mammalogy
tetrapodzoology | March 20, 2008
As explained in the previous article, here's another by-now-outdated effort to report on stuff that's been published recently, or recently-ish. This time: mammals.
Several neat new fossil mammal discoveries have gone unreported in the press so far as I can tell. Deng & Qiu (2007) recently reported the first black rhino - that is, a member of the genus Diceros - from eastern Asia. Similar to the extant black rhino D. bicornis in size, the Chinese animal is from the Late Miocene Liushu Formation of Gansu Province and has been named D. gansuensis. The Liushu Formation has also recently…
tetrapodzoology | March 16, 2008
Regular readers will know that I am an unashamed fan of non-standard theories, aka fringe theories or whacky theories, and of course we looked just recently at the haematotherm theory. Doubtless you've all heard of the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH): that strangely popular notion which promotes the idea that modern humans owe their distinctive features to a marine phase. While it still seems conceivable that at least some fossil hominins foraged on shores and in mangroves, all of the evidence so far put forward to document our aquatic heritage is demonstrably incorrect and fails to fit the…
tetrapodzoology | March 13, 2008
In the previous article (required reading) we looked at European leopards. But the leopard wasn't the only big spotted Panthera species that lived in Europe during the Pleistocene: it was joined by a second, far less well known animal: Panthera gombaszoegensis (originally Leo gombaszoegensis Kretzoi, 1938). This cat seems to have been very jaguar-like and in fact the name 'European jaguar' is often used for it. In fact, it may actually be a jaguar - that is, a member of the species Panthera onca - and some cat experts classify it as an extinct Panthera onca subspecies (Hemmer et al. 2001,…
tetrapodzoology | March 12, 2008
So, on to the contents of my BCiB talk (see previous article for preamble). We began by looking at Homotherium latidens, sometimes called the scimitar cat, scimitar-toothed cat or dirk-toothed cat. H. latidens is one of several Homotherium species that inhabited North America, Eurasia and Africa during the Pleistocene: the different species varied in body size, skull shape, the proportional length of the forelimbs, and in other features. It's repeatedly been suggested that H. latidens might have survived in Britain until as recently as 11,000 years ago (close to the start of the Holocene):…
tetrapodzoology | March 11, 2008
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: one of the best ways to invigorate your enthusiasm about a subject is to attend a conference on it, and to spend at least a couple of days talking with other people about that subject. I've (more or less) just returned from the third Big Cats in Britain conference, held at Tropiquaria at Watchet, north Somerset. What an amazing venue: picture, if you can, a 1930s BBC radio station [adjacent image shows the stonework above the main entrance] surrounded by gigantic towering antennae, the heat radiating from one of the antennae being…
tetrapodzoology | March 6, 2008
Congratulations are in order: well done Dave Hughes, David Marjanović and Allen Hazen in particular. No, the creature shown yesterday is not a squabrat from The Dark Crystal (if there is such a thing), Romer's hellasaur, an old picture of a colugo, a proto-bat, proto-pterosaur, arboreal theropod, antiquated archaeopterygid, tree shrew, climbing duck-possum, arboreal gorgonopsian, proto-ropen, or one of Dougal Dixon's arbrosaurs: it is, instead, the hypothetical stem-haematotherm depicted in Philippe Janvier's 1984 article on the Haematothermia concept. It made an appearance both within the…
tetrapodzoology | March 4, 2008
Yes yes, well done (almost) everyone: yesterday's so-called mystery picture was indeed of a takin calf Budorcas taxicolor, and yes it's the offspring of the individuals that I was talking about seeing at Marwell Zoological Park back in 2006. This particular photo was taken by Graeme Elliott (I think)...
Besides the thickset look of the whole animal, clues that give away the calf's identity include the dark vertebral stripe, the chunky forelimbs, and the big, bulky lateral hooves (or dewclaws). Takins use their big dewclaws to aid their footing on hilly, rocky places. Takins occur today in…
tetrapodzoology | March 3, 2008
You all love the 'identify the mystery animal' posts so much I thought I'd produce a whole string of them. Minimum effort, maximum result ('min eff, max res', as I always say). Go go go!!
tetrapodzoology | March 2, 2008
I spent much of my Saturday doing an interesting thing. Together with another 30 or so people, I went along to my local nature reserve (Chessel Bay Nature Reserve, Southampton) and took part in an effort to clear the shore of its tons upon tons of human crap. Unsatisfied with our constant use of resources, our epic, manic pollution, and our rampant annihilation of other species, we aim to cover as much of the planet's surface as possible in our waste: we are literally doing our very best to swamp natural environments with the discarded shit that we can't be bothered to deal with properly.…
tetrapodzoology | February 24, 2008
The third Big Cats in Britain (BCiB) conference is almost upon us: it happens from 7th-9th March 2008 at Tropiquaria (Watchet, Somerset). This time round, I'm speaking, and most of my research time is currently being eaten up as I prepare for the meeting (I'm also speaking in the first week of March on 'Britain's changing herpetofauna' for the Southampton Natural History Society... haven't really started preparing that talk yet). My talk is titled 'The deep time history of Britain's felid fauna' and is essentially a palaeontological/archaeological view of British cats. You could argue that…
tetrapodzoology | February 7, 2008
Time to do more astrapotheres. In the preceding article, we more or less introduced astrapotheres, had a quick look at their diversity, and ran through some of the basal forms. Here we get to the good stuff on astrapotheriid astrapotheres, on lifestyles, and on that question that keeps us all awake at night: just what the hell are astrapotheres anyway?
Astrapotheriid astrapotheres - the astrapotheres with particularly big canine tusks, a specialised narial region and other characters - appear to consist of two clades: Astrapotheriinae and Uruguaytheriinae. Besides Astrapotherium,…
tetrapodzoology | February 3, 2008Anyone even vaguely interested in fossil mammals has the same problem at some time or another. You repeatedly encounter the same bizarre and fascinating beasts, long to know more about them, and yet have to endure a lifetime of frustration in the absence of any good, comprehensive information. Typically, one species in the group - usually, the most geologically recent, or the biggest, or the first-named - is figured and mentioned in all of the books, while all of the others languish in obscurity and may as well not exist.
An excellent example of this sort of thing is provided by the…
tetrapodzoology | January 26, 2008
2007 - Tet Zoo's second year of operation - has come and gone. The previous article was a brief personal review of the year, and here's more of the same (sort of) if you can handle it...
As if Tet Zoo wasn't enough to deal with, in September my partners-in-crime Mike P. Taylor and Matt Wedel [shown here; Mike is the less big one] decided, with me, to start up a new zoological blog, but this time devoted to something a little more specific: namely, sauropod vertebrae (and nothing else, pretty much). So on October 1st, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, or SV-POW!, was born. Despite…
tetrapodzoology | January 11, 2008
Thanks to everyone who offered an opinion and submitted their thoughts on that photo - and there were no silly answers, because I feel the real answer was not necessarily easy. As some of you correctly determined, the cat was actually not an unfamiliar or obscure species - just the opposite - it's just that it represented a body shape and/or geographical variant of this species that we're not used to seeing...
The proportionally long tail shows that this can't be a small cat like a golden cat; it's difficult to be sure from the photo, but the cat also looks much larger than a golden cat […
tetrapodzoology | January 9, 2008
The large black cats that people report from Britain and elsewhere in the world are sometimes said to look odd, being occasionally described as unusually gracile and less stocky than leopards (for an example in the literature see Trevor Beer's description and illustration: Beer 1988). If this is true it makes these creatures a total mystery as no leopard-sized species matches this description. But what do you make of this peculiarly gracile large melanistic cat? Compare it with the melanistic leopard shown below...
I'll explain what's going on here later; I do know the answer. Yet again no…
tetrapodzoology | December 22, 2007
Thanks to everyone for their comments on the previous article about island-endemic otters and canids. I was going to add a brief response to the comments section, but eventually the comments reached the length you see here, hence my decision to turn them into a brief article...
Yes, I should at least have mentioned Darwin's fox Pseudalopex fulvipes, originally described from Chiloé Island off the coast of southern Chile, and the endemic Cuban canids Cubacyon transversidens and Indocyon caribensis, both of which are now extinct. First collected by Charles Darwin in 1834 and regarded as a…
tetrapodzoology | December 20, 2007
Some people who come to Tet Zoo seem to absolutely despise all those annoying teasers, preemptives and references to things that are yet to come. Others regard these as one of Tet Zoo's key points of awesomeness. Whatever, I am pleased to say that I congratulate you all on your patience and tolerance, for there are some subjects that I advertise and am then unable to publish for weeks, or months, or months and months and months. Yes, unable... I don't delay things on purpose. Obscure island-dwelling, recently extinct animals are a case in point: there's this map from October, and there are…
tetrapodzoology | December 18, 2007
Over the weekend Neil Phillips, Richard Hing, Jonathan McGowan and I went into the field, in quest of tetrapods (Jon and Neil are shown in the adjacent image, as are other mammals). And we saw a bunch. In an effort to produce a post that is essentially an excuse to showcase some of Neil's photos (for the whole set go here), it occurred to me that this is a good chance to throw out some random facts about Britain and some of its wildlife... well, more random facts than I've already thrown out, anyway. Contrary to the idea that Britain lacks anything interesting, I still think we have a really…
tetrapodzoology | December 11, 2007
I'd like to talk about the filming of long-eared jerboas Euchoreutes naso (after all, I covered them on ver 1 back here), about the reclassification of Brontornis (again, covered on Tet Zoo ver 1 here), about Aaron Filler's new paper on bipedality in hominoids (see the PLoS pdf here), and about astrapotheres, swimming giraffes, Loch Ness Monsters, British iguanodontians, proterosuchids and phytosaurs.. but right now I want to get this Australian murid thing finished. You'll need to have read part I before proceeding. Here we go, hold on to your hats...
Wurlies: time capsules of palaeoclimate…
tetrapodzoology | December 9, 2007
We are surrounded by annoying misconceptions about the diversity of animal life. For me, one of the most annoying and persistent of these is the idea that... drumroll... Australia is a 'land of marsupials' where - bar humans and introduced species like dingoes and rabbits - placental mammals have no presence. Well, it just ain't so...
In fact about 25% of Australia's mammal fauna is made up of placental mammals, and I'm not including marine mammals like sealions and cetaceans, nor bats, in this count. We are in fact talking about rodents, and specifically about murids at that (Muridae is the…