claws
bleimanb | June 2, 2008A study of rare African frogs has revealed a form of self-defense hitherto unbeknownst to the scientific world: claws of pure bone that burst through the frogs' skin. And it gets worse. When the frogs are threatened they need to first "actively break" their own bones in order to create these claws.
Don't make me angry...you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.
David Blackburn of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology released his team's findings last week in Biology Letters on the Trichobatrachus robustus, and ten other related species of frog, most of which live in Cameroon.
The frogs'…
laelaps | October 11, 2007My wife merely considers it a quirk a living with a paleontologically-oriented husband; whenever I feel like my efforts are futile, I hold my hands up against my chest with two fingers extended to represent the "useless forelimbs" of Tyrannosaurus. The evolutionary narrative of how Tyrannosaurus came to have such a massive head and such small limbs is a familiar one, physical constraints determining that the development of a large, terrible head would cause a reduction in limb size. This doesn't make the relatively minuscule limbs of Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives any less puzzling,…
laelaps | October 11, 2007When I was first becoming acquainted with dinosaurs during the latter half of the 1980's, the standard "rule" for theropod dinosaurs was that as they grew bigger through the course of time their heads became more robust and their arms grew smaller. Just comparing the Jurassic predator Allosaurus with the Cretaceous Tyrannosaurus rex (numerous pictures of both filling the books I constantly begged my parents to purchase for me) seemed to confirm this, but there was always one very special set of fossil remains that seemed to contradict the prevailing trend. Hung up in the corner at the…