regurgitalite in Cretaceous rocks from Russia…

Same old story: Naish plans to blog on long-promised subjects, Naish gets distracted by cool new stuff, Naish ends up writing about cool new stuff and delaying long-promised subjects for even longer. Here, inspired by a paper I recently published with University of Bristol's Barbara Sánchez-Hernández and Mike Benton (Sánchez-Hernández et al. 2007), I've made a concerted effort to finish writing about the Mesozoic tetrapods of the Galve region of Teruel Province, NE Spain. In the previous post I covered crocodyliforms and pterosaurs. This time we get to the dinosaurs [adjacent image shows…

I promised myself not to bother, but what the hell. Last week I assisted journalist Marc Horne in his research on rabbit-headed cats, and the result was an article in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper that you can read here. I'm not going to write anything new on these cats, but the article does raise a couple of things worth commenting on... Firstly, my quotes are - I hope - appropriately sceptical. I am not pretending to be a world expert on small cat morphology so, while the skull of the Dufftown cat does look morphologically unusual to me, I tempered my opinion with the caveat that we…

Another one of those projects too-long-in-gestation has finally appeared and, unlike the others (e.g., the much-delayed British dinosaurs article), it's one that I haven't previously mentioned on the blog (I think). For the last couple of years I've been working, on the side as it were, with University of Bristol's Barbara Sánchez-Hernández and Mike Benton on the fossil vertebrates from the Galve region of Teruel Province, NE Spain. This is a really rich site, best known for its sauropods and mammals, and it's been the focus of much research since the 1950s. Our new paper - a large synthesis…

Yet again, I am totally snowed (the day job, editorial work, technical consultancy, in-progress manuscripts, etc.) and haven't been able to complete any of the frighteningly long list of articles I am planning to blog: you know, the ones on more sheep, more anguids, Australia: land of placentals, It's all about me, proto-narwhals and beluwhals, vampire pterosaurs, Piltdown, plethodontids, the probing guild, Cenozoic sebecosuchians, more Triassic crurotarsans, dinoceratans, pyrotheres, astrapotheres, 'new' big cats, more phorusrhacids, J-Lo and other fossil pleurodires, meiolaniids, passerine…

As you might guess from the following article, I still have a bit of a thing going on with anguid lizards (the family that includes slow-worms, glass lizards, alligator lizards and galliwasps). This is despite the fact that I spent a lot of time over the last few days talking about new tupuxuarid pterosaurs, the behaviour of hadrosaurs, and the discovery of multiple (yes, multiple) new large mammal species in the Amazon... If you live in a northern place where anguids occur, you might regard these lizards as denizens of predominantly subtropical or temperate climates. The vast majority of…

I just couldn't resist covering this, sorry (though, technically speaking, it's old hat). On June 17th 2004, the reign of Hogzilla - an immense pig estimated to be nearly half a ton in weight and 3.7 m in length - was brought to an end. The animal 'rampaged' across southern Georgia until it was shot in a hunting preserve and, amusingly (for fans of Family Guy, the best thing on TV), the hunter's name is Chris Griffin. Now comes news that the story of Hogzilla will hit the big screen sometime in the near future... After exhuming the carcass in October 2004, a team of researchers working for…

I've returned several times on this blog to the Slow-worm Anguis fragilis, a legless anguid lizard that occurs across Europe and Asia as far east as western Siberia. I find slow-worms very charismatic animals. Part of the appeal might be that they are easy to find in the places where I've lived, part of it might be that we Brits have such a poor reptile fauna that we hold those few species we do have in special regard, and part of it might be that they're really cute and cool to look at. Slow-worms (there are actually two species: A. fragilis, and A. cephallonica of the Peloponnese and…

Here's the plan over the next week or so... Australia, land of placentals; more sheep; giant anguids, legless and not; and It's all about me. Amazing social life of green iguanas to be published soon, and what about those long-promised posts on vampire pterosaurs, proto-narwhals, Piltdown, plethodontids, the probing guild, Cenozoic sebecosuchians and more Triassic crurotarsans? Yikes, I really do need more hours in my life. Thanks to all for the congrats on the job, but don't get your hopes up as goes Primeval and other such projects.

As some of you now know, finally I have something that might be considered close to a dream job: I'm now a researcher for Impossible Pictures, the company that did Walking With Dinosaurs, Primeval and a host of other things (website here). This job isn't going to be forever, but it's a start, and it doesn't make me feel any less bitter about being unable to get a job in academia. It means lots of expensive commuting (I don't live in London, where the company's based), and it also explains the recent lack of blog posts. But I'm not complaining. So, after turtle genitals and ostrich dinosaurs…

Popular culture would have it that turtles are weak, flaccid, crappy organisms with dull social lives, stunted and barely functional internal organs and - it goes without saying - undersized sex organs. Right? WRONG... Warning: the following blog post may be considered unsuitable for viewing by minors. Believe it or don't, turtles are horrifically well-endowed, and if the thought of learning more about the genitals of these oh-so-surprising reptiles doesn't appeal to you, look away now. Last warning. Ok, here we go. To begin with, I have to confess that I actually know very little about the…

So, on to more ornithomimosaurs, aka ostrich dinosaurs (part I here). This time, the ornithomimids: this is the ornithomimosaur clade that includes only the edentulous arctometatarsalian taxa. Yes, I said arctometatarsalian*. However, note that some authors have incorrectly regarded Ornithomimidae as synonymous with Ornithomimosauria... and one author has even included therizinosauroids and alvarezsaurids within Ornithomimosauria. For those who don't keep up to date with the phylogeny of non-avian theropods, character evidence indicates that ornithomimosaurs are stem-group coelurosaurs,…

As events conspire, I again find myself unable to devote time to completing any new blog posts. That's a shame, as I'm desperate to finish and publish my article on the terrifying sex organs of male turtles (yes really: stay tuned). In desperation, I've opted to dig out and recycle some old text. If you like dinosaurs, you might be pleased... We've seen before that - perhaps more than most scientist-authors - I've lost/wasted an unbelievable amount of time on projects that ultimately failed, or have yet to come to fruition. There was the taphonomy book, and there are a long string of…

A week ago I went on a tetrapod-finding trip - with my good friends Mark North and Jon McGowan - to the Isle of Portland. Portland isn't an island: it's a promontory, sticking out from the south coast of Dorset into the English Channel. The plan with this post was to show off some of the neat photos that resulted, and perhaps accompany some of those photos with a little bit of text. As with previous attempts to produce 'text-lite' posts of this sort, I failed miserably... What's been happening at Tet Zoo lately I hear you ask? Besides that long-awaited British dinosaurs paper, I've had a few…

Hmm, how cryptic. Post to follow soon (thanks to Mark North for photo: that's him on the right). Calling all palaeo-artist friends and colleagues: please start sending me your temnospondyl images (see profile for email).

I've said it before and I'll say it again: we keep coming back to the subject of flightless bats. Besides fictional future predators and night stalkers, there never have been any flightless bats so far as we know. Whenever this subject is discussed however, we have to pay appropriate homage to the most strongly terrestrial bats that we know of: the vampires, and the short-tailed bats (or mystacinids). Vampires were done to death here earlier on in the year (go here)... now, at last, it's the turn of the mystacinids. New Zealand has - or had - more than its fair share of neat tetrapods,…