mammalogy
tetrapodzoology | December 7, 2007
Specializing on locomotor ecology*, my good, long-standing friend Mary Blanchard of the University of Liverpool's Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology has been spending a lot of time on Madagascar over the past several years, and has been looking at a lot of wild lemurs. She has studied the ecology of wild indris Indri indri, Diademed sifakas Propithecus diadema and Grey bamboo lemurs Hapalemur griseus griseus, and has also collected data on the diets of wild Ring-tailed lemurs Lemur catta, Verreaux's sifaka Propithecus verreauxi and Black-and-white ruffed lemurs Varecia variegata…
tetrapodzoology | November 30, 2007
Only time for a picture-of-the-day today, and this neat picture shows an Eastern red bat Lasiurus borealis, a mid-sized vesper bat (wingspan c. 300 mm) that occurs across most of eastern North America, some of northern South America, and parts of the Caribbean (in 2004 an individual was reported from north-east Alberta, which I presume is the northern-most record for this species). Eastern red bats are sexually dimorphic: females have grey frosting on their light brown fur while males are entirely red (this is a female). They are insectivorous, nomadic, migratory bats that roost individually…
tetrapodzoology | November 24, 2007
I'm going away for a little while. I leave you with this nice picture of a male Fallow deer Dama dama, taken from Neil Phillips' collection of UK wildlife photos (and used with his permission)...
All deer are bizarre (I'll elaborate on that cryptic comment at some time), but Fallow deer are especially interesting: they differ from most other Old World deer in retaining spots into adulthood, in having a particularly long tail (for a deer) that is used in an unusual urination display, in having big rump patches, in lacking canines (although every now and again there are freaks: see Chapman…
tetrapodzoology | November 23, 2007
On to more of my thoughts about the TV series The Velvet Claw (part I is here). In the previous article, I discussed the art and animation used in the series, all of which was really quite good and very interesting in often featuring fairly obscure creatures...
There's one really important thing I haven't yet mentioned about The Velvet Claw: the fact that both the book and the TV series was written by David Macdonald, director of the Wildlife Conservation Research University at Oxford University and very well known for his many, many publications on biology, ecology and conservation […
tetrapodzoology | November 21, 2007
Those of us interested in the same subject often tend to have experienced the same sort of things. If you share my interests (as you probably do, given that you're here), you've probably watched a lot of Attenborough on TV. You've probably been to at least one of the bigger natural history museums of your country, probably more than once. You've probably spent more time than is considered usual looking at weird reptiles, or bat-eared foxes, or tapirs, or giraffes, or bats, or rhinos, at the zoo. You probably caught and kept weird insects and pond animals as a child. You've probably picked up…
tetrapodzoology | November 19, 2007
If you're like me, you'll know the TV series, and/or the book, well...
Reminiscing about it now, it's impossible to forget how awesome it was. And it was so much more than a history of the carnivorans: it involved dinosaurs, mesonychians, pristichampsines, glyptodonts, future predators, and some plain awesome real-life sequences of carnivorans doing what they do best. I'm hoping to post the full article tonight. And if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about you're definitely in for a surprise!
tetrapodzoology | November 12, 2007
While googling for Tetrapod Zoology recently (how vain) I came across a bunch of interesting giraffe images, most of which I'll be recycling here at some stage in the future. I don't know anything about the history of the photo shown here; it looks genuine and I think it speaks for itself. It seems to have been posted around the internet quite a lot already, mostly by people who seem to think that it's amusing - yeah, a dead animal that was hit by a plane, oh my sides...
Anyway, not only is there all the stuff to say about the fossil history of long-necked giraffes (a subject we've covered…
tetrapodzoology | November 5, 2007
By now I think you'd have to have been hiding under a rock to miss the news on the accompanying image: taken on September 16th 2007 in north-west Pennsylvania, it depicts a large, rangy mammal, and was photographed with an automatic motion-sensing camera put in place by R. Jacobs. However, it occurred to me that, while the image (and accompany story) might be very familiar to people interested in sasquatch - and to those who get to hear the local news in and around Pennsylvania - there is still likely a huge audience that haven't even heard of it. The photo has become known as the Jacobs…
tetrapodzoology | October 16, 2007
I have tried desperately to not be distracted by the mysterious rodents, new gigantic dinosaurs and Iberian lynxes that have been on my mind lately - plus lots of things are happening with the 'Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective' conference that I'm co-organising with Dick Moody, Eric Buffetaut and Dave Martill (to be held in May 2008: more news later). Before the whole white squirrel thing, I was talking about cryptozoology (here), in particular on the ideas that (1) a cryptid is any animal reported from anecdotal data (i.e., it does not have to be a 'monster'), and that (2) given that…
tetrapodzoology | October 14, 2007
So what was the mysterious beast shown in the photo? As usual, the Tet Zoo readership proved too clever to be fooled by such a rubbish trick. That white blurry streak in yesterday's photo was...
.... not a fox, lynx, marten, white carrier bag, draft excluder, house cat, tree trout, rhinogradentian, dormouse, slug, ent, iguana, arboreal monitor lizard, tree octopus, kitten, raccoon, tree-eel, kite skeleton, nor, sadly, a late-surviving, modern-day, dwarf arboreal gorgonopsian (wow - an impressive list of in-jokes there). It is nothing more than, as some of you correctly guessed, a lowly Grey…
tetrapodzoology | October 10, 2007
By naughtily avoiding the long list of things that I'm supposed to be doing in my 'spare' time I've finally done it: adapted my monumental, keynote cryptozoology conference speech into an article(s) for publication here at Tet Zoo. Ok, so it wasn't so 'monumental' or 'keynote', but I thought I might as well recycle it anyway (for more on the conference in question see the article here). The general message here might, by now, be familiar to Tet Zoo regulars, as I've been promoting the same view for a while now...
The talk included several hundred words on the discoveries made by Marc van…
tetrapodzoology | October 8, 2007
So the other day I got to stroke a live pipistrelle. In the adjacent photo, Mike Pawling (chairman of the Hampshire Bats Group) is holding the bat; Vicki is touching the bat's back. Mike and his wife Chris hold permits and everything, and they take care of rescued bats that have been found injured, or have been dropped by their mothers. Pipistrelles are certainly Britain's - and probably Europe's - most abundant bat; they are highly adaptable little bats (part of the vesper bat group, or Vespertilionidae) that inhabit cities and suburbs as well as woodlands and other places. Here are just a…
tetrapodzoology | October 7, 2007
So I've told you all about the Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting (three links), and I've told you all about the 55th SVPCA (here and here). But there was a third conference I attended recently (August 17th-19th) that I have yet to write about - it was that cryptozoology one. As some of you might recall, I'm going to avoid using the name of the meeting: it's not that there's anything wrong with the name... it's just that it doesn't exactly do the whole subject of cryptozoology any favours. But, anyway, here are my assorted thoughts. As usual, I'm not going to cover everything, just the…
tetrapodzoology | October 5, 2007
Time permitting... coming next: that cryptozoology stuff. If I say any more I'll spoil the surprise (there are a few technical errors in the map shown here - it's not meant to be totally accurate. It depicts various extant and recently-extinct Caribbean tetrapods. Well done to anyone who can name all the taxa).
tetrapodzoology | September 30, 2007
How did the centenary workshop on mammal bone identification go, I hear you cry? It went very well, thank you very much. Anyway, as promised here are more of various recollections from the 55th SVPCA, held at the University of Glasgow between August 29th and September 1st. For previous of my thoughts visit part I here, and for abstracts, photo galleries and more, visit the SVPCA site here. In this article, I'm going to review the dinosaur talks. You have been warned.
[I should explain the photo montage used here. For reasons that might have been mysterious to him, Bob Nicholls (of…
tetrapodzoology | September 6, 2007
Once more it's that time again, I'm leaving for conference # 3 (well, I'm not leaving right now, but I won't have the chance to blog before I do)...
It should be great, and in particular I look forward to the fist-fights and rock-throwing that will doubtless ensue over whether Anhanguera really is synonymous with Coloborhynchus, over the mass of Quetzalcoatlus, and over skim-feeding habits (or lack of) in tupuxuarids. On Dave Unwin's advice, rest assured that I will get Mark Witton all beered-up in front of an audience so that he'll stand before all and relate the Thalassodromeus flume of…
tetrapodzoology | September 4, 2007
Here is another thrown-together collection of things relating to SVPCA... well, I photographed the Short-billed echidna Tachyglossus aculeatus and Platypus Ornithorhynchus anatinus in the Zoology Museum at Glasgow (during SVPCA); the photo of the echidna checking out the camera came from elsewhere. Monotremes have been in the news recently, what with the alleged recent rediscovery of the poorly known Attenborough's echidna Zaglossus attenboroughi Flannery & Groves, 1998 (photo below). I think this is the second taxon named after Sir David: the other is the controversial basal plesiosaur…
tetrapodzoology | August 13, 2007
In another desperate effort to bump up the number of hits, I thought I'd go with a provocative title. There is, sorry, no such thing as a Frasercot: but it is, however, the answer to the question... to what animal, exactly, does that mysterious skin actually belong? No, it was not feathers, nor scales on a moth's wing (!), nor the skin of an octopus (!!), but most definitely the pelt of some sort of carnivoran (I enlarged and rotated a section of the adjacent image). But the problem is: that's about as far as we can go, as no-one really seems to know what it is...
The skin is now owned by…
tetrapodzoology | August 7, 2007
I just saw the above on Stephen Bodio's Querencia, where it was posted by Matt Mullenix, and just had to steal it (sorry).
Long-time readers will know that mammal-killing eagles have been a Tet Zoo mainstay since the very beginning (and then here and here, with Haast's eagle here). I'm on lunch right now, and after scoffing down a bowl of noodles am comparing limb : body depth ratios in assorted carnivorans. Let's just say that it's relevant to a certain grey shaggy beast photographed on Dartmoor...
tetrapodzoology | July 23, 2007
Just a very quick post before I get back to work... Regular Tet Zoo readers will know that - for my shame - I'm a pathological collector of toy/model animals [for more, go to the ver 1 articles here and here]. One of the things I did over the weekend was acquire some fantastic new models, all produced by the German toy company Schleich. They are so awesome I just had to share the news. Clockwise from right to left, the animals on the ground are a musk ox, Smilodon, cave bear and Torosaurus. The cave bear is awesome. The Smilodon isn't tremendously good, and I admit I bought it because I…