mammalogy
tetrapodzoology | July 1, 2008
Distractions distractions distractions. Mayfly chameleons. Sea monster carcasses. Avian supertrees. Fake tiger photos. New pterosaurs. Frogs. But... must... complete... borhyaenoid... articles... For the intro, go here. Time now to crack on with hathlyacynids and prothylacinids. If you don't care, let me note that this is (to my knowledge) the biggest amount of information yet made available on these animals outside of the technical literature. Yes yes, I feel your love, thank you...
Hathlyacynidae is the biggest and longest-lived borhyaenoid clade, with members that range in age from Late…
tetrapodzoology | June 29, 2008
By now I hope it's clear, even to novices with no special interest in the extinct wildlife of the Cenozoic, that ancient South America had what we might technically call a Really Awesome Faunal Assemblage. Astrapotheres, sebecosuchians, phorusrhacids, teratorns, gigantic caimans, madtsoiid snakes, sloths, glyptodonts... and this is only half of it, there's so much more. It occurred to me a while back that it would be only fair and proper to cover yet another of South America's extinct Cenozoic groups, and yet again it's a bunch of animals on which comparatively little information is freely…
tetrapodzoology | June 25, 2008I was recently asked a reasonable and intelligent question on elephants. One thing led to another, and after a bit of research I discovered the fascinating world of elephant masturbation. If you want to collect sperm from a (captive) elephant, how do you do it? Luckily youtube provides the answer. It seems that manual stimulation of the penis (1) just doesn't do it for elephants, and (2) is physically dangerous (read on), so you have to stick your arm into the animal's rectum and vigorously stimulate its prostate gland. How vigorously? Watch the video. The eventual result - and I'm not…
tetrapodzoology | June 24, 2008
Here I am again, derailing the Tet Zoo publishing schedule, but while I have them on my mind I may as well deal with them now. It'll be brief (no, it wasn't). GOLDEN MOLES!!!1!, or chrysochlorids. If you think true moles, or talpids, are weird (think about it for a minute: they are), you ain't seen nothin' yet. Golden moles are an entirely African group of shiny-furred, fossorial mammals with vestigial eyes (sometimes grown over with haired skin), concealed ears that lack pinnae, a robust snout that terminates in a fleshy pad, and extremely unusual, specialised forelimbs. How 'extremely…
tetrapodzoology | June 23, 2008
Phil Budd (of the Southampton Natural History Society) recently gave me a dead mole Talpa europaea, and here it is. It isn't the first mole for my collection: I have another one that I skeletonised long ago. Moles really are amazing. Their forelimb and pectoral anatomy has to be seen to be believed, and is so modified relative to what's typical for mammals that even some experienced people struggle to identify elements of the mole forelimb skeleton. The short-shafted humerus sports immense expansions and crests for hypertrophied musculature, the sternum is highly elongate and deeply keeled,…
tetrapodzoology | June 20, 2008
This is the third time that Tet Zoo has featured a dead giraffe (for the first time go here, and for the second go here). It's not that I don't like giraffes - quite the contrary - it's just that anything and everything about them is fascinating. Lions Panthera leo are incredibly adaptable, and seem not only to develop special techniques that allow them to successfully tackle such formidable prey, but also to take advantage of special conditions that put the prey at a disadvantage. It is widely reported that lions have learnt that giraffes are disadvantaged when forced onto paved roads: they…
tetrapodzoology | June 15, 2008
The image depicted in the previous brief post is one of those famous iconic photos that many people have seen but few know anything about: it's an alleged yeti track, photographed by Eric Shipton and Michael Ward on the 8th November 1951 on Menlung Glacier during their exploration of the Gauri Sanker range in the Himalayas (Heuvelmans 1995). Together with the Sherpa Sen Tensing, Shipton and Ward apparently followed a trail of large, human-like tracks for about a mile but, unfortunately, only photographed one track. There have been several efforts to interpret this track as one made by a…
tetrapodzoology | May 23, 2008
I was saddened to learn today of the recent death of elephant researcher and conservationist Prof. Yeheskel (or Hezy) Shoshani: he was severely injured in what is thought to have been a terrorist attack in Addis Ababa (where he worked) on Tuesday 20th May, and died in hospital on Wednesday 21st. Two other people travelling on the same minibus were killed in the same attack and nine others were injured...
I had never met nor corresponded with Prof. Shoshani but have always been a great admirer of his excellent work. He was a giant in the world of elephant research and made an immense…
tetrapodzoology | May 19, 2008
Well done and thanks to everyone who had a go at identifying the mystery skull, and congrats to TJ, Jorge Velez-Juarbe, Mark Lees and others: it was indeed a glyptodont, specifically a glyptodontine glyptodontid and, most specifically of all, Glyptodon clavipes. So much for posting the answer on Sunday night - I've been busy but, if you feel in need of a good, lengthy Naish article you can always nip over to SV-POW! and read the piece I recently produced on theories about sauropod pneumaticity. There's an awful lot that you could say about glyptodonts: their armour, tails, limbs, and limb…
tetrapodzoology | April 29, 2008
Welcome to the third and final part of my write-up of the CEE functional anatomy meeting: for part I go here, and for part II here. Here's where we wrap things up, but let's get through the last of the talks: those on tuataras, and yet more on primates...
Marc Jones discussed his work on skull shape and feeding behaviour in rhynchocephalians (the extant tuataras and their Mesozoic relatives: adjacent image, from Marc's UCL page, shows Marc with a live tuatara). It is generally agreed among herpetologists that Sphenodon is not, as used to be thought, an archaic relict; a sort of poor relation…
tetrapodzoology | April 28, 2008
More recollections from the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting: part I is here. We looked in the previous article at Robin Crompton's overview of primate locomotor ecology and evolution, Renate Weller's overview of new technologies, John Hutchinson's work on dinosaur biomechanics, and Jenny Clack's new look at Ichthyostega [adjacent image is Jaime Chirinos's Thylacoleo restoration]. Still loads more to get through...
Paul O'Higgins took us back to primates. His key message was that two distinct computational techniques used to study anatomy - geometric morphometrics and finite element analysis (…
tetrapodzoology | April 28, 2008
At a vertebrate palaeontology workshop held in Maastricht in 1998, some colleagues and I sat in a bar, lamenting the fact that nobody cared about anatomy any more, and that funding bodies and academia in general were only interested in genetics. Given the poor to non-existent coverage that anatomy gets in many biology courses and textbooks, you might think that anatomy has had its day and that - as some molecular biologists told us in the 1980s and 90s - all the anatomical work worth doing had been published in the days of Owen and Huxley. Nothing could be further from the truth, and if you…
tetrapodzoology | April 24, 2008
Yesterday I attended the Centre for Evolution and Ecology workshop 'Modern Approaches to Functional Anatomy', held at the Natural History Museum (and organised by the Royal Veterinary College's John Hutchinson). Whoah: what a meeting...
Bipedal chimps and orangutans, leaping lemurs, autralopithecines, 'When Komodos destroy', pliosaurs and marsupial lions, hominid wrists, elbows and ankles, over-engineered dwarf elephants, how elephants use their sixth digits, the non-conservativeness of Sphenodon, self-righting turtles, bat canines... and McNeill Alexander! Shock horror, even the talks on…
tetrapodzoology | April 21, 2008
You might have noticed very little/no activity here over the past two weeks: partly this is because I'm very busy (preparing for Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective, among other things), but it's also because I currently have no internet access at home. Sigh. In an effort to add something new, here's the long-planned, third and final part in the series on Europe's cat fauna, adapted from the Big Cats in Britain talk 'The deep time history of Britain's felid fauna'. In a previous article we looked at homotheres, lions and leopards, and in a second one at jaguars, pumas and cheetahs. This…
tetrapodzoology | April 8, 2008Here's that cute porcupine photo I mentioned (I think). It shows a group of Crested porcupines Hystrix cristata photographed at Marwell Zoological Park.... awww, look at the little baby. Many other blogs would stop there. But ooooh no, that's not how we do things round here. Here are some little known factoids about Old World porcupines, focusing mostly on the Crested porcupine*...
* Hystrix is traditionally divided into three 'subgenera': Thecurus, of Borneo, Sumatra and the Philippines (three species), Acanthion of China and SE Asia (two species), and the crested porcupines proper,…
tetrapodzoology | April 5, 2008
In the previous article we looked at the discovery of the Red panda Ailurus fulgens, and also at some aspects of its biology and distribution. There's so much I didn't cover: Red panda physiology is bizarrely interesting, for example. In this article we're going to look at the Red panda's fossil relatives. As I implied in the last article, the Red panda's friends and relations once roamed far and wide. And remember that the term 'panda' belongs to the Red panda and its kin, not to the giant pandas (which are bears, and not close kin of pandas proper). The Red panda and its close relatives…
tetrapodzoology | April 3, 2008
They sit there, mostly curled up, mostly asleep, high up in tree-tops, sometimes chewing on bits of plants. But little known is that, deep within their furry little heads, they harbour an unknown desire: to take over the world...
Pet peeve # 113 concerns pandas: it's the generally held notion that 'the panda' is a big, bear-shaped black and white animal. In fact the Giant panda Ailuropoda melanoleuca is not the original panda: the Red panda is 'the panda', its name being derived (according to some) from the word 'poonya' (others doubt this: the names 'nigayla-ponya' or 'nyala-ponga' are…
tetrapodzoology | April 2, 2008
This picture borrowed from wikipedia. Full story later (about wahs, not wikipedia).
tetrapodzoology | March 31, 2008
Among the most controversial and remarkable of living tetrapods are the bizarre amphisbaenians: a group of fossorial, long-bodied carnivorous animals with reduced or absent limbs, spade-shaped or bullet-shaped skulls strongly modified for burrowing, and an annulated body where distinct, regularly arranged transverse segments give the animals a worm-like appearance. Until recently it was generally thought that amphisbaenians are reptiles, and part of Squamata (the reptile group that includes the snakes and lizards). But, in a fascinating case of multi-disciplinary co-operation involving…
tetrapodzoology | March 29, 2008
I've mentioned on and off lately that Tet Zoo the book is now go. The manuscript is complete, and right now (when not working on other things) I'm dealing with the editorial tidying-up. The book won't, I'm sorry to say, be anything technically new: it's simply a compilation of the better articles from Tet Zoo ver 1, arranged chronologically. And, because of word-count, it only incorporates articles going up to September 2006, so there's still tons of stuff that can be used for later books (should book 1 prove popular enough that others are worthwhile)...
Adapting Tet Zoo articles for a book…