READ ME: I'M NEW! With six years of phd work on theropod dinosaurs behind him, Darren Naish mostly spends long, happy hours in the library, hunched over his laptop. But he gets out sometimes, and picks up litter and pursues exotic lizards across the British countryside, aiming all the while to publish his technical work on obscure Cretaceous dinosaurs. He also messes around with pterosaurs, swimming giraffes, British big cats and stuff like that. He has given up on the stupid idea of being a dedicated academic and ekes out a living as a technical consultant, editor and author. He can be contacted intermittently at eotyrannus (at) gmail dot com. For more biographical info go here.
Very late to the party here (the story was first published waaaaaay back on the 18th), but it just seems wrong not to cover this at Tet Zoo. Sincere apologies to the Bleiman brothers at Zooillogix and to John Lynch at Stranger Fruit, both of whom covered the following several days ago, but what the hey, there still might be some people who haven't seen the amazing photos...
We looked previously at a partial skull, collected in northern Africa. Apart from the odd outing when it's been used in teaching, it's been sat in a box on my desk for a couple of years now, forlornly hoping that it might one day earn a place in the peer-reviewed literature. However, that would only apply if it were a fossil, and as we'll see that's contentious.
The idea that non-avian dinosaurs might have been able to climb trees is (I assume) not all that familiar to people outside the field of dinosaur research, but within the field of dinosaur research it has become an increasingly familiar idea within recent decades. Thanks to the discovery of such theropods as Microraptor and Epidendrosaurus, we do now have small forms exhibiting some features suggestive of a tree-climbing (or scansorial) way of life. Perhaps surprisingly however, the idea that dinosaurs might have climbed trees goes back a long way, and well pre-dates the dinosaur renaissance of the 1960s and 70s...
Once upon a time longhorn cattle were abundant and kept by many people; in fact, they were the most abundant domestic cattle, and this breed more than any others was selected for 'improvement' by Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) of Leicestershire, the great pioneer of domestic cattle breeding (note that I'm talking here about English longhorn, not Texas longhorn). Prior to Bakewell's work, cattle of both sexes had been kept together and allowed to breed as and when, but by deliberately selecting certain individuals with certain traits (he was specifically breeding cattle to increase meat yield) Bakewell fixed and exaggerated those traits that he considered desirable.
The original title for this article was going to be 'Sorry Heteralocha, but you ain't that special'. I ended up deciding against that, however, as I realised that few readers would know what the hell I was on about, nor indeed what Heteralocha is. Heteralocha (Heteralocha acutirostris to be precise) is the Huia, a large wattlebird (callaeid), endemic to New Zealand, that became extinct some time around 1907 (though a few sightings occurred well after this date, leading some to speculate that it might have hung on for longer). What makes the Huia famous is that males and females differed markedly in bill size and shape, with females possessing an elongate, slender, decurved bill, and males a shorter, stouter, far straighter bill [John Gould's classic painting shown here]. Females were otherwise smaller than males. Supposedly a mated pair would work together in order to extract insect prey from rotten wood: the stout-billed male would heroically dig away to expose the tunnel made by a beetle grub, and the curve-billed female would then probe in and grab it (but read on). This is all absolutely amazing: one species acting (and looking) like two. And it's so amazing that the Huia has often been regarded as totally unique: Gill & Martinson (1991), for example, said 'It is the only bird known in which the bill of the male and female are radically different in shape'. Ah, sigh, if only this were true...
I suppose it's not every day you get to appear in a TV series called MonsterQuest. I appear in two places in one episode (first screened last week): once for a little while in the section embedded here, and again much later on. The bit with me starts 2 minutes, 20 seconds in (let's not worry about the bit later on). Things to note: the lion skull that previously featured in one of the articles on the Functional Morphology Conference and (right in the background, covering a small cupboard that contains keys) Steve White's drawing of the big cats of Rancho La Brea...
Better late than never, I've only recently gotten hold of Zhou et al.'s paper on the enantiornithine bird Pengornis houi, published online in Journal of Anatomy back in January but now available in hard-copy. I must say that I really dislike the new trend of publishing things in special, online versions prior to their 'proper' publication. Anyway... Pengornis (which is from the Lower Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation of Dapingfang, Liaoning, China) is particularly interesting for several reasons...
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
READ ME: I'M NEW! With six years of phd work on theropod dinosaurs behind him, Darren Naish mostly spends long, happy hours in the library, hunched over his laptop. But he gets out sometimes, and picks up litter and pursues exotic lizards across the British countryside, aiming all the while to publish his technical work on obscure Cretaceous dinosaurs. He also messes around with pterosaurs, swimming giraffes, British big cats and stuff like that. He has given up on the stupid idea of being a dedicated academic and ekes out a living as a technical consultant, editor and author. He can be contacted intermittently at eotyrannus (at) gmail dot com. For more biographical info go 
