picture of the day
tetrapodzoology | January 8, 2008
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you read Tet Zoo, you're in very good - nay, famous - company. I've lost track of how many famous zoologists, palaeontologists, artists, TV personalities and Hollywood starlets are among the regular visitors. Among the many is Mike Skrepnick, who of course needs no introduction. Inspired by my previous article on that god-awful How to Keep Dinosaurs book, he told me about a similar project he's been working on himself...
And here are some pictures to prove it. The image above features a Daspletosaurus, a tyrannosaurine tyrannosaurid…
tetrapodzoology | December 17, 2007
If you're on my hallowed List of Correspondents you'll already have received the image here as an attachment (and at slightly higher resolution: email me if you want a higher-res version). For the other several thousand of you, happy Christmas and all that. I've never been one to bother with paper Christmas cards, so the digital revolution gave me a good excuse to create senseless tat and send it round to my friends, ostensibly in the spirit of Christmas. For a previous effort you can see the 2006 card on ver 1 here (the 2005 card used to be viewable at Steve Bodio's Querencia but is no…
tetrapodzoology | December 15, 2007
What with yesterday's Simolestes picture-of-the-day article I couldn't resist but using - at last - this picture. It was taken by Mark Witton at the Oxford University Museum and depicts the immense pliosaur mandible OUM J.10454, a specimen that comes from the Kimmeridge Clay of Cumnor, Oxfordshire, and was acquired by the museum some time between 1880 and 1888. William J. Sollas (1849-1936) had intended to describe the specimen in the year that he died, but its proper debut in the literature didn't occur until 1959. The lovely lady posing next to the specimen is Claire, Mark's sister (at…
tetrapodzoology | December 14, 2007
For shame, I have yet to cover Mesozoic marine reptiles in depth here at Tet Zoo: in another effort to bring balance, I here depict a skull of the awesome Jurassic pliosaur Simolestes vorax Andrews, 1909. The name means something like 'voracious snub-nosed robber'. This essentially complete skull, discovered with much of the rest of the skeleton, was found in 1990 in a waste disposal site at Dogsthorpe, Peterborough (Cambridgeshire, UK) and comes from one of the most famous units of Jurassic rock in the world: the Oxford Clay. Originally identified as a new specimen of Liopleurodon ferox,…
tetrapodzoology | December 11, 2007
You can knock it
You can rock it
You can go to Timbuktu
But you'll never find a nessie in the zoo
You may see an anaconda, or giraffe and kangaroo
But you'll never see a nessie in a zoo
More soon, really. For now, I'm afraid all you get is this poxy teaser post... plus some of the lyrics to The Family Ness, staple viewing for my 9-year old self.
tetrapodzoology | December 9, 2007
If you read the ceratosaurid article from yesterday (here), you'll understand what's going on here. I drew it in a diary in 1992 (specifically, on Wednesday 29th April 1992, the day I learnt that Toby the cat had died, and also the day on which the borg [of Star Trek: The Next Generation] made their first appearance on British TV). The caption reads 'Ceratosaurus and Thylacinus contemplate their predicament'. Anatomical errors abound, but I can live with that.
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 28, 2007
Late in the evening I sat in an airport lounge, finally reading Robert Twigger's book on python hunting, my head full of Robert Appleby's legacy, fossil giraffes, giant mustelids, and the song from the end of Portal. I thought about the wolfhounds I'd seen, the bullfinches, stock doves and plovers; the bones we'd found; the teeth and vertebrae I'd handled or photographed; a futile search for hares and about the leverets I discovered in Germany once; the pile of correspondence I'd gone through; and the work I had yet to do on all those hundreds and hundreds of unlabelled diagrams. I thought…
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 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 7, 2007
Again, no time to complete any articles, sorry. Bloody annoying. Attended Witton pterosaur talk yesterday (it included revelations on winged hatchet-headed ptero-squirrels) as well as a Peter Burford talk on Gambian birds. Have found ten mins to post the above: fantastic pic from Matt Wedel (aka Dr Vector). Few quick factoids on Stegosaurus...
Stegosaurus is no longer unique to the USA (now known from Portugal too), it's not definitely the biggest stegosaur (European Upper Jurassic Dacentrurus might have been as big or bigger), it's possibly the only stegosaur that lacked parascapular spines…
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 | November 1, 2007
Everyone interested in animals must, by law, have set eyes on that iconic image of palaeornithologist Kenneth E. Campbell standing next to a life-sized silhouette of the immense Argentinean teratornithid Argentavis magnificens [the image is shown below]. At the International Bird of Prey Centre, Gloucestershire (UK), I quite liked the wooden silhouette of an Andean condor Vultur gryphus and, in the image here, Tone is standing next to it, looking as much like Campbell as she is able. An actual live Andean condor can just about be seen sitting in the enclosure in the background. An Andean…
tetrapodzoology | October 17, 2007
Here's a photo of one of my favourite anurans: the fantastic Helmeted water toad, or Gay's frog* Caudiverbera caudiverbera, a large, robust Chilean species (the only extant member of its genus) that is said to mostly feed on other anurans (though it also eats insects and other arthopods, fishes and even small birds and mammals)...
Females can reach an SVL (that's snout-to-vent-length) of 320 mm, which is huge. Its larvae reach a ridiculous size of about 150 mm and take about two years to metamorphose. Together with another obscure Chilean anuran (Telmatobufo), Caudiverbera has conventionally…
tetrapodzoology | October 12, 2007
Can you identify the mysterious cryptic beast shown in the photo? A prize to whomever gets it right*. The photo was taken in Europe, and the one person who was with me when I took the photo is not allowed to profer his opinion. I wish you the best of luck!
* Subject to availability.
tetrapodzoology | October 9, 2007
There's no way I'm going to have time today to post any of the promised articles - sorry. Once more, all I can do to combat the frustration is post a picture of the day: this one depicts the head of a Green turtle Chelonia mydas and was provided by Dave Hone, thanks Dave. Chelonia is a wide-ranging oceanic cheloniid (or hard-shelled sea turtle). Its common name comes from the colour of its body fat, not from the colour of its scutes or skin. The fact that its generic name is the same as that sometimes used for the entire turtle clade explains why turtle workers mostly prefer to use the name…
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 | September 28, 2007
No time for nothing today, sorry. In desperation, I thought I'd blog a photo of a bronze hippo. Here it is. SVPCA part II next, then Becklespinax and Valdoraptor, then cryptozoology conference stuff (think monster pigeons and assorted other obscure extinct island-endemic giants), then Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered amphibians. Then red panda empire, Australia land of placentals, and beluwhals (at last). But don't hold your breath. And it's not really TZPOD # 28, but I've lost count.
tetrapodzoology | September 27, 2007
Having spent the better part of the day recovering from the birthday celebrations of last night (and working, of course), I regret that I haven't had the time to post any of the promised articles (more SVPCA stuff to come next). So here's a picture of the day: it depicts the incredible mounted Pentaceratops sternbergii skeleton on display at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, and comes courtesy of Matt Wedel...
First described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1923, P. sternbergii is a deep-snouted chasmosaurine/ceratopsine ceratopsid known only from the Fruitland Formation and Lower…
tetrapodzoology | September 25, 2007
Without doubt, one of the coolest living animals on the planet is the Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis, a giant flesh-eating lizard that kills water buffalo, eats children, harbours noxious oral bacteria and is impervious to bullets (ok, I made that last bit up)...
Unknown to western science until 1912 (when it was 'discovered' by J. K. H. van Steyn van Hensbroek, and described in the same year by P. A. Ouwens), it reaches a maximum authenticated length of 3.5 m and can weigh about 250 kg (Steel 1996). In contrast to most other monitors, its legs and tail become proportionally short and…