August 6, 2008
Category: picture of the day
Amazing news! This mysterious striped mammal was recently photographed by a camera-trap: I won't say where it was photographed as that'll give the game away. What is it? I'll announce the answer soon, but feel free to guess in the meantime (this is not a hoax: the photo really does genuinely depict a wild mammal). Am now going into conference-preparation mode (56th SVPCA, Dublin), so am not going to be posting anything substantial on the blog for a while. I'll try and keep it ticking over with pictures and such though. Dammit, never got to finish the stuff on squirrels, or tortoises. And now I have crazy plans to cover cryptocetology and Lake Dakataua in the near future...
Posted by Darren Naish at 6:15 AM • 40 Comments
August 4, 2008
Category: cryptozoology • mammalogy
Unless you've been hiding under a rock, or spending all your time on Tet Zoo, you will almost certainly have heard about the 'Montauk monster', a mysterious carcass that (apparently) washed up on July 13th at Montauk, Long Island, New York. A good photo of the carcass, showing it in right lateral view and without any reference for scale, surfaced on July 30th and has been all over the internet. Given that I only recently devoted a week of posts to sea monsters, it's only fitting that I cover this too. I'm pretty sure that I know what it is, and I'm pleased to see that many other people have come to the same conclusions, as demonstrated by the many informed comments that appeared at Cryptomundo and elsewhere last week. So, what is the Montauk monster?
Read on »
Posted by Darren Naish at 5:55 AM • 75 Comments
August 3, 2008
Category: mammalogy
Well, here we are at the end of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week. I hope you've all enjoyed it. We're going to finish with a bang by looking at a few - yes, not one, but a few - of the real way-out-there oddballs among the odontocetes. We start with a famous freak individual...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 6:39 AM • 25 Comments
August 2, 2008
Category: mammalogy
Let's face it, all the frickin' weird cetacean skulls we've looked at so far have belonged to frickin' weird cetaceans: sperm whales and river dolphins. Time for something less frickin' weird, though still frickin' weird, if you get my meaning. It's a boring old dolphin. But is it just a boring old dolphin? No, of course not.
Here is the skull of Orcaella brevirostris [the skull shown here is of USNM 199743, image © Smithsonian United States National Museum, courtesy C. McHenry]. Variously termed Irrawaddy or snubfin dolphins, the Orcaella species are entirely tropical and restricted to the coastal waters of south-east Asia and northern Australasia (they might also occur around the Philippines. While known from the southern and western coasts of New Guinea, they may also occur around the northern and eastern coasts). They also inhabit the major rivers in their range, and members of some populations spend their entire lives in freshwater. A population of large animals with unerupted teeth inhabit two freshwater lakes on Borneo and have been intimated at times to represent a distinct taxon...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 5:49 AM • 7 Comments
August 1, 2008
Category: mammalogy
You would be forgiven that doubting that this awesome object - displayed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History - is a fossil odontocete skull, but it is. Discovered in Lompoc, California, and as yet unreported in the scientific literature (so far as I can tell), it is the skull of a large predatory sperm whale purportedly closely related to the Japanese Miocene physeterid Brygmophyseter shigensis (but read on).
The extant sperm whale Physeter lacks functional teeth in the upper jaw and in fact even possesses special sockets in the maxillae that house the lower jaw teeth when the mouth is closed (it may actually have as many as eight teeth in each maxilla, but when it does they are unerupted and remain buried in their alveoli). However, this was not true of all extinct physeteroids, many of which possessed fully erupted premaxillary and maxillary teeth (Kellogg 1928, Kazár 2002). In some of these sperm whales, large upper and lower jaw teeth, combined with a robust skull morphology and large body size (6-7 m long), indicate that the animals were macropredators, probably attacking other cetaceans (Bianucci & Landini 2006, Hampe 2006)...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 7:04 AM • 7 Comments
July 31, 2008
Category: mammalogy
More on weird odontocete skulls. This time, another river dolphin: this is the skull of the Amazon river dolphin or Boto Inia geoffrensis, also known as the tonina, bufeo or pink dolphin.
Three generally recognised Inia taxa exist, and views differ as to whether these are subspecies or species. I. g. humboldtiana inhabits the Orinoco basin, I. g. geoffrensis inhabits the better part of the Amazon basin, and I. g. boliviensis (or I. boliviensis) inhabits the Amazon tributaries of Bolivia. A few recent studies have supported species status for I. boliviensis (Banguera-Hinestroza et al. 2002, Martínez-Aguero et al. 2006). As you might recall from the series of articles on Marc van Roosmalen's new mammals, a dwarf Inia purported to be a new species inhabits the Rio Aripuanã. It has a proportionally shorter beak and less pronounced melon than other Inia populations.
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Posted by Darren Naish at 5:25 AM • 11 Comments
July 30, 2008
Category: mammalogy
Yay: day 3 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week. While we've previously been looking at the skulls of extant species, this time we have a fossil (or, actually, a diagram of one: from Muizon 1988). It's Scaphokogia cochlearis from the Miocene Pisco Formation of Peru, described by Muizon (1988). Exhibiting an incredible amount of cranial asymmetry and a wide, round supracranial basin, it's clearly a physeteroid (sperm whale), and the presence of slit-like antorbital notches, absence of nasals and other characters indicate that it's a kogiid (Muizon 1991) (if you need help with the terminology go see the Tursiops and Kogia articles)...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 5:31 AM • 32 Comments
July 29, 2008
Category: mammalogy
Welcome to day 2 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week, and here we look at one of my favourites: Platanista, the Asian river dolphins or susus. Susu is a Hindi onomatopoetic name based on the exhalation noise these dolphins make, and other local names include susuk, sishuk, shushuk and sishumarch. There are two species: the Indus river dolphin P. minor Owen, 1853 of the Indus and Chenab in Pakistan, and the Ganges river dolphin P. gangetica Roxburgh, 1801 of the Ganges, Meghna and Brahmaputra of India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, the Karnaphuli in Bangladesh, and (possibly) the Sangu in Bangladesh and the Chinese part of the Brahmaputra (Reeves & Brownell 1989, Carwardine 1995). Both species are critically endangered thanks to pollution, hunting, and damming and resulting population fragmentation.
And, of course, their skulls are very, very weird...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 6:07 AM • 16 Comments
July 28, 2008
Category: mammalogy
Welcome to another of those week-long series of themed posts, produced (ostensibly) to save me from spending time on blogging (other jobs require priority). Previous series have been ankylosaur week and sea monster week. This time round we're looking at seriously frickin' weird cetacean skulls although, actually, we're only going to be looking at odontocetes, as these are (1) the ones I want to write about, and (2) the ones I have neat new photos of. This was, of course, all inspired by the comparative work I recently did on the Tursiops skull. All of the skull photos you're going to be seeing were kindly provided by Colin McHenry and are used with permission. And we begin with a whale that does, indeed, have a frickin' weird skull: it's the Pygmy sperm whale Kogia breviceps...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 5:50 AM • 22 Comments
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 
