mammalogy

Late last year (on December 22nd) the British newspapers told the story of Pete, a purple-coated Grey squirrel Sciurus carolinensis photographed in the grounds of Meoncross School, Stubbington (Hampshire, UK). Why a Grey squirrel should have a purple coat is, of course, the big mystery. One suggestion is that Pete might have found purple ink cartridges in the bin and somehow groomed the ink into his fur. I suppose that's possible, but it sounds pretty unlikely. Local naturalist Chris Packham has been quoted as suggesting that Pete fell into a bucket 'containing a weak colour solution'.…
Welcome to my final set of musing and recollections about our recent Moroccan trip, led by Nizar Ibrahim. Mostly I'll be talking here about the amazing desert birds we got to see, but I also have stuff to say about the mammals, and - of course - about the fossils... One of the birds I most wanted to see - in fact it was top of my list - was the remarkable Greater hoopoe lark Alaemon alaudipes [see photo at top here for Richard's photo of one of these birds], and eventually we were to see four or five of these (though never more than one at the same time). Alaemon occurs across Africa and is…
More musings from the Morocco trip. So, we travelled over the Atlas Mountains and were soon up at the snowline. We joked about seeing lions and bears, but did see a Barbary partridge Alectoris barbara (another first) and a representative of the strikingly blue Blue tit subspecies Cyanistes caeruleus ultramarinus. If you've been keeping up with parid taxonomy you'll know that some workers now regard this blue tit of north-west Africa and the Canaries as a distinct species, the Ultramarine or Afrocanarian tit C. ultramarinus (but note that not all the blue tits of the Canaries belong to this…
Since getting back from Morocco I've had no time to do anything for the blog, dammit. Too much to catch up on. But stuff is coming. Meanwhile, here are some interesting pictures. They depict the same sort of creature, but what is it? I know, I know: easy. Next: to the Sahara and back! Camels, sauropods, larks, owls! Azure-winged magpies! Exclamation marks!
Another article from the archives, written back on April 19th 2006. Two days earlier I'd sat up watching BBC4's night of primate documentaries, and that where our story begins... I've sat up and watched such things as 'Natural History Night' and 'Dr Who Night' before - usually they're a con, the programmes fizzling out round about 10-30, but 'Primates Night' (err, if that's what it was called) wasn't so thrifty, keeping me in front of the TV until past 01-00 at least. And it was brilliant - the best assortment of TV programmes I've seen since, well, ever. The first episode of the BBC series…
Here's an interesting photo provided by Markus Bühler (of Bestiarium): it shows a bull Asian elephant Elephas maximus at Hagenbeck Zoo, Hamburg. The picture is neat for a few reasons. For one, it emphasises the agility of elephants: despite their size and 'graviportal' specialisations, they can still do some pretty impressive bending and stooping. They're not bad at climbing slopes, albeit ones much shallower than the zoo trench shown here. Actually, people have reported (and even illustrated) elephants clambering down precipitous slopes. Tennent (1867) showed an Asian elephant clambering…
Another one from the archives. It's one of several articles I wrote in 2006 on obscure tropical rodents, was originally published here, and appears here with new pics and a few new details... If you've read Scott Weidensaul's excellent book The Ghost With Trembling Wings (2002), you'll recall the story of Louise Emmons and the giant Peruvian rodent she discovered. But before I get to that, let me say that The Ghost With Trembling Wings isn't about ghosts at all, but about the search for cryptic or supposedly extinct species. Think thylacines, British big cats, Ivory-billed woodpeckers, Cone-…
I think everyone seriously interested in animals collects dead animals, or bits of dead animals. Over the years I've built up a reasonably good collection of bones, teeth, antlers and carcasses, most of which are used 'academically' (in teaching and research) and not just kept for fun. Some of the specimens I have are amazing, like the robin Erithacus rubecula still attached to the twig and the wind-dried squirrel (both discussed here on Tet Zoo ver 1). One specimen above all others might be regarded as the centre-piece of my collection... This is a mummified fox Vulpes vulpes. Its right…
Another one from the archives, and another one from my rodent phase of 2006 (originally published here): despite efforts, I was simply unable to even scratch the surface of what is the largest extant mammalian 'Order'. Where appropriate I've added updates and have uploaded new images. Though new rodents are described from all over the place (yes, even from North America and Europe*), I had a recollection of the greatest percentage coming from South America. And indeed there are quite a few (note that some of the following don't have common names), with a randomly-selected list of my…
It's reasonably well known that fighting male deer are sometimes unable to extricate themselves after tangling their antlers together. Mammoths - which had more strongly curved tusks that living elephants - sometimes had a similar problem, as demonstrated by the famous fighting mammoths from Crawford, Sioux County, Nebraska... Yes, this fossil is for real (it's accessioned in Washington, D.C. as USNM 2449). The animals belong to the North American species Mammuthus columbi and must have died after becoming locked together. The fossil has been figured a few times since Boucot (1990) discussed…
Knowing that members of a certain species sometimes reach a certain size is not always the same as actually seeing images of that certain species at that certain size. The Puma, Cougar or Mountain lion Puma concolor (other names include panther, painter, catamount, mountain devil, silver lion, brown tiger, red tiger, king cat, Indian devil, purple feather (wtf?), mountain demon, sneak cat, leao and onça vermilha) is a highly variable animal (its historic range extends across much of the length and breadth of the Americas), but an average example from an average population might be anywhere…
Thanks to Tet Zoo, I sometimes receive books to review, and earlier on in the year I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of Lewis Smith's Why the Lion Grew Its Mane (Papadakis, 2008). Smith is a science reporter at The Times and in this book, billed as presenting 'a miscellany of recent scientific discoveries from astronomy to zoology', he takes us on a tour of some of the newest, neatest science. Despite its title, Why the Lion Grew Its Mane isn't just about animals, but also includes sections on cutting-edge technology, astronomy, genetics and psychology. I don't know enough about any…
Blame Matt Wedel for kindly bringing my attention to this wonderful image; he was clearly inspired by the anuran porn from yesterday. Attempted interspecies matings are more common than people normally think - particularly in captivity of course - and, sad to say, I have detailed files (incidentally, I'm not totally sure that this is an attempted mating: hard to tell!). Am thinking of doing a themed post on the subject, god help me.
Because antler growth depends fundamentally on health and nutrition as well as age and size, antlers are among the most plastic of all bones. You might be able to appreciate this fact from this photo (courtesy Jon McGowan) showing diversity in English Roe deer Capreolus capreolus, yet even the diversity shown here is far from comprehensive. Roe deer actually have particularly odd antlers. In addition to a prominent coronet (the roughened 'lip' at the antler's base that separates it from the bony pedicle), and brow, back and top tines (or points) arranged along the rack, they sport weird…
Both Cryptomundo and Big Cats in Britain have recently showcased the photo you see here. Taken in Snodland, Kent (UK), earlier this year, it depicts what appears to be a dark, mid-sized felid (NOT a big cat in the proper sense), though the lack of any adequate scale makes its size difficult to judge. Is it just a domestic cat? I want to say that it is, but it just 'looks' larger and more robust, and with chunkier limbs. Superficially, it recalls an African golden cat Profelis aurata, and Loren Coleman has already suggested this (it wouldn't be a big deal if it was, as all manner of exotic…
I've said it before: it isn't that I don't like giraffes - quite the contrary - it's just that they have a nasty habit of dying in the most bizarre, fascinating ways. And, because they're such big, obvious, famous animals, when they do die in bizarre and fascinating ways, people tend to record it photographically. So, we've previously seen a giraffe killed in a fight by another giraffe, a giraffe hit by a plane, and a giraffe killed on a road by lions. Giraffes also get struck by lightning sometimes, but nobody's yet photographed this happening to my knowledge. The death featured here is…
If you know anything about the literature on marine cryptids - or sea monsters, or sea serpents, or whatever - you will know of the Long-necked seal, a hypothetical mega-pinniped proposed by Bernard Heuvelmans (1968) as the explanation for sightings of giant long-necked sea (and lake) monsters. Based on a number of apparently reliable eyewitness reports, Heuvelmans suggested that this new species, which he dubbed Megalotaria longicollis, was a highly specialised otariid (Otariidae is the group that includes sea lions and fur seals). Giant compared to its relatives (4.5-19 m long), with an…
As always, at least a few people got yesterday's picture correctly identified: it was indeed a Giant armadillo or Tatuasu Priodontes maximus, and specifically the animal's right hand and lower arm. I photographed it at the National Museum of Ireland (Natural History) during SVPCA 2008. A stuffed specimen was on display next to the skeleton, so the scaly leg you could see in the background was indeed a pretty big clue. Armadillo skeletons - like those of all xenarthrans - are so weird and unfamiliar to us euarchontoglirans that it would be easy to write thousands of words on their weirdness.…
Entelodonts were covered briefly on Tet Zoo back in July 2007 (here), when life was oh so different. Here's a brand-new rendition of Entelodon from the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene of western Europe, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and Japan (it's probably the most widely distributed entelodont), kindly provided by Jaime Chirinos of zooartistica.com and used with permission. Closely related to Late Eocene-Oligocene Archaeotherium from North America, Entelodon was a large entelodont, with good remains of E. deguilhemi from France showing that it reached 1.3 m at the shoulder, and 65 cm in…
For a long time now I have been, shall we say, gently encouraged by two of my friends to write about a subject that is both familiar, and yet also strangely alien and poorly understood. Sleep behaviour. We still know comparatively little about this subject: not only about the big stuff like its function, but even about its distribution within animals. I am not, by the way, about to tackle the big questions about sleep, nor am I going to discuss the different types of sleep (e.g., REM vs NREM sleep) and on how they differ from creature to creature. Instead I'm interested in the more…