frivolous nonsense
tetrapodzoology | December 23, 2008Here's the Tet Zoo Christmas card. As always, it's strikingly Christmassy in theme and content (for 2007 go here and for 2006 go here). What does it all mean? Why, you're a Tet Zoo reader: you don't need to ask that! After all, you already realise the significance of qilins, cadborosaurs and Tecolutla monsters. Tizhureks and cetodipterans have yet to appear here I'm afraid, but they'll definitely be making an appearance next year. And David Marjanovic has already noted that Atlantisia is preoccupied by the generic name of the Inaccessible Island rail Atlantisia rogersi, but that's a…
tetrapodzoology | December 17, 2008Since 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!
tetrapodzoology | December 16, 2008Over the past month Tet Zoo has been totally different. In what way has it been "totally different", I hear you ask. The answer: I have been absent, with all of the posts having been scheduled in advance of my departure. Many thanks to everyone for reading stuff and for leaving comments in my absence. Together with members of a joint team from the University of Portsmouth, University College Dublin and University of Casablanca, I've been exploring the Cretaceous rocks of the Kem Kem Formation in Morocco. We discovered loads of stuff, some of it very significant (in fact the results of our…
tetrapodzoology | December 12, 2008All three tetrapods shown here all work on tetrapods. But what the hell Dave Martill was doing I can't recall. Eric Buffetaut appears over my shoulder. I look bemused.
Mo Hussan - of The Disillusioned Taxonomist - took this photo on the Isle of Wight. Thanks Mo, I think. Something about Tet Zoo has been different over the past couple of weeks - have you noticed what it is?
tetrapodzoology | November 1, 2008
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.
tetrapodzoology | October 21, 2008Yes, it's true. As revealed by my most redoubtable friend and ally Nemo Ramjet, Amerindian people knew of giant flightless azhdarchids long before their possible existence was hypothesised about here at Tet Zoo (follow-ups here and here). Depicting these animals in their artwork, they symbolised them as the great bird Kaloo: this was the most terrifying of all creatures, a stork-headed, long-necked, quadrupedal, flightless bird with long, three-fingered arms and slim legs. Wow.
I am, of course, joking. Nemo discovered an illustrations of Kaloo in a book on mythology and thought that it…
tetrapodzoology | October 2, 2008
I have lot of toys. Too many. Here are just some of them. Sorry the image is too small, but if you want bigger pics they're all available on my flickr site. Despite all these new theropods (hmm.. Aerosteon. Hmmm) and recently published papers on plesiosaurs, no time for any articles at the moment. Have been killing myself by staying up working to 2am every morning anyway.
I just finished reading Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth (Mike P. Taylor forced me, at gunpoint, to dispense with my 'I don't read fiction' mantra and read it). What the hell was meant to have happened at the end? And…
tetrapodzoology | September 27, 2008
Here are some neat things I saw this week. You get points for identifying stuff or saying interesting things about it. What you see in the adjacent pictures was visible from my back garden within the last few hours. Amazing stuff, though my rather limited photography meant that I couldn't capture everything that happened. Remember: stuff like this is happening all around you, all the time, every day. You already know that of course, but 95% of the urbanised human population of the world don't know it, and it's difficult to know whether they care, or are interested.
Ooh - neat beasts!…
tetrapodzoology | September 26, 2008
After a hiatus of several months I attacked Tet Zoo the book during the small hours of this morning (I started while the repeat of Fossil Detectives was on at 1 am... missed the bit with Jeff Liston and Leedsichthys, did anyone else see it?). For no particular reason I created a wordle from the text of the whole book. It's crap: are all wordles like this? So, apparently, if you want to read a book with exciting words like 'one' and 'new' and 'also', this is the place to go! I like the fact that 'et' and 'al' loom large, and 'might' and 'known'. Where are all the bloody animal names? I see '…
tetrapodzoology | September 8, 2008To begin with, I want to thank everyone who continued to visit Tet Zoo while I was away - you managed to keep Tet Zoo in the top 5 on Nature Blog Network - and I was surprised and pleased that several long-running conversations developed in the comments section of the bunny-killing heron article. Awesome, thanks so much. My trip away was great and I had an excellent time, though what wasn't so excellent is that it was literally sandwiched in between two family funerals. I'm ok now though...
For now, all I want to do is showcase the incredible new fossil sperm whale Acrophyseter deinodon,…
tetrapodzoology | August 31, 2008
I'm now leaving, again, this time for SVPCA. I'm hoping that I might be able to do some blogging from the conference, but the last time I said this (the Munich Flugsaurier conference back in September 2007) there was neither the time nor opportunity for it, so don't get your hopes up. Thanks to SVPCA and other matters, I've obviously been unable to put anything substantial on the blog for a while now... making Tet Zoo all too much like a normal blog... and for personal (family-related) reasons, it's been a strange and sad week here. We're all in need of time off that we can't afford to take…
tetrapodzoology | August 28, 2008
Thanks to the latest issue (no. 240) of Fortean Times I've just learnt of the remarkable case whereby an unlucky Canada goose Branta canadensis was, allegedly, hit by a meteoroid (Anon. 2008). The story goes that Derbyshire postman Adrian Mannion was 'having a morning cuppa with his wife Fiona' (I'm not quite sure what a cuppa is, but assume it's a sexual act of some sort) when a rock fell, from space, onto their driveway. It was followed by the goose, which hit the roof of their car. This story was reported in that most reliable of sources, The Sun newspaper, back in February (it's here).…
tetrapodzoology | August 22, 2008
Well, what an interesting time I've had. Firstly, many thanks to everyone who left a comment - however silly or clueless - on the 'novel Mesozoic archosaur' I posted here a few weeks ago. As those in the know correctly stated, the cartoons depict the Brazilian Cretaceous theropod Irritator challengeri in its original guise as a gigantic flightless pterosaur. Now known without doubt to be a spinosaurine spinosaurid (Sues et al. 2002), Irritator was - astonishingly - first published (Martill et al. 1996) as a coelurosaur and as part of Tom Holtz's Bullatosauria (a since-disbanded…
tetrapodzoology | August 14, 2008So, conference season is upon us, and I leave you now for a little while. But here's something to have fun with in the meantime... Back at a conference in 2003, Bob Nicholls (of paleocreations.com) and I wasted time during a lecture by drawing silly pictures. Here's mine, Bob's is below the fold. The question you have to answer is... exactly what were we drawing? Note the scale bars: this is a big animal (err, actually rather too big). The sound effects are speculative.
Those who follow the literature on Mesozoic archosaurs will know what this is about. Remember though, don't spoil it for…
tetrapodzoology | August 13, 2008As a kid, among my most favourite books were those of the Casa Editrice AMZ's Animal Life and The Private Lives of Animals series, first published in Italian during the late 1960s and translated into English during the 70s. There are loads of these books, and they all follow the same format: a big painting of the featured animal on the left (with text and a 'Did you know?' feature), and then little paintings reconstructing aspects of daily life on the right. The art is often wonderful, and the poses and scenes from these books have often been faithfully copied by many less gifted artists.…
tetrapodzoology | July 15, 2008I suppose it's not every day you get to appear in a TV series called MonsterQuest. I appear in two places in one episode (first screened last week): once for a little while in the section embedded here, and again much later on. The bit with me starts 2 minutes, 20 seconds in (let's not worry about the bit later on). Things to note: the lion skull that previously featured in one of the articles on the Functional Morphology Conference and (right in the background, covering a small cupboard that contains keys) Steve White's drawing of the big cats of Rancho La Brea...
And am I really an '…
tetrapodzoology | June 17, 2008Shame, shame, shame, oh shame on me. I saw the following on John Conway's Philosophica Neopalaeontographica and have become so obsessed with it that, here I am, stealing it. It's not, even, really about tetrapods...
... and the accompanying paper (available as a free pdf) is available here. As John says, the word chicken will never seem the same again. Hang around a bit longer, phorusrhacids next... again...
tetrapodzoology | May 21, 2008
Tone and I recently threw out* tons of old clothes, and among the many t-shirts I'd been hoarding was the one shown here: I had it made in 1993 for the Jurassic Park premiere, how sad is that. Consider it a protest directed at Spielberg's hideous feather-less dromaeosaurs (recall that, even in 1993, many of us were confident that dromaeosaurs should be depicted with feathers). The wording says 'Scaly protobirds no thanks! Feathering the theropods: a matter of principle' (kudos if you know the derivation, though it's horribly obvious). I never got beaten up for wearing the t-shirt in public,…
tetrapodzoology | May 17, 2008
What the hell is this? As usual, I'm sure that many people will get it, but oddities (clues?) to note include the paired shallow concavities on the dorsal surface, the rugose laterodorsal patches and the clusters of large foramina. Have fun...
PS - I'll post the answer on Sunday night.