Tetrapod Zoology

Riding the sivathere

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:01:00 -0500

My good friend Luis Rey was kind enough to pass on the following photos, taken at the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris. It's the extinction carousel, (presumably) the only place in the world where you might ride a sivathere...

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Big animalivorous microbats

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:23:00 -0500

Time only for a picture-of-the-day post... here are portraits of the big animalivorous microbats Otomops (a molossid, of course*), Cheiromeles (also a molossid) and Vampyrum (a phyllostomid). The pic is from Freeman (1984), but you might notice that two of the drawings are based on the photos featured in Walker's Mammals of the World.

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Hippos are photographed biting a crocodile to death

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:21:01 -0500

You've probably seen - presumably on TV - Nile crocs Crocodylus niloticus interacting with Common hippos Hippopotamus amphibius (if you've seen it in real life, lucky you). By and large the two seem to keep apart. Having said that, there are certainly photos of the two sharing the same sandbanks. And then there are those instances of hippos scaring crocs away from carcasses, the weird reports of hippos mouthing and chewing the backs and tails of resting crocodiles, and those cases where crocodiles have been seen to walk or run across hippos' backs.

What can certainly be said to be the most remarkable croc-hippo encounter yet reported was photographed by Czech wildlife photographer Václav Šilha last year, and yesterday they were featured in various national newspapers. Here's the best photo (in my opinion: you may already have seen it November's BBC Wildlife magazine).

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The Tet Zoo tour of Libya (part III): frasercots and Tripoli Zoo

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:57:00 -0500

By now you might have read my two previous articles (part I, part II) on the assorted tetrapods I encountered in Libya last month. Here's the third and final part in the series [image below shows chital at left, melanistic fallow top-centre, nilgai bottom-centre, blackbuck at right].

It's a bit unusual for a Tet Zoo article, as it contains a whole paragraph of boring travel-writing stuff, but I hope you can grit your teeth and get through this - the meat and potatoes on obscure subspecies and so on is delivered towards the end, I promise. So, without further ado...

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Richard Dawkins and the crappy 'humanoid dinosaurs' that just won't die

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:02:00 -0500

Regular readers will know that I'm not exactly a fan of the idea - discussed here and there in the technical (Russell & Séguin 1982, Russell 1987), popular (Hecht 2007, Socha 2008, Naish 2008) and speculative literature (McLoughlin 1984, Magee 1993) - that non-avian theropod dinosaurs might have evolved into humanoids had they not bought the farm 65 million years ago [image below by Matt Collins].

The hypothetical (emphasis: hypothetical) evolution of big brains, intelligence and so on among imaginary post-Cretaceous deinonychosaurs is not (in my opinion) all that unreasonable, and I base this assertion on what birds have been doing over the past 65 million years. Look at parrots and corvids. Parrots overlap with primates in brain : body size ratio, intelligence and abilities, and evidence suggests that they (and corvids) have sophisticated emotions that aren't much different from ours (or from those of other primates; humans are not magic animals different from all the others, but part of a spectrum). You probably heard the recent reports about funeral rites in magpies. This was in the news thanks to the publication of Bekoff's paper (Bekoff 2009), but stuff like this has been widely reported anecdotally and there's every reason to take it seriously [Alex the grey parrot (1976-2007) shown below, from wikipedia].

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The Tet Zoo tour of Libya (part II): of larks and buntings

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:51:00 -0500

After a little delay, I'd like to continue regaling you with, if I may, my assorted musings on my excursion to the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. In other words, I want to talk more about Libya...

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Christmas cheer from... from... wtf?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:30:00 -0500

My wife gives money to a cancer charity. She gets literature of some sort for doing this, and here's the front cover of the Christmas booklet she recently received. Why, as a Tet Zoo nerd, do I find it so funny?

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Won't someone please think of the coelacanths, and other lamentations

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:23:05 -0500

Goddammit, no time for more reports from Libya, or for more in the toads series, or for articles on hairless Spectacled bears or tiny heterodontosaurids or neovenatorids, or anything really. Here's how things are progressing in view of Saturday's event...

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The Tet Zoo tour of Libya (part I)

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:11:00 -0500

So, I recently returned from a brief sojourn in Libya. The trip was led by Richard Moody, best known for his work on Cretaceous sea turtles; I was also accompanied by palaeornithologist Gareth Dyke and by a group of people interested in the country's geology.

Libya - officially, the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya - is huge: it covers nearly 2 million square kilometres and is the fourth largest African county. However, 90% of the country is desert, and the population is only about 5.7 million (of which nearly 2 million live in Tripoli, the capital). It's a land of spectacular sweeping landscapes, enormous vistas, rocky hillsides, wadis and deserts. The landscape isn't all that different from the wilds of Morocco - the only other north African country I've visited - but the towns have a totally different feel, as Libya lacks the long tourist tradition of that country. Visitors thus get none of the constant hassling they get in places like Morocco. While the country runs on paperwork, with everything being stamped in triplicate, signed and counter-signed, there's no strong military presence or anything like that, and we never felt uneasy or uncomfortable. Huge pictures of Gaddafi are everywhere.

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Sea Monsters, the CFI conference

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:10:21 -0500

On November 7th 2009, the Centre For Inquiry in London is hosting a one-day event titled Monsters From the Deep! It's being held at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square (a venue I know all too well...). I'm giving a talk at the event so wanted to advertise it: for more details please visit the CFI website here. The day kicks off at 11am and will include both talk and workshop sessions. Charles Paxton of the University of St. Andrews, well known for his work on statistical ecology, will be giving a talk titled 'Anecdotes, statistics and sea monsters'. The belief that anecdotal data (in this case, reports of sea monsters) can be dismissed wholesale is naïve, as analysis can still reveal meaningful inferences (make sure you see Paxton (2009) for more on this). Charles will also be leading a workshop on 'Ecology of aquatic monsters'. A very belated congrats to Charles, incidentally, for his 2002 Ig Nobel Prize for Bubier et al. (1998).

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The Natterjack, its life and times

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:20:00 -0500

The Natterjack Epidalea calamita (introduced in the previous article) is a remarkable animal, well adapted for the dry, relatively saline environments it inhabits (there are places where Natterjacks inhabit saltmarshes, moors, and disused industrial areas). A proficient burrower, it starts digging a burrow with its forelimbs but does most of the work with its hindlimbs (hindlimb burrowing is typical for anurans, whereas forelimb burrowing is highly unusual). The burrows help the toads to gain access to moisture in dry habitats because they typically extend down to damp sediments; a particularly absorbent patch of granular skin on the animal's belly enables it to make the most of damp sediments when they're encountered [adjacent photo by kind courtesy of Neil Phillips].

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Toads of the world: first, (some) toads of the north

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:20:00 -0500

If you've been following the toad series, you'll have read articles that introduce toads in general, discuss reproductive biology, and look at cranial anatomy. This can all be regarded as background introductory stuff. From hereon, we're mostly going to look at toad diversity in rough phylogenetic order: that is, starting at the base of the clade and working up to the 'top'of the tree [European common toad Bufo bufo shown here, from wikipedia. This individual has really weird nostrils].

Basal toads are all South American, and include the South American redbelly toads (Melanophryniscus) and the stumpfoot or harlequin toads (Atelopus). The South American Rhaebo toads (conventionally included within Bufo) also seem to be basal within the bufonid crown. The rest of toad phylogeny is rather controversial: some studies recover a major Old World clade that includes several Asian, African and Eurasian clades as well as a clade of New World toads including the Cane toad group (Rhinella) and North American group (Anaxyrus) (Pramuk et al. 2008). If this topology is correct, crown-toads - ancestrally South American - radiated extensively in the Old World but re-invaded the Americas during the Eocene. Others studies find Rhinella and so on to be outside of the Old World clade (Van Bocxlaer et al. 2009). We'll be coming back to the various details here later on.

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Skulls, crests, snouts and giant poison glands: the heads of toads

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:03:00 -0500

Yes! MORE TOADS. You surely know what a toad's head looks like. But there's a lot about toad skulls that you almost certainly don't know, and the aim of this article is to review toad skull anatomy. This might seem like an arcane subject, but - as we'll see - the diversity of toad skulls is really quite remarkable and much of toad success can be put down to various of their cranial features (such as their parotoid glands and strong degree of cranial ossification)...

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Our sex lives in words and pictures (or, On the reproductive biology of the Bufonidae)

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:51:00 -0500

After a brief hiatus we return to the remarkable world of toads, and this time round we look at reproductive biology. As a western European person, the toad species I'm most familiar with (the Common toad Bufo bufo and Natterjack Epidalea calamita [see later articles for details on the name changes]) are seasonal breeders that turn up at ponds early on in the year [Common toad mating ball shown here, photo by Neil Phillips] and produce strings of hundreds or thousands of eggs (between 400 and 7500). There are other toad species that are even more fecund, with individuals of some species (like the American toad Anaxyrus americanus and Cane toad Rhinella marina) producing more than 20,000 eggs on occasion: if you put an egg string from one of these species into a straight line, it would be up to 20 m long. You might think that no-one will ever see an egg string even approaching that length, given that the toads wind the strings around plants and debris. However, the egg strings of species that lay their eggs in streams or rivers sometimes become un-entangled by heavy rains and are then swept downstream: Shannon & Werler (1955) reported seeing a doomed string belonging to a Mountain toad Incilius cavifrons that was about 14 m long.

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The sort of stuff I put on facebook

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:51:09 -0500

Preparing blog posts for Tet Zoo takes hours, sometimes days or even weeks. It's done in "spare time". Putting crap on facebook takes minutes and can be done during the course of a normal work day. Some of the stuff is soooo hilarious it deserves to be shared...

Francisco Gascó (aka Paco) knocked this up, thanks Paco. It was taken in about ~~1992~~ 1994 (when I was 18 19): note the Battat dinosaurs on the terrarium lid, Greg Paul theropods on the wall, and Luis Rey spiky amargasaur t-shirt. The croc skull is a juvenile C. niloticus.

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