Tetrapod Zoology at the United Nations Science Summit 2022

Today (September 27th 2022), I’m speaking at the United Nations Science Summit panel Knowing and Protecting Life on Earth Starts with Natural History and Science Innovation…

I don’t have time today to talk about the presentation itself (that will come later), but I make several points: on education and outreach, on accessibility of knowledge, on the importance of a historical approach to natural history, and on the universal appeal of amazing animals to all people of all backgrounds. I’m one of a team of people on this panel; the others are highly respected experts on biodiversity, conservation and nature writing: namely Dr Ursula Valdez (tropical avian ecologist and trans-cultural educator), Dr Tom Fleischner (author and director emeritus of The Natural History Institute), Dr Dita Cahyani (marine biodiversity scientist and innovator), and Dr Nalini Nadkarni (forest canopy pioneer and conservationist). The panel was arranged by Dr Seabird McKeon and Dr Michele Weber, and will be led and convened by Dr McKeon.

You can register to attend yourself (it’s free) here.

Tetrapod Zoology's 14th Year of Operation, 2019 in Review

Once again, it’s January 21st – hello, January 21st – which means that it’s Tetrapod Zoology’s birthday, or blogoversary or whathaveyou.

Caption: a montage of TetZoo-themed things relevant to 2019, read on…

TetZoo started life in 2006 and we saw last year how it became a teenager on its 2019 birthday. Today, TetZoo has hit the big 1-4. 14 years old. In keeping with tradition, let’s now look at the year’s TetZooniverous adventures, the caveat as always being that you should stop reading now if this sounds like it’s going to be too introspective. Because it will be. One final warning: this article is realllly long, I could have split into four or five different parts (but I didn’t want to).

Caption: we’ll start here. It depicts Joschua Knüppe, was taken at TetZooCon 2019, and was modified by Armin Reindl. I’ve lost track of who took the original, sorry.

From my own idiosyncratic perspective, TetZoo is – approximately speaking – as active as ever. I still manage to publish a few articles a month and report and discuss things relevant to my interests and thoughts, the site’s visibility and content continues to win me paying employment, its articles remain a (hopefully) valuable source of information on various arcane zoological topics, and – even in the age of Twitter and Instagram (I’m findable on both as @TetZoo) – it has a healthy community of regulars who help keep the site alive with discussion and comments.

Caption: TetZoo Towers, the scene of our story’s Act 1. Yikes, it was a mess at the time this photo was taken… Image: Darren Naish.

January 2019 started with me returning from a consultancy job in China – I work on occasion for Don Lessem’s DinoDon company – which I feel I’ve written about already. I visited Dinosaur Isle at Sandown (one of several trips made there during the year) for on-going work on Wealden theropod dinosaurs with Neil Gostling, Chris Barker and colleagues.

Caption: life-sized dinosaur models at Dinosaur Isle, Sandown. At left, one of Andrew Cocks’s Eotyrannus models (with cannon-fodder ornithischian in mouth). At right, the famous Dorling Kindersley Caudipteryx, with Luis Rey colour scheme. It was in a weird, crooked pose until Luis recently corrected it. Images: Darren Naish.

I also visited the Pulhamite Garden at Holly Hill. Pulhamite gardens – named for their designers, the Pulham brothers – are landscaped Victorian features, designed to include replica waterfalls, grottos, caves and so on. John Conway and I recorded a few episodes of the podcast and released episode 70… which we’d actually recorded back in September 2018. Yeah, we’ve had to abandon any plans to record episodes of the podcast at all regularly, not through choice but because workload no longer allows. And when we do get to record an episode, there’s no longer time or opportunity to edit it. Plus John is very, very lazy.

Caption: a cave - not a natural one, but one made by people - in the Pulhamite garden at Holly Hill, Hampshire, UK. I love this stuff. Reminiscent of the Prehistoric Court at Crystal Palace, of course. Image: Darren Naish.

The TetZoo review of 2018 (I mean, the 13th birthday article) was published at the end of January, a bit later than planned. Episode 71 of the podcast was released in early February and episode 72 – a Loch Ness Monster special – later in the month. A TetZoo article reviewing some recently-ish published books was published, and my recollections of the Dinosaurs Past and Present exhibition of the late 1980s and early 90s was published too. A technical paper I contributed to – on a Late Cretaceous eggshell assemblage from Romania, incorporating the eggs of several reptile species – was published in Scientific Reports in February (Fernández et al. 2019), and I wrote about it here at TetZoo. Will and I went to the Isle of Wight Zoo at the end of February. I mean to write about it. Internet potoos were also covered at TetZoo in February.

Caption: OH MY GOD IT’S MELLER’S DUCK. Yes, they have them at the Isle of Wight Zoo. Image: Darren Naish.

Also during February, I spent time at the BBC’s Natural History Unit – something that would take up an increasing part of my time for the rest of the year (no, I can’t talk about it) – and made tiny, incremental progress on the Eotyrannus monograph (it’s finished, and has been for months, ‘all’ I’m doing is making the post-review changes). My article on OroBOT appeared in BBC Focus magazine (Naish 2019a; an online version is here).

Caption: OroBOT! A mobile, articulated robot replica of Orobates. From the BBC Focus magazine article here.

Caption: the arrival of frogs and frogspawn in the early part of the year is always a significant annual event, and generally occurs round about the second week of February. Two clumps of spawn were produced in 2019; many of the tadpoles made it to froglet stage and some over-wintered and are still in the pond right now (January 2020). The species here is the European common frog Rana temporaria. Images: Darren Naish.

Books. The events of 2019 meant that I wasn’t able to write any new books during the year, nor finish any of the ones I’ve started. A few things happened though. The Dorling Kindersley book that I co-wrote with Chris Barker – part of their ‘What’s Where on Earth’, fully titled What’s Where on Earth: Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Life (Barker & Naish 2019) – appeared in print in March. It’s been very warmly received in reviews. I did an interview on the book (and dinosaurs in general) for First News newspaper.

Caption: new books for 2019. A new edition of Dorling Kindersley’s Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Life appeared during the year: I helped with the update but have yet to see a copy. What’s Where on Earth: Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Life (Barker & Naish 2019) also appeared.

The Japanese edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved (Naish & Barrett 2018) arrived. This version of the book makes me appreciate Japanese respect for detail and intricacy: the cover features several of the cladograms I produced for the book, the boards of the cover are decorated with a beautiful image of a moa skeleton, and there are additional details like an Erlikosaurus on the book’s spine. I drew squamates for the Big Book, a huge project that’s still ticking away in the background (cough cough).

Caption: cover views of the new Japanese edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved (Naish & Barrett 2018).

Moving to March, I worked on a TV series for Wall to Wall, commissioned by Netflix. I may or may not talk about it when it’s out. An article on alternative timeline dinosaur evolution – featuring interview comments and thoughts from me – appeared in the Italian Focus magazine (Camardo 2019).

Caption: opening spread of Giovanni Camardo’s 2019 article on alternative timeline dinosaur evolution. I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: James Kuether’s dinosaurs are everywhere these days.

The dinosaur models I worked on in China at the start of the year were delivered to their new home in New York’s Bronx Zoo and put on show. Articles published at TetZoo during this part of the year include those on the cautious climber hypothesis, and the first and second of my Nessie-themed book reviews. I attended a beach clean event in late March, and as usual picked up many kilos of discarded plastic crap otherwise contaminating the environment. I’ve been doing litter-picks at beaches for years now. Things haven’t improved but have steadily gotten worse. The end of much of the natural world is in sight.

Caption: imagine trying to clean a beach like this of its plastic pollution. It isn’t going to happen: no-one is ever going to remove all of this waste. Chessel Bay, Southampton, March 2019. Image: Darren Naish.

I went to another local zoo (Marwell) in mid-April, highlights of this trip being lemurs in a pile, a rhino gang, good views of Mountain zebra Equus zebra, Crocodile monitor Varanus salvadorii and Blesbok Damaliscus pygargus phillipsi.

Caption: Marwell Zoo has so many great animals. At left, Crocodile monitor Varanus salvadorii in the new tropical house. At right, Mountain zebra Equus zebra (note the dewlap). Images: Darren Naish.

TetZoo articles from this time included those on sleep behaviour in non-human animals, phyllostomid bats, cocks-of-the-rock, and my fondness for Usborne’s 1977 All About Monsters. My latest technical contribution to the cryptozoological literature appeared (Paxton & Naish 2019), this being an article in which Charles Paxton and I aimed to determine whether popular knowledge of Mesozoic marine reptiles might have influenced 19th and 20th century sea monster sightings. We concluded that they likely had, to a degree. This research was covered here at TetZoo; Mike McRae also wrote about it here at ScienceAlert. I spent time at one of my local patches, Telegraph Woods.

Caption: while at Portsmouth Comic Con in May, I got to see several of Roger Dicken’s movie models; here’s a sauropod, I think from The Land That Time Forgot. Images: Darren Naish.

May was busy. I visited the Royal Veterinary College for a secret project I can’t talk about and, outside of work, attended Portsmouth Comic Con and Exbury Gardens, went to the several famous geological sites of Durdle Dor and its surrounds on the Dorset coast (my parents spend part of the year there), and visited the new Dogstival fair – a massive, dog-themed event devoted to everything about dogs – in the New Forest.

Caption: some summertime shots of the New Forest, UK. It really is the most spectacular location and I love spending time there. Images: Darren Naish.

On the subject of dogs, late May was difficult…  I and my family said goodbye to Willow on May 20th, an event which inspired me to write about Willow and her life. I made the mistake of thinking that I’d be able to launch back into work and carry on as if nothing had happened; I should have taken the rest of the month, at least, off work. Other articles appearing at TetZoo during May include those on the creatures of Star Wars, palaeoartistic depictions of Styracosaurus, birdwatching in China, and cases where animals have died after they’ve been hit by falling rocks or trees.

Caption: I visited Bob Nicholls of paleocreations.com during summer 2019. Wow, he has some cool stuff. One of the psittacosaurs is for sale… Images: Darren Naish.

Hunting Monsters and the tabloid press. In early June I attended, and spoke at, the Cheltenham Science Festival. My talk was the Hunting Monsters one, initially prepared to promote the book of the same name (Naish 2017) back when it was new. The talk is on the history of cryptozoological theorising, on the reliability or otherwise of people as reporters of information, and on how the supposed targets of cryptozoology – ‘cryptids’ – might be explained. I signed and sold a bunch of books and had a great time, but an interesting thing happened after my talk.

Caption: books and book signing at the 2019 Cheltenham Science Festival. Jules Howard books make a guest appearance. Images: Darren Naish.

Two journalists – one from The Sun, one from The Daily Mail – were in the audience, and both asked if I thought that the lack of compelling photographic data (especially in an age where huge numbers of people now carry cameras with them most of the time) was essentially the death-knell for the existence of monsters. While things are not necessarily as simple as all that (not all animals can be photographed given the brief duration of many encounters, camera-phone photos are not necessarily good enough to be convincing to those with critical faculties, and so on), I do think that the rarity if not absence of photographic data for most cryptids counts for something, and I hence agreed with this contention. Both journalists were interested, quizzed me further on this point during the book-signing event, and said that this point would be used as the ‘hook’ in the pieces they were going to write. Remember: this idea was raised, de novo, by them and wasn’t mentioned or alluded to in my talk.

Caption: quality, genius journalism from the rag known as The Sun, oh what fun.

How, then, did the journalists concerned deal with this information? Well, you can see for yourselves from the screengrabs used here: the whole thing was spun in the weirdest direction, the take being that I’d only just concluded that cryptids aren’t real, and that I’d hence admitted to wasting about 20 years of research (as if monster-hunting is all I’ve done across the better part of my adult life). Needless to say, this is a nonsense interpretation of everything I’ve done and published. I wrote a response (initially as a series of threaded tweets); you can read it here.

Things kicked off from here, by which I mean that there was substantial further media interest. I turned down most requests for interviews (I’m at that point in my career and experience where I no longer see any benefit in making unpaid appearances on radio or TV. The claim that media exposure helps you, or is useful, is bullshit in my line of work) but did – under duress – do a brief thing for Channel 5 news (you can watch it here, if you want). So I learnt a lot from this, the main thing being that I’d underappreciated how vile and disgustingly biased and manipulative British tabloid journalism mostly is. Newspapers like The Sun approach issues with a rancid anti-intellectual agenda, with a clear intention to inspire and promote disdain, hate and ill will and – while an article written to make me look like an idiot has no national or international relevance or importance and won’t be remembered by anyone excepting myself – the impact that these redtop rags have on important issues (like Europe’s refugee crisis and the infinitely bad Brexit shitstorm) can’t be understated. Everyone knows this already, of course; I merely wanted to state it in my own words.

Caption: at the 2019 Dinosaurs and Art event - hosted at Oxford University Museum of Natural History - David Button uses the mounted Iguanodon bernissartensis replica to make a point about iguanodontian anatomy and posture. Image: Darren Naish.

Whale Watching, Fortean Times, Monsters of the Deep, Anglesey. Also in June, I watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters and was sufficiently inspired to write about it. I attended Will Tattersdill’s Dinosaurs and Art event at the University of Oxford and enjoyed talks by David Button and Verity Burke. I visited Bob Nicholl’s studio in South Gloucestershire (see montage above) and got to see a great deal of amazing in-prep, embargoed work, what an honour. My reminiscences of Lyall Watson’s Whales of the World, some thoughts on books about woodpeckers and my thoughts on Mark Witton’s The Palaeoartist’s Handbook were published at TetZoo.

Caption: you need a really good camera to take good photos of distant whales, and I don’t have one. So what I’d sometimes do, as a temporary record of recording what we’d seen, was photograph other people’s camera screens. Here, you can see someone else’s photo of two Cuvier’s beaked whales. Image: Darren Naish.

During July I went on a whale-watching trip in the Bay of Biscay. This was a fantastic experience (bar the desperate rush to get to the ship on time, I only just made it) where we saw hundreds of dolphins, several Fin whales, Minke whales, Cuvier’s beaked whales, Harbour porpoises and so on and I fully intend to go again as soon as opportunity allows. I wrote about the trip here; thanks again to Alex Srdic for use of his photos.

Caption: a scene from the Pont Aven, July 2019. Our progress across the Bay of Biscay is charted, and we keep tally of the cetaceans (and other interesting animals) we see. Image: Darren Naish.

Topics covered at TetZoo included European cave art, British journalism’s misplaced and weird hatred of gulls (see above re the British tabloid press) and dunnocks, and I also published an article reviewing the FIRST YEAR of TetZoo at its home here at tetzoo.com. I drew lots of passerines and snakes for my textbook and TetZooCon tickets went on sale.

Caption: here’s something that’s kind of a big deal. I worked - as consultant - on the second edition of Don Lessem’s Ultimate Dinopedia book, published 2017. And - look - here it is, making a guest appearance in season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale (in an episode that I watched in July 2019). In the episode, Emily reads part of the section on Spinosaurus (but changes the wording slightly relative to what’s actually in the book).

A really interesting TetZoo-relevant article appeared in Fortean Times in July: namely, a whole article on Hunting Monsters (Naish 2017), published as part of their ‘building a Fortean library’ series. The article was penned by The Hierophant’s Apprentice (there’s a long backstory there which’ll mean something to followers of Forteanism) and emphasises the book’s value as a sceptical review of cryptozoological claims and ideas (The Hierophant’s Apprentice 2019).

Caption: Hunting Monsters is written about in Fortean Times 382, what an honour.

On to August. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned here my in-prep museum exhibition – Monsters of the Deep – which will open in March 2020 at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall. At the time of writing it’s near-finished and we’re about ready to go, but in August there was lots to do and I spent time in Falmouth, pulling things together. More on the exhibition below.

Caption: Red-billed choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax on Anglesey. As usual, my photos aren’t the best, but at least they show what I saw. Choughs are among the oddest of corvids. Images: Darren Naish.

I travelled from Falmouth to Wales, meeting en route with my family, for a brief holiday in Anglesey. We had a fantastic time and watched Common bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus and Grey seals Halichoerus grypus (both within just a few tens of metres of our residence), Red-billed choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax, a huge raft of Goosander Mergus merganser and a ton of seabirds.

Caption: a Goosander raft in the Menai Straits, Anglesey. Image: Darren Naish.

At Breakwater Country Park we visited the outdoor Charles Tunnicliffe gallery, which was a great thrill to me as he’s one of my favourite natural history artists, the works he contributed to (Ladybird Books and PG Tips teacards) being among my earliest influences. The Anglesey Sea Zoo was also great; I used the life-sized leatherback model in an effort to make a homage to the 1988 photos of the giant Harlech leatherback, a century-old specimen that stranded (after drowning in a fishing net) in Gwynedd, Wales, in September 1988 and is today on show at the National Museum, Cardiff. We also visited Ironbridge in Shropshire where I managed to pick up a (super cheap!) copy of J. A. Moy-Thomas’s 1939 book Palaeozoic Fishes.

Caption: my best efforts to mimic what happened in photos depicting the famous Harlech Beach leatherback. This model is on show at Anglesey’s Sea Zoo.

My article on British tabloid journalism’s approach to KILLER SEAGULLS appeared in BBC Science Focus magazine (Naish 2019b) and a reprinted article on the rise of dinosaurs in the Triassic also saw print (Naish 2019c). TetZoo articles of August included those promoting TetZooCon 2019, my review of Angus Dinsdale’s Loch Ness Monster book on his father (Tim Dinsdale), and a report on whale watching in the Bay of Biscay.

Caption: I took so many photos on Anglesey that I have too many to share, but here’s one more. Green spaces are of vital importance to our well-being, we must do everything to preserve them. The humans are Emma, Will and Toni. Image: Darren Naish.

King of the Sex Lakes. While out shopping I discovered that Brian Ford’s wretched book Too Big to Walk had succeeding in winning a second edition. Here’s the explanation for the ‘dInOsAuRs NeEdED sEx LaKeS’ story – wherein it was, apparently seriously, proposed that dinosaurs needed lakes for the purposes of mating, and that a drying up of said lakes in the Late Cretaceous caused dinosaur extinction – which hit the newswires earlier in the year (in May): it was evidently released to drum up interest in Ford’s alt-universe dinosaur project. Ford is a science writer who seems to regard himself as the ultimate expert on everything and, prior to his efforts to reform our understanding of dinosaurs (he thinks that all non-bird dinosaurs were aquatic), might be best known for his takes on spontaneous human combustion and alternative energy weapons.

Caption: a now iconic image. Nothing says science like a full run of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

I’ve already written too much about him (Naish 2012, plus this 2015 article at TetZoo), and at least some of you will know that I gave a talk at his own book launch (held at Conway Hall during May 2018). I did my best in that talk to counter his writings on dinosaurs and out them as the steaming pile they are. Anyway, said second edition of Too Big to Walk includes various updates relative to the first edition, the most interesting of which are those pertaining to the events of Conway Hall. Ford’s take on what happened is dishonest and inaccurate and I did my best to more accurately report events in a series of threaded tweets which you can read here.

Caption: Mr Ford talks about Riley Black on a cruise liner (from this 2015 TetZoo article). This is an old photo that comes from TetZoo ver 3: I try not to link directly to the SciAm host of ver 3 but to the wayback machine versions of the respective articles, firstly because SciAm have removed most of the images; secondly because they’ve paywalled them too. Image: Darren Naish.

Too Big to Walk, incidentally, currently scores 2.5 on Amazon and the only positive reviews appear to have been written by Mr Ford’s friends and allies. This is despite the fact that Ford (and/or his publishers) successfully lobbied to get several fair – but harshly negative – reviews written by qualified palaeontologists removed for ‘being biased’. As I’ve said before, I don’t want to write or talk about Brian Ford and his aquatic dinosaur nonsense again – what a waste of my time and effort – but I’ll continue to do so if I have to.

Caption: the ‘sex lakes’ idea was mocked hilariously throughout the year. I am nothing to do with these images, widely shared online.

It is especially amusing to see Mr Ford lie about the way his claims have been received within the palaeontological community. He’s claimed (on one of his facebook groups) that young palaeontologists “love” his work, that his stuff is only being resisted by the ‘old guard’ – who are busy squatting on their piles of accrued palaeo-dollars at the tops of their ivory towers – and that scientists far and wide are accepting his writings with open arms. When challenged, he can’t name any such scientist, however. I asked on Twitter if anyone out there really “loves” his stuff. The responses were pretty amusing, in that the main “love” for Ford’s view of dinosaurs comes from its potential as meme-worthy nonsense that’s fun to mock.

On that note, early 2020 saw the release of Lemme Splash!, a game in which your aim is to get two amorous, love-struck sauropods to the sex lakes. An excellent review, with some exposition, is provided here at Dino Dad Reviews. “Brian Ford, this is your legacy”.

Conference World. September and October are conference season, and September kicked off with PopPalaeo (properly: Popularising Palaeontology), hosted at King’s College, London, and arranged by Chris Manias. The entire meeting was devoted to palaeontological representation via media, and my own talk was on Dinosaurs in the Wild. It’s online here. Ilja Nieuwland brought along one of the recently discovered replicas of the original Hydrarchos skulls and there was a public engagement event involving an art exhibition and some public talks.

Caption: a Dinosaurs in the Wild Tyrannosaurus model observes events at PopPalaeo 2019. Image: Darren Naish.

The season’s second conference was the 67th SVPCA, this year held at Ryde, Isle of Wight. Because I only had clearance to go at the very last minute, I didn’t have time to throw a talk together. But I really wish I had, since my continuing (and seemingly never finished) research on Wealden theropods would have been absolutely relevant given the biases of the audience. The meeting was made memorable by my locking our entire party out of our shared accommodation, what fun.

Caption: some scenes from the 67th SVPCA, Isle of Wight. At left, a 3D-printed Neovenator skeleton. At right, a table-load of John Sibbick originals. Yes, ORIGINALS. Images: Darren Naish.

The big TetZoo-relevant event of the year is TetZooCon of course, and September is the month where things really have to be sorted out (John’s hectic schedule demands that we leave everything to the last minute). And thus it was that we discovered that The Venue – our, err, venue – had double-booked the room we needed, their suggested solution being that we hold the event at one venue on the first day but at a second venue on the second. Needless to say, this was unworkable and another solution would be needed. We got things resolved eventually, but what a mess. Even after five years of running these events we have yet to find a venue which is (a) affordable and (b) actually interested and reliable when it comes to organisation and communication.

Back at TetZoo, I published my review of Phil Senter’s Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs? as well as parts 1 and 2 in the extreme cetaceans series. Episode 74 of the podcast was released.

Caption: it turns out that Brisbane is absolutely full of these amazing animals. I photographed every individual I saw. They were Australian water dragons Intellagama lesueurii. Image: Darren Naish.

During early October, my wife Toni and I flew to Scotland for the wedding of our friends Jeff and Femke (I’m fundamentally opposed to the concept of short-haul flights but… ugh… if you need to get to Scotland from southern England, flying is massively cheaper than going by train, ffs). I was only back a few days before I attended conference number three: the 79th Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, this year hosted in Brisbane, Australia. This was my very first trip to Australasia. I saw loads of great animals (my article on the birds I saw – published in mid November – is here), hung out with friends old and new, and obtained books and animal figures that aren’t ordinarily available back home in the UK. I attended the meeting for the talks and posters on Cretaceous dinosaurs, pterosaurs and marine reptiles but it was made especially memorable by the many excellent presentations on Cenozoic marsupials, lizards, crocodylians and birds. A dinosaur-themed presentation that inspired a lot of discussion was Kayleigh Wiersma and Martin Sander’s on the claimed presence of beak-like tissues in sauropods; I was one of the several palaeontologists interviewed by John Pickrell for his Science article on the proposal.

Caption: scenes from the excellent Queensland Museum, Brisbane. At left, the famous Perentie Varanus giganteus specimen that died while swallowing an echidna (there’s an old TetZoo article about it here). At right, a real live wombat! Images: Darren Naish.

Finally on the conferences, conference number four – TetZooCon 2019 – happened on the weekend of 19th and 20th October. It was the biggest and best TetZooCon so far and included a dinosaur palaeobiology session and roundtable, a natural history film-making panel and section of talks, Mike Dickison’s Wikipedia workshop, several book signings, a dedicated palaeoart event and exhibition, and a proper merchandise area. The TetZoo write-up is here. Other reviews of the meeting can be found here at LITC (and here’s part 2), here at Luis Rey’s blog, here at Talita Bateman’s blog, here at Steve Allain’s herpetological blog, and here at Albert Chen’s Raptormanics.

Caption: at left: Lauren, Laura, Sam and Kannan at London’s Zoo Reptile House. At right: your humble author with a giant penguin. Always with the giant penguins. This one might be a little too giant. Images: Darren Naish.

A bunch of us went on a post-TetZooCon fieldtrip to ZSL London Zoo on the Monday after the convention. We saw nearly all of the animals. At the time of writing, John and I are in the earliest stages of discussion about TetZooCon 2020. We still don’t have the finances resolved from last year, so I can’t yet be sure that it’ll definitely be happening. But it probably will.

Caption: at left: Dr Cox/BiPolarCosplay as SkekSo, Skeksis Emperor. At right: Naish and Reddish, together at last.

I got to see the first episode of the new BBC natural history series Seven Worlds, One Planet in the cinema and attended London ComicCon with the kids. Highlights included meeting Reddish from Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Spawn and Violator, a Skeksis, a wookiee and a Hoth wampa. An entire episode of the Natural History Channel Podcast devoted to TetZooCon 2019 was released in November 2019 and can be found here. At TetZoo, my review of Robert France’s book on the New England Sea Serpent was published.

Caption: some Naishes (Will at left) with a Wampa; junior Hoth rebel at far right.

The freshly renamed pterosaur Targaryendraco was published at the end of November; I work on pterosaurs sometimes (I certainly have enough unfinished manuscripts on them kicking around) and was quoted in this Nat Geo article by John Pickrell. I actually told John a bunch of stuff that (for obvious and understandable reasons) didn’t make it into the final article, namely that Targaryendraco was being worked on by a second team who – arguably – could be said to have ‘academic priority’ on this project, and that the systematics and taxonomy of ‘ornithocheiroid-type’ pterosaurs has been slowed and stalled for decades by the efforts (or otherwise) of a certain pterosaur worker who shall remain nameless. FINAL EVIDENCE that the Phylonyms: A Companion to the PhyloCode volume will appear in 2020 – only a few decades too late – was received in November. I have one contribution in said volume. I should have three but – funny story – two of them were rejected after having been accepted, substantially revised in a loooong running series of exchanges, and listed as ‘in press’.

Caption: my time in Bristol means that I’ve made numerous visits to the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, which has a ton of excellent stuff. Here’s a dodo model, and an Archaeopteryx. Images: Darren Naish.

I went on a Climate Strike march in Bristol… I still can’t decide whether these events are a total waste of time or not: when it comes to the action that’s so urgently required, we’re still being dismally and catastrophically failed by the so-called leaders of our various countries.

Caption: a Climate Strike march in Bristol, November 2019. We want our governments to instigate change. They mostly want to carry on as normal, because who cares about the future. Image: Darren Naish.

A series of TetZoo articles on ‘alternative timeline dinosaurs’ appeared (part 1, part 2, part 3), which was good (and not entirely coincidental) timing since a BBC World Service radio show on the very same subject was released in November, and featured myself in addition to Memo Kösemen, Anjali Goswami, Elsa Panciroli and Nicola Clayton. I got to see one of my favourite bands – Metronomy – live at Bristol’s O2 Academy. And, with the family, I visited Birdworld in Surrey, home to one of the UK’s most exciting bird collections.

Caption: an ‘alternative timeline smart dinosaurs’ montage, featuring various creatures written about in the TetZoo series. Images: Jim Limwood, CC BY 2.0 (original here), Norman (1991), John Sibbick/Norman (1985), Darren Naish, C. M. Kösemen, John McLoughlin, Matt Collins, Mette Aumala.

Caption: a selection of birds on show at Birdworld, Surrey. They have a lot of great stuff. Images: Darren Naish.

A spider story. While out one December evening at a busy restaurant, I saw a large dark spider on the floor, and – as you do – went to pick it up so that I could relocate it in a place of safety. Unlike any other spider I’ve previously handled, it immediately bit me hard, latching its giant fangs into my left thumb and leaving two small bleeding holes in my skin. I’d been envenomated, and the wound hurt for the next few hours. The pain was about similar to that of a bee sting. The spider was Segestria florentina (the Tube web or Mouse spider), a species I know well but have never previously been bitten by. Segestria, incidentally, isn’t native to the UK but is now so widespread that it’s an established part of our fauna. I captured the spider in a small bucket and released it outside. Remember that animals which bite you are (ordinarily) terrified and in fear of their lives, not ‘angry’ as is so often stated.

Caption: Flame the dragon, on this occasion being most upset about the look of the sky. Image: Darren Naish.

It was also in December that we went live on the advertising for the Monsters of the Deep exhibition which I mentioned earlier. This has been a big part of my life for the last few years and rest assured that I’ll be writing about it once the exhibition is officially open. It’s mostly about European sea monster lore and covers medieval ideas about the creatures of the sea, mermaids, kraken, the scientific exploration of the oceans and cryptozoology. There isn’t currently much online content about the exhibition but, right now, you can get a basic idea of what’s going on here.

Caption: Monsters of the Deep teaser - more info is available here, and watch the National Maritime Museum, Falmouth Twitter account too.

Pressures of time mean that nothing has been published at TetZoo this month – as in, January – bar this article and the one on the Loveland Frog, the latter written as a tie-in to our ongoing efforts to get Cryptozoologicon Volume 2 finished (the ‘our’ referring to me, John Conway and C. M. Kösemen). And that, just about, brings us up to date…

In keeping with tradition, it’s at this point that I list the TetZoo articles of the year by category, analyse said coverage with taxonomic bias in mind (how fair, or unfair, have I been to the various tetrapod groups?), and then self-flagellate given that the bias usually reveals massive skew to charismatic megafauna. Here we go…

Miscellaneous Musings

• TetZoo Bookshelf, February 2019, Part 1

• Sleep Behaviour and Sleep Postures in Non-Human Animals

• On May the 4th, Some Star Wars Musings

• Death by Falling Rocks and Trees

• Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Some Trivial But Monstrous Thoughts

• Mark Witton’s The Palaeoartist’s Handbook

• Five Famous Palaeolithic Rock Art Enigmas

• The First Year of Tetrapod Zoology Ver 4

• Announcing TetZooCon 2019 – the Biggest Yet

• Final Call For TetZooCon 2019

• The Sixth TetZooCon

Mammals

• The Cautious Climber Hypothesis

• The New World Leaf-Nosed Bat Radiation

• Lessons From a Dog: a Life With Willow

• Remembering Lyall Watson’s Whales of the World

• Whale Watching in the Bay of Biscay

• Extreme Cetaceans, Part 1

• Extreme Cetaceans, Part 2

• Extreme Cetaceans, Part 3

Non-avialan dinosaurs

• Recollections of Dinosaurs Past and Present, the 1980s Exhibition

• The Fate of Burian’s Styracosaurus

• Philip J. Senter’s Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs?, the TetZoo Review

Birds

• A Multi-Species Nesting Assemblage in the Late Cretaceous of Europe

• Potoos As An Internet Phenomenon

• Cocks-of-the-Rock, Extreme Cotingas

• Birdwatching in Suburban China

• The World’s Best Books on Woodpeckers

• Tell Me Something Interesting About Dunnocks

• Hacks Vs Wildlife: the Eternal Vilification of Gulls

• Suburban Birdwatching in Queensland, Australia

Cryptozoology

• Books on the Loch Ness Monster 1: Ronald Binns’s The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded

• Books on the Loch Ness Monster 2: Gareth Williams’s A Monstrous Commotion

• Usborne’s All About Monsters

• Sea Monster Sightings and the ‘Plesiosaur Effect’

• Books on the Loch Ness Monster 3: The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness

• A Review of Robert L. France’s Disentangled: Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent

• Lore of the Loveland Frog

SpecBio

• Alternative Timeline Dinosaurs, the View From 2019 (Part 1)

• Alternative Timeline Dinosaurs, the View From 2019 (Part 2)

• Alternative Timeline Dinosaurs, the View From 2019 (Part 3): the Dinosauroid and its Chums

Why Are Things Like This. Ok, there’s a bit to unpack here. Long-time readers will know that my aim at TetZoo is to achieve some sort of taxonomic balance whereby I write fairly and equally about the major tetrapod groups. Somehow I stupidly expect that this will magically just happen, which I know is ridiculously flawed and dumb, but there it is. Have I ever achieved said balance? There was a time when I felt I was getting close to achieving it but… no, no I haven’t. And as we can see from TetZoo’s subject coverage across 2019, I’m further away from it than ever, utterly failing across the year to cover amphibians, stem-mammals, squamates and so many other groups. This failure is mostly down to two things, and those things are things that make the ‘fair coverage’ failure somewhat ironic, and hopefully understandable. Forgivable, if you will.

Caption: for levity, some toys. Images: Darren Naish.

First thing: now that TetZoo is hosted at its very own site, I feel freer, more able to write about whatever relevant topic I like, however sensational or semi-serious. And I won’t lie: writing about the Loveland frog, alternative timeline dinosaurs or the Loch Ness Monster is easier for me than is writing about obscure skinks of New Guinea or turtle phylogeny. Those more technical, scientific topics – while worthy and of great interest to me – require so much more research and checking of the literature, and thus time. Time is the great constraint on everything I do. Oh, and money, but I’m not here to complain about that.

Caption: which of these two articles do you think brought in more visitors: the one about bigfoot’s dick, or the one about mystery skinks from Tonga? The answer may depress you, but may also be very predictable.

Second thing: tetzoo.com is still a relatively new site where I’m trying to build an audience. Both ScienceBlogs and SciAm – the two previous hosting sites for TetZoo – came with captive audiences of many thousands of readers, any number of whom would hop over to TetZoo when the interesting title of a TetZoo article appeared in a sidebar. This new hosting site doesn’t have that ‘captive audience’: I’m relying either on people who come here on a regular basis because they’ve been rewarded in the past (hello), or those who find the site while googling ‘what do we know about bigfoot’s genitals’, or whatever (hello to you too, please visit again). Ergo, part of my thinking has been that I should concentrate on some of the rather more sensational things I write about: experience and data shows that they do bring in more readers. If you doubt that, here’s a visitor graph showing what happens when I write about ‘humanoid dinosaurs of an alternative timeline’. People are fickle, and I’m trying to take advantage of that.

Caption: this is what happens when I blog about speculative zoology… I mean the peak at far right. So don’t judge me.

In fairness to myself, I should also add that my assorted dealings, projects and paying gigs over 2019 mostly revolved around cryptozoology, dinosaurs, speculative biology and sensational, weird animals, and not the more academic side of herpetology or vertebrate palaeontology. So there’s also some genuine justification for the biases in coverage we’re seeing here.

Caption: Andrew Dutt produced this masterpiece. It reflects John Conway’s great love of movies like Pacific Rim and the unstoppable force that is the Category V kaiju Petersquama. Image: Andrew Dutt, used with permission.

And that about wraps things up. This article is huge: about five times longer than a typical TetZoo article, and I did toy with the idea of splitting it up. I opted not to because I prefer to avoid dragging the birthday thing out; I’d rather move on to other things. Despite an ever-increasing workload and a continuing decrease in the time available to me for blogging (I’m writing this while sat on a train: I’ve just seen a group of Roe deer in a frozen field), my aim is to continue to publish new content as and when I can throughout 2020 and beyond. I thank you for visiting and reading TetZoo and hope that you’ll continue to do so. And happy 14th birthday, little blog.

Caption: another personally relevant thing I haven’t discussed here at all: 2019’s maturation of pond 2. It and its surrounds proved a total wildlife haven. I dearly hope this small green area persists after we move away…

For previous Tet Zoo birthday articles, see...

• Happy first birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part I)

• Happy first birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part II)

• Happy second birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part I)

• Tetrapods of 2007 (happy birthday Tet Zoo part II)

• Happy THIRD birthday Tet Zoo

• Tet Zoo = 4 years old today

• 2009, a year of Tet Zooery

• Four years of Tet Zoo: to infinity... and beyond!

• It is with some dismay that I announce Tet Zoo's first hemi-decade

• Tet Zoo 5th birthday extravaganza, part II

• Happy Birthday Tetrapod Zoology: SIX YEARS of blogging

• Happy 6th Birthday, Tetrapod Zoology (part II)

• Tetrapod Zoology enters its 8th year of operation

• Today marks NINE YEARS of Tetrapod Zoology

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 1: 2015 in Review

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th Birthday Extravaganza, Part II: the Rest of 2015 Reviewed

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 3: Tet Zoo's Tetrapod Treatment in 2015

• Today Is Tet Zoo's 11th Birthday

• The 12th Year of Tet Zoo

• The Tet Zoo 12th-Birthday Event, Part 2

• The Much Belated Final Part of the Tetrapod Zoology 12th Birthday Event

• Tetrapod Zoology Is A Teenager Now, January 2019

Refs - -

Barker, C. & Naish, D. 2019. What’s Where on Earth: Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Life. Dorling Kindersley, London.

Camardo, G. 2019. Se non si fossero estinti, avremmo vinto noi o loro? Focus 317, 51-55.

Fernández, M. S., Wang, X., Vremir, M., Lauren, C., Naish, D., Kaiser, G. & Dyke, G. 2019. A mixed vertebrate eggshell assemblage from the Transylvanian Late Cretaceous. Scientific Reports 9, 1944.

Naish, D. 2012. Palaeontology bites back… Laboratory News May 2012, 31-32.

Naish, D. 2017. Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths. Arcturus, London.

Naish, D. 2019a. The walk of prehistoric life. BBC Science Focus 334, 52-55, 58-59 (online version here).

Naish, D. 2019b. Seagulls: are they getting more aggressive? BBC Science Focus 340, 38-39.

Naish, D. 2019c. How dinosaurs conquered the world. BBC Science Focus Magazine Collection 13, 42-47.

Naish, D. & Barrett, P. M. 2018. Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. The Natural History Museum, London.

Paxton, C. G. M. & Naish, D. 2019. Did nineteenth century marine vertebrate fossil discoveries influence sea serpent reports? Earth Sciences History 38, 16-27.

The Hierophant’s Apprentice. 2019. Building a Fortean library No 47. There ain’t so such animal. Fortean Times 382, 56-57.

The First Year of Tetrapod Zoology Ver 4

It’s July 31st 2019, meaning that TetZoo the blog has been at its new home here – tetzoo.com, previously occupied only by the podcast and the TetZooCon page – for a whole year.

If there’s ever a TetZoo Park, it’ll have a lot of tapirs, especially Kabomani ones. Image: Patrick Murphy.

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, I already do birthday articles every January 21st (doing these is a good way of keeping track of the year’s events), but being at a new hosting site is enough of a big deal that I feel it’s worthy of a special article too. This article also exists as a one-stop list of links for all ver 4 articles published so far.

Who doesn’t love bigfoot, wailing in the dark? More colorful versions of this image are available on merchandise at the TetZoo redbubble shop. Image: Darren Naish.

Ver 4 started its life with an obligatory ‘Welcome to ver 4’ article but we were immediately deep in extreme niche: specifically cryptozoology, more specifically bigfoot (still one of my favourite subjects in the world, however things pan out), and more specifically still the genitals of bigfoot. Yes, it was a vile, cheap effort to rake in readership, but by fuck did it work. A few dinosaur-themed book reviews followed, as did a popular and fun article on the vexing (and somehow topical as of August 2018) issue of dinosaur domestication.

• Bigfoot’s Genitals: What Do We Know?

• New Dinosaur Books, Part 1: Barrett on Stegosaurs

• New Dinosaur Books, Part 2: Ben Garrod’s ‘So You Think You Know About… Dinosaurs’ Series

• A 1996 Letter from Dr Phil Currie

• Could We Domesticate (Non-Bird) Dinosaurs?

The Vectidraco daisymorrisae holotype (NHMUK PV R36621) in (A) left lateral, (B) right lateral, (C) dorsal and (D) ventral views, and - at right - shown in anatomical position as per the animal's presumed profile in life. Image: figures from Naish et al. (2013).

For understandable reasons, another thing I often blog about is the research I publish, and August 2018 saw me writing about the new paper on pterosaur palaeoneurology I published with Liz Martin-Silverstone and Dan Sykes (Martin-Silverstone et al. 2018). The evolutionary history and diversity of modern animal groups are – surprisingly to many – not well covered in the literature, nor online, and it’s partly for these reasons that I often write review articles on given groups when I can (oh, for more opportunity to do this). August’s article on mastigures is one of the latest example of this noble tradition; I hope it proves useful.

• Postcranial Palaeoneurology and the Lifestyles of Pterosaurs

• The Tet Zoo Guide to Mastigures

Megaloceros cheat-sheet, from the September 2018 article on the life appearance of this animal. Image: Darren Naish.

And so to September 2018. A long-running project I’d been involved in over the past several years – the travelling, immersive Dinosaurs in the Wild experience – came to an end in September, and I just had to write about it, one more time. I also wrote about the giant deer Megaloceros (part of a slow-burn series on the life appearance of Pleistocene mammals), and I also covered TetZoo-relevant meetings of the time: the Dougal Dixon After Man event and TetZooCon 2018.

• The Last Day of Dinosaurs in the Wild

• The Life Appearance of the Giant Deer Megaloceros

• The Dougal Dixon After Man Event of September 2018

• Reasons to Attend TetZooCon 2018

• Reminiscing on Tetrapood Zoology: Book One…

• TetZooCon 2018: Best TetZooCon So Far

• TetZoo ver 3 and a Dark Day for the Dissemination of Knowledge

A Tapirus terrestris at Chester Zoo, UK. Relevant to tapir discussions covered here in October 2018. Image: Darren Naish.

Avocets and tapirs – the infamous Kabomani tapir, no less (did I mention that there’s a new tapir?) – were covered here in October, while November saw New Living Animals We Want to Find, another dinosaur-themed book review, a report of the ZSL ‘Comical Tales From the Animal Kingdom’ meeting, thoughts on an alleged 16th century dino-chicken, news on the second edition of the Naish & Barrett book Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved (Naish & Barrett 2018), a brief review of Erroll Fuller’s Passenger pigeon book, and a really fun article on the pouches of the Sungrebe. Wow, that was a busy month. The dino-chicken article includes a serious gaff and a follow-up article is needed. It’s coming, I promise.

• Avocets in Flight and Phylogeny

• Whatever Happened to the Kabomani Tapir?

• New Living Animals We Want to Find

• Brian Switek’s My Beloved Brontosaurus: A Belated Review

• Comical Tales From the Animal Kingdom, a Zoological Society of London Meeting

• Aldrovandi’s Monstrous Rooster, a 16th Century Dino-Chicken

• The Second Edition of Naish and Barrett’s Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved

• Erroll Fuller’s The Passenger Pigeon

• Pouches of the Sungrebe

Head of the reclining Crystal Palace Iguanodon. There’s an awful lot to say about these models… and I’m pretty sure they’ve been extensively discussed on a blog run by a colleague of mine. If only I could remember the name of it, or the url. Ok, ok, Mark Witton has been discussing all the models A LOT. Image: Darren Naish.

And we saw the year out with articles from December on TetZoo’s 12th birthday, the Crystal Palace prehistoric animal models, and one on exciting TetZoo-themed discoveries of 2018.

• The Much Belated Final Part of the Tetrapod Zoology 12th Birthday Event

• Up Close and Personal With the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

• The Most Amazing TetZoo-Themed Discoveries of 2018

That’s 27 articles over the five months in which ver 4 had - at this point - existed (I can’t count July, seeing as things kicked off on July 31st), meaning that 5.4 articles were published each month. That’s reasonable value for money, if I say so myself – more than one new article per week. Surely I couldn’t keep up such superhuman levels of productivity across 2019 as well? Let’s find out…

Gerhard Heilmann’s take on the appearance of ‘Proavis’ - a hypothetical bird ancestor - as illustrated in his Danish book of 1916. For more see the article on Heilmann and his Proavis from January 2019. Image: Heilmann (1916).

January 2019 was off to a good start, with articles on hypothetical proavians (follow-up article still needed), the life appearance of sauropods, and the obligatory birthday review all appearing during the month. More new(ish) books were reviewed in February, I also wrote about potoos on the internet, my personal recollections of the Dinosaurs Past and Present exhibition of the late 1980s and early 90s, and another new published piece of academic research (a new paper on a Late Cretaceous nesting colony, dominated by archaic birds; Fernández et al. 2019).

• Heilmann, Thompson, Beebe, Tetrapteryx and the Proavian

• The Life Appearance of Sauropod Dinosaurs

• Tetrapod Zoology Is A Teenager Now

• TetZoo Bookshelf, February 2019, Part 1

• A Multi-Species Nesting Assemblage in the Late Cretaceous of Europe

• Recollections of Dinosaurs Past and Present, the 1980s Exhibition

• Potoos As An Internet Phenomenon

Pretty soon there’ll be an entire wing of Tet Zoo Towers devoted to Loch Ness literature. Image: Darren Naish.

More on cryptozoology was published in March as I got through two of the promised three connected reviews of books on the Loch Ness Monster (the third will appear within the next month or two). Also worth mentioning here is the April article on my paper with Charles Paxton on sea monster sightings and whether they were shaped by people’s familiarity with fossil marine reptiles (Paxton & Naish 2019), and my recollections of a popular children’s book on monsters.

• Books on the Loch Ness Monster 1: Ronald Binns’s The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded

• Books on the Loch Ness Monster 2: Gareth Williams’s A Monstrous Commotion

• Sea Monster Sightings and the ‘Plesiosaur Effect’

• Usborne’s All About Monsters

Slow loris, sloth and hypothetical pre-hominid, three ‘cautious climbers’ illustrated in the cautious climber article of March 2019. Image: Darren Naish.

Articles on the cautious climber hypothesis of hominid origins, sleep behaviour, New World leaf-nosed bats, and cocks-of-the-rock all appeared during April 2019. May was fairly eclectic and featured articles on the creatures of Star Wars, the way in which Styracosaurus has been depicted in books and movies, birdwatching in China, and cases where animals have been killed by falling rocks and trees. An unusual personal article dedicated to the life of the older of our family dogs – Willow – also appeared in May.

• The Cautious Climber Hypothesis

• Sleep Behaviour and Sleep Postures in Non-Human Animals

• The New World Leaf-Nosed Bat Radiation

• Cocks-of-the-Rock, Extreme Cotingas

• On May the 4th, Some Star Wars Musings

• The Fate of Burian’s Styracosaurus

• Birdwatching in Suburban China

• Lessons From a Dog: a Life With Willow

• Death by Falling Rocks and Trees

I have it bad for the Big G. Here’s a recent addition to my toy and model collection. Image: Darren Naish.

June – we’re in recent memory now – included articles on Godzilla: King of the Monsters, my reminiscences of Watson’s Whales of the World, thoughts on books about woodpeckers, and a review of Witton’s The Palaeoartist’s Handbook. Bringing us right up to date, we have my July pieces on dunnocks, Palaeolithic rock art and gulls.

• Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Some Trivial But Monstrous Thoughts

• Remembering Lyall Watson’s Whales of the World

• The World’s Best Books on Woodpeckers

• Mark Witton’s The Palaeoartist’s Handbook

• Tell Me Something Interesting About Dunnocks

• Five Famous Palaeolithic Rock Art Enigmas

• Hacks Vs Wildlife: the Eternal Vilification of Gulls

Sleep well, little, err, giant panda. From Chengdu Panda Base. Image: Darren Naish.

Excluding the article you’re reading now, that gives us 27 (again, oddly) 2019 articles across the first six months of the year, giving us a lower output of 4.5 articles per month… so, still more than one a week. I’ll say at this point that it’s the support I receive via patreon that allows me to be, and remain, productive here at TetZoo, so huge thanks to those who assist. My other projects – technical research and various in-prep books (not least of which is The Vertebrate Fossil Record) – are also dependent on patreon support.

I constantly upload in-prep stuff to patreon, support me there and see it come together :)

So there we have it: a quick review of what’s happened at ver 4 so far. As I’m sure I always say, there’s tons more I plan to write about, the current to-do list featuring some ungodly number of articles that are partially written, or planned, or in some preliminary stage of preparation. I would do so much more if I could. Overall, I’m happy with the way things are going at ver 4. Finally, I’m free of adverts (like those crow-barred in at SciAm) and have control over commenting (something I care about and want to encourage, not curtail). The community here is healthy and growing, and it can only continue to grow and expand as ver 4 itself incorporates more articles on an increasing number of subjects. Thank you for reading, and I hope you’ll continue to do so. Here’s to the first year of ver 4.

The inevitable consequence of overlapping obsessions: actinopterygians and tapirs. Result: mertapir. Image: Darren Naish.

Refs - -

Fernández, M. S., Wang, X., Vremir, M., Lauren, C., Naish, D., Kaiser, G. & Dyke, G. 2019. A mixed vertebrate eggshell assemblage from the Transylvanian Late Cretaceous. Scientific Reports 9, 1944.

Heilmann, G. 1916. Vor Nuvaerende Viden om Fuglenes Afstamning. Unknown publisher, Copenhagen.

Martin-Silverstone, E., Sykes, D. & Naish, D. 2018. Does postcranial palaeoneurology provide insight into pterosaur behaviour and lifestyle? New data from the azhdarchoid Vectidraco and the ornithocheirids Coloborhynchus and Anhanguera. Palaeontology 2018, 1-14. doi: 10.1111/pala/12390

Naish, D. & Barrett, P. M. 2018. Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. The Natural History Museum, London.

Naish, D., Simpson, M. I. & Dyke, G. J. 2013. A new small-bodied azhdarchoid pterosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of England and its implications for pterosaur anatomy, diversity and phylogeny. PLoS ONE 8 (3): e58451.

Paxton, C. G. M. & Naish, D. 2019. Did nineteenth century marine vertebrate fossil discoveries influence sea serpent reports? Earth Sciences History 38, 16-27.

On May the 4th, Some Star Wars Musings

Today is May the 4th (2019), so what better thing to post at TetZoo than a brief take on Star Wars and its zoology crossovers.

Caption: Star Wars creatures. From left to right: tauntauns, opee, wampa, Max Rebo (in ball organ), Sy Snootles, Droopy McCool, Amanaman, rancor. We’ll be talking about some of these creatures below. Image: Darren Naish.

Like most people of my age (I’m a child of the 1970s), the original Star Wars films had a huge influence on me. In fact, I’m a massive Star Wars nerd who knows an inappropriate amount of things about the droids, bounty hunters, planets, characters and plot lines of the original trilogy… aaaand the other films too. Those who listen to the TetZoo podcast will know that I’m gradually working my way through the entire script to The Empire Strikes Back, in part because I’m such a huge fan of AT-ATs and everything else featured in the section of the movie set on Hoth.

While I could easily write vast swathes of useless nonsense on the Star Wars movies and my thoughts on them (fun fact of the day: Leia calls Luke and Han “moon jockeys” in the original script for Empire), let’s focus on a few things that have some kind of relevance to the TetZooniverse.

Caption: that Krayt Dragon skeleton sure looks a lot like a replica sauropod with a semi-fictional head. Now we know why.

The Krayt Dragon. Today it’s fairly well known among movie buffs that the Krayt Dragon skeleton featured on Tatooine in the original Star Wars (today Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope) is actually the same replica skeleton – the exact same prop – that stands in for Diplodocus in the 1975 Disney movie One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing. I’ve written about this at TetZoo, and it’s been covered at SV-POW! as well. Also well known is that the Star Wars crew left some, most or even all of the skeleton out there in the Tunisian desert (wow, epic littering), and that bits and pieces of it have been collected from the site by geologists, palaeontologists and others over the years.

Caption: a scene from One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing. Yup, that skeleton looks familiar. These days it’s funny to think that it’s meant to be one and the same as Dippy of NHM London fame, and that it ended its life a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Image: IMDB.

On the subject of sauropods, also worth noting is that the CG Rontos of the modified editions of episode IV are tweaked versions of the Jurassic Park brachiosaur, but with some additions inspired by Paraceratherium, the giant rhino.

Of wampas and tauntauns. Hoth’s wampa – or, the Hoth wampa, in fact – is one of my favourite Star Wars creatures. It’s assumed that the wampa was inspired by the pop-culture idea of the Himalayan yeti, and designed to be a frightening, hypercarnivorous version of this creature (even though yetis are dark, and not snow-coloured). The wampa of the movie undergoes several radical changes in appearance if you watch closely, a consequence of the fact that various different models, suits and puppets were used for different scenes. The original toy looks very odd in the face, I believe because the Kenner model-makers were given insufficient information on its final look. Oh: why is it that herbivorous tauntauns and hypercarnivorous wampas both have gnarly, curling horns on the side of the face? The real answer is “because it looks cool”, but… is there an in-universe explanation that explains this unusual detail of convergent evolution?

Caption: tauntauns started life as kangaroo-dinosaur creatures, the first concept art by Joe Johnston actually making them look rather like fuzzy theropods (could Johnston have been inspired by the fuzzy dinosaur artwork that had appeared in Bakker’s Scientific American article?). Today they’re one of the most-loved creatures of the canon. Image: StarWars.com.

Reptomammals and reptavians. If you’re curious about the phylogeny of Star Wars creatures, there have been several efforts to devise taxonomic schemes that reflect phylogeny. Wampas, tauntauns and rancors are all reptomammals, apparently. This is a group of animals that combine reptile- and mammal-like traits, and can be furry, scaly, or a combination of the two. Then there are reptavians, which similarly combine reptile and bird traits. My favourite example of a reptavian is the Varactyl, a creature that looks like a giant day gecko but has a hooked bill and a covering of iridescent feathers (Obi Wan rides one, called Boga, in Revenge of the Sith).

Caption: turns out that the species is called a Varactyl, and the individual Obi-Wan is riding is called Boga. Ok. Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.

This creature fascinates me because its sprawling locomotion and sinuous flexing of its body during running mean that its ribcage is surely undergoing a lot of shape change, yet it’s yelling its head off all the while. In other words, the Varactyl has circumvented Carrier’s constraint: the biomechanical problem whereby animals that flex their bodies laterally during running have their breathing (and thus vocalising) constrained at the same time.

Back to reptomammal and reptavian affinities… I’m sure there’s some stuff in Star Wars canon about how the members of these clades (are they clades?) came to be widely distributed across planets and even solar systems, but otherwise this always seems to be a stumbling block for the ‘these creatures which are spread across the galaxy all have close evolutionary relationships’ idea common to the Star Wars universe.

Caption: rancors have featured in a huge number of Star Wars stories now. This artwork is pretty badass (the individual shown here is much bigger than the young one Skywalker encountered in Jabba’s palace). Image: reddit (original here).

While – even today – I have my own fair share of Star Wars toys (virtually all pertaining to the original films alone), I don’t have a vast number of the creatures. Just two tauntauns, a wampa, a rancor, an opee (from The Phantom Menace), and a few of my favourite humanoids, like Amanaman. It’s virtually always possible to recognise which real-world creatures inspired the designs of Star Wars creatures, and if there’s a criticism of the look favoured throughout the various iterations of the franchise it’s that the animals are too Terran. Virtually everything is identifiable as a reptile, bird, mammal or fish of Earthy sort. To take just a few examples… tauntauns are bipedal camels (with a hint of dinosaur), while Amanaman has clear cobra vibes to its look [UPDATE: I was totally wrong on this. Turns out that Amanaman was inspired by flatworms!] . The Opee sea killer is obviously just an anglerfish and crustacean stuck together.

Caption: I’ve proudly retained at least some of my Star Wars toys. Image: Darren Naish.

Whitlatch and Carrau’s The Wildlife of Star Wars. Anyone interested both in Star Wars and in imaginary or speculative animals will be aware of Terryl Whitlatch and Bob Carrau’s beautiful book The Wildlife of Star Wars, which features scores of amazing illustrations depicting the animals of the Star Wars universe and such things as their ecological interactions and lifecycles.

Caption: Whitlatch & Carrau’s The Wildlife of Star Wars, front cover. Image: amazon.co.uk.

Terryl designed many of the creatures used in the prequel trilogy, and came up with such things as the humanoid amphibian Jar-Jar Binks (and hence his species, the gungans) and the various aquatic predators of Naboo. Among these is the Sando aqua monster, a quadrupedal super-predator that reaches 200 metres in length. Concept art shows that the Sando aqua monster was originally going to be built like an immense, aquatic cat, a really cool idea which I can’t help but think of when I see footage of jaguars foraging and swimming underwater. Alas, someone somewhere didn’t like this, so it was given a wide-mouthed, whale-like head and ended up looking less interesting (in my opinion).

Caption: a screengrab from one of those amazing pieces of film that show jaguars swimming underwater. This footage comes from what I think is a Brazilian zoo with a special glass-fronted swimming pool.

And while there’s much more I could say, I’ll stop there. And I didn’t once mention the fact that I previously worked with Jez Gibson-Harris, maker and operator (with others) of Jabba the Hutt.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to see me do more, please consider supporting this blog (for as little as $1 per month) at patreon. The more support I receive, the more financially viable this project becomes and the more time and effort I can spend on it. Thank you :)

For vaguely relevant TetZoo articles, see…

• Bigfoot’s Genitals: What Do We Know?, August 2018

• Could We Domesticate (Non-Bird) Dinosaurs?, August 2018

• The Dougal Dixon After Man Event of September 2018, September 2018

• Usborne’s All About Monsters, April 2019

Tetrapod Zoology Is A Teenager Now

Yet again a year has passed and yet again it’s time to review events relevant to the TetZooniverse, so here we are at TetZoo’s 13th birthday (January 21st 2006 being the date on which the blog first came into being). As per usual, I’m going to discuss, comment on or mention all those TetZooniverse things that I deem worthy of discussion, comment or mention. And, as usual, I implore you not to read this if the thought of me writing about my own achievements and adventures sounds arrogant or worth a miss. Still here? Ok, we proceed…

Caption: once again I’m going to begin by reminding you of how it all began, back in 2006… you can see that very first article (should you want to) here. Images: Darren Naish.

Our story begins in late January 2018. Birds (owls and rollers, among others) were still keeping me busy as goes The Big Book, and academic work on ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs and sea monsters (of the cryptozoological sort) was underway. It’s a reminder (as if another were needed) of how slowly it takes for academic projects to come together to note that none of those projects have yet seen print, more than a year later. Fossil bats – covered only because I suddenly suffered bat guilt – got a little coverage at TetZoo during February. I visited Hill Head, West Wittering and Swanwick to see grebes, divers, waders and gulls. The conditions were mostly cold and windy but clear and sunny, which is great for looking at water- and seabirds.

Caption: there are so many great places to see water- and seabirds around the coasts of the UK. One of my favourite haunts at the moment is Swanwick in Hampshire. Teals at left; Brent geese at right. Image: Darren Naish.

Dinosaurs in the Wild (DITW) opened for its final, London-based run at the start of February. If you’re a regular reader you’ll already be familiar with this interactive, science-based visitor attraction so I won’t be saying much more about it today. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and are curious, see Dinosaurs in the Wild: An Inside View at TetZoo ver 3 and The Last Day of Dinosaurs in the Wild here at ver 4. I did various promotional events for DITW from February to June and met science journalist and author John Pickrell at the exhibition during February. Also in February, I wasted time submitting a grant application which was ultimately unsuccessful – more on that later.

Caption: scenes from Dinosaurs in the Wild. At left, your humble author with John Pickrell (and friend: John is the one not holding the plush tyrannosaur). At right: myself, Siouxsie the Dakotaraptor, and Chris Packham. Images: Darren Naish, Megan McCubbin.

A TV thing filmed at Colchester Zoo during October 2017 appeared on BBC4, titled ‘The Incredible Science of Temperature’ and presented by Helen Czerski. I was filmed discussing, with Helen, what influence global temperatures have had on the distribution of ectothermic reptiles (qualifier because not all non-bird reptiles are ectothermic), and on the physiology and behaviour of Komodo dragons. It felt, at the time, like a total disaster but I’m pleased to say that the parts of my performance included in the show weren’t too bad (the relevant episode is online here). Fighting blue tits, Leguatia, and an article about Mark Witton’s palaeoart appeared at TetZoo during this part of the year. Remember that TetZoo was still hosted at SciAm at this point.

In March I assisted with a local beach clean event. I don’t talk about these to brag about my public service (heavens, no), but to help maintain awareness of plastic pollution and the problems facing marine environments today, and also to remind those of you reading this that you can help by getting involved with local environmental groups.

Caption: beach cleaning is always such a joy (am being ironic). Here’s a haul after just a few hour’s work. Image: Darren Naish.

March was also the month in which Paul Barrett and I compiled our suggested list of corrections and updates for the second edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. Again, I don’t need to say much about this here since the story behind the second edition was recently covered here in, err, The Second Edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. Thanks again to those who provided help in compiling corrections, to those who’ve said positive things about the book and to those who’ve purchased it and helped spread the word about it.

Caption: Milo the Neotropical giant toad - at right - now lives at Tet Zoo Towers, but his original home was the BBC Natural History Unit, at BBC Bristol. Like Milo, I spent time at BBC Bristol during 2018. Why? Well… we shall see. Images: Darren Naish.

I engaged in an online interview with the brilliant Aron Ra who I’ve long been familiar with but had not previously spoken to. We discussed TetZooCon, the Tetrapod Zoology project, my books, serial mis-educator David Peters, and more. The interview – part of Aron’s RaMen series – is online here. I also used our virtual meeting as an excuse to invite Aron as a speaker to TetZooCon 2018 since, by virtue of good timing, he was going to be in the UK at exactly the right time. More on TetZooCon later. Oh: I joined instagram in March, wholly because I read an article by a scientist bemoaning scientists who join instagram. My review of Jonathan Kane et al.’s most worthy book God’s Word or Human Reason? appeared at TetZoo in late March, as did a short review of everything columbiform. By now, the substantial passerine section was being done for The Big Book which surely meant that completion of the enormous bird section was in sight, right?

Caption: work on The Big Book (my in-prep textbook The Vertebrate Fossil Record) mostly involved birds across 2018. In cases, as here, I had to revamp some old illustrations. This image shows old (at right) and new images of Aepyornis… and surely I won’t need to revamp Aepyornis AGAIN, right? Some of you will know what I’m getting at. Image: Darren Naish.

Sunday Brunch, publishers, duckbills, sexual selection. And so to April. As – once again – part of the whole promotional Dinosaurs in the Wild thing, I appeared on the TV show Sunday Brunch… which I’ve never watched but is, by all accounts, pretty popular. It went well and I got to talk about our current knowledge of Mesozoic dinosaurs a fair bit as well as promote Dinosaurs in the Wild, but what might have been the most memorable section of the interview was at the end where presenter Tim Lovejoy asked what the future might hold in store as goes the evolution of life on Earth. Ever the optimist, I told them about the impending mass extinction and the death of biological diversity at the hands of humanity, and that was that.

Caption: a view from the set of Sunday Brunch, April 2018. Ash, Chrissie and a hatchling Dakotaraptor at left. Image: Darren Naish.

Caption: Chrissie, Darren and the Dakotaraptor hatchling, live on Sunday Brunch on April 8th 2018. Image: (c) Sunday Brunch/Channel 4.

In an effort to get the planned Dinosaurs in the Wild book off the ground, I physically dragged myself from publisher to publisher. So many meetings, and all in vain. While at William Collins, however, I did get to see the complete set of the New Naturalist series and, via publisher Myles Archibald, got to hear the backstory to that Too Big to Walk book… the one by ol’ BJ Ford in which he asserts his uncanny ability to finally get dinosaurs right (they were all aquatic, you see). More on that shortly. I also had a meeting about another planned cryptozoology-based TV series. I can basically guarantee having two or three such meetings about the same sort of project every year. They never go anywhere. Yet.

Caption: the Collins New Naturalist books on display at the Collins office in London. Most of us own at least a few of these volumes. Image: Darren Naish.

My article on why duckbilled dinosaurs really shouldn’t be called duckbilled dinosaurs appeared in April. It includes a significant gaff and a follow-up article is due to be published here within the next several weeks. The second part of of my review of the Indiana University Press 2014 hadrosaurs volume was also published in April: the first part of my review is one of those articles that SciAm removed due to perceived problems with image use so isn’t currently online. I’ll republish it here at ver 4, eventually.

Caption: attendees of the Sexual Selection meeting at Chicheley Hall, Buckinghamshire. Image: Rob Knell.

I attended the Royal Society Sexual Selection meeting at Chicheley Hall in Buckinghamshire in early May and chaired one of the sessions. A TetZoo article about the meeting can be found here at ver 3.

Caption: I went to Tintagel, north Cornwall, in May 2018. Here’s a scene of the coastline there, with seabirds. Image: Darren Naish.

Naish v Ford. The biggest event of May was the debate with Brian Ford at Conway Hall, hinted at above. It seems that this was actually the official launch for Mr Ford’s book – it’s hard to tell as I didn’t see anybody buy a copy – but it was more like a structured debate, the two of us presenting opposing viewpoints on the palaeobiology of Mesozoic dinosaurs before responding to questions from the floor. Events were reported on twitter via #FordvNaish, and my talk can be seen here online.

Caption: at left, the cover slide for the event. At right: protesters outside Conway Hall, as imagined by Gareth Monger. Well done if you recognise the reference. Images: Darren Naish, (c) Gareth Monger.

I’ve written about Brian Ford and his ideas at least twice before: both in print for an invited article in Laboratory News (Naish 2012) and at TetZoo ver 3. Needless to say, I think he’s flat-out wrong and also guilty of conspiracy mongering, self-aggrandisement (he has literally compared himself to Galileo) and crankery (“nobody’s smart but me!”), among other things. Evaluating the talks is difficult due to the fact that I’m just about never happy with the presentations I give; in any case, John Conway and I already dissected the event at some length in an episode of the podcast. Having said that, Brian asserted that everyone was getting dinosaurs wrong, and assert is basically all he did. I would think that the mostly negative responses that have been directed toward Mr Ford’s ideas would have been sufficient to make him realise that he could very well be wrong as goes his take on dinosaurs, but… nope… he’s still at it (at least, judging from comments he’s recently been making at ResearchGate). I don’t want to give him more publicity than I already have, but if I need to respond to him again, I will.

Caption: Darren Naish (left) and Brian Ford (right). Image: Luke Muscutt.

Podcats, Jurassic Park at 25, lego at Metro. Having mentioned Conway, we released a few episodes of the podcast – the Tet Zoo podcats or Tetrapodcats – throughout the first half of the year, but we’re still nowhere near having anything like a regular schedule. Mostly this is because John is incredibly lazy, and unproductive to boot. An added factor is that I ‘accidentally’ cleaved through a buried telephone cable in the garden with a spade one day, but I’m sure that that’s coincidental. The new cover for Dinosaurs How They Lived and Evolved, produced by the excellent Bob Nicholls, was released in May – sooner than expected. More on that below.

Caption: in May 2018, I (with my kids Will and Emma) attended the Portsmouth Comic Con, and here are some scenes. Not really relevant to TetZoo, but what the hell. Images: Darren Naish.

Hunting Monsters – the cryptozoology book that I’ve now mentioned here on some number of occasions (Naish 2017) – was mentioned on the TV show Jeopardy in early June, wow. Thanks to whoever it was who brought my attention to this. June 2018 was also the time at which Jurassic Park – a movie you might have seen or heard about – celebrated its 25th birthday. A lot of the fan response to the original Jurassic Park – we see a lot of it in vertebrate palaeontology, in fact it comes around every few years – is, my apologies for seeming rude here, mostly vacuous and doesn’t come from a position all that well informed as goes the backstory and making-of the movie. Make of that what you will; whatever, my three Jurassic Park articles are here, here and here, and my liberal use of Jurassic Park toys reflects my best efforts to circumvent the rules regarding image use at SciAm. For all that, they still objected so much to my use of a photo of an issue of National Geographic that they removed it. So I created my own version of the cover.

Caption: Hunting Monsters appears on Jeopardy. Image: (c) Jeopardy, NBC/American Broadcasting Company.

Another bit of Dinosaurs in the Wild promotion happened in late June when – together with palaeontologist Alessandro Chiarenza and actor Ross Cooper – I got to sit in a studio with Natasha Salmon and build Jurassic World lego, all the while talking about dinosaurs. This was for the Metro newspaper, and what fun it was. I even got to keep some of the lego. I also had an article on dinosaurs – specifically on how our perception of their appearance has changed – appear in the Independent Online in mid July. It’s here.

Caption: playing with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom lego at the Metro offices. I’m not entirely sure why Natasha is making the face she is. Image: (c) Metro.

Eotyrannus 2018. During late June I participated in the 2018 BioTweeps conference (an online, Twitter-based conference in which attendees present their ‘talks’ via a series of threaded tweets), my presentation being ‘Eotyrannus and the History of Tyrant Dinosaurs’ (abstract here). As an invited presenter I got to tweet as much as I wanted to in the allotted 30 minute slot. It was a very rewarding experience (with a massive, global reach, I might add), and my thanks to Dani Rabaiotti and Anthony Caravaggi for getting me involved. You can see my presented tweets here (with an addendum here).

Caption: Naish at BioTweeps 2018. Image: Darren Naish.

Having mentioned Eotyrannus… as some of you know, I am (still) committed to publishing the monograph on this dinosaur, and while I failed to get the damned thing into print in 2018, I promise that this will happen in 2019. It’s not for want of trying: substantial progress was made on the post-review version of the manuscript throughout the year, it’s just that I was never able to commit sufficient time to getting it finished. Silly old me for leaving professional scientific research and becoming a freelancer. My co-author Andrea Cau continues to be a most worthy collaborator.

Caption: the Eotyrannus holotype, in its storage boxes, at Dinosaur Isle, Sandown, Isle of Wight… as it looked in 2012. One day my work on this dinosaur will be published. Image: Darren Naish.

I mentioned earlier that I was unsuccessful in obtaining a grant – that’s no big deal, most grant applications in science are unsuccessful. Said grant was an attempt to win the money I require to publish an open-access version of the Eotyrannus monograph. On the advice of colleagues, I tried a different approach and set up a gofundme campaign to raise the money aaaand succeeded in raising it (and a bit extra) in about 5 hours. WOW.

Caption: Eotyrannus at gofundme — SUCCESS. Image: gofundme.

Speaking of long-running projects that never seem to reach completion, I and colleagues put what are supposed to be the final touches to a PhyloCode Companion Volume article on theropods during the summer. I’m also part of the team that produced the volume’s sauropod and sauropodomorph articles. But they have a somewhat different fate from the theropod article, that’s all I’ll say for now.

Caption: this image has to go somewhere and here is as good a place as any. It’s not made by me, but by naughtyhippo (if that is her real name). Available on merchandise here. Image: Darren Naish.

Goodbye SciAm. July was a significant month as goes TetZooniverse things as, on July 25th, I reached a funding goal at patreon. Regular TetZoo readers will know (my god, how many times have l mentioned it?) that I was not happy with the way things were going at SciAm. Their total clamping down on image use and removal of various of my articles was pretty much the last straw: blogging there was proving more trouble that it was worth, despite the major kudos of being attached to the SciAm brand. Achieving the relevant goal meant that I could leave (as a freelancer, I’m dependent on earning from my writing: it is my primary income) and set up shop as an independent blogger once more (harking back to the days of TetZo ver 1, 2006). Despite my unhappiness with SciAm, walking away was not a decision I took lightly. The very last TetZoo ver 3 was published on July 31st, and here we are at ver 4, at the same website at the podcast. Thanks, as ever, to the patreon supporters who made this possible.

Caption: leaving SciAm means that I’m now entirely dependent on support at Patreon. What a gamble. As of right now, the site needs updating. Image: Darren Naish.

August began with the taking on of an exciting job in the museums world. It involves an exhibition relevant to our interests, but it won’t go live until 2020 and I won’t be talking about it until then, sorry. I’ll give you a clue and say that it has meant spending time in Cornwall, one of my favourite parts of the UK. Also during August, I spoke to New Scientist about megalodon in view of a scientific documentary called Meg. I’m not, technically, an expert on megatooth sharks but I have written about them several times: there’s a section in Cryptozoologicon Volume I (Conway et al. 2013) and another – as yet unpublished, of course – in the chondrichthyan section of The Vertebrate Fossil Record.

Caption: from time spent in Hay-on-Wye. This is Hay Bluff. Image: Darren Naish.

Articles on the potential domestication potential of non-bird dinosaurs and mastigures (or spiny-tailed agamas) appeared at TetZoo. Together with the family, I visited Hay-on-Wye, the fabled Town of Books of the Welsh borders (and filming location for certain iconic scenes in An American Werewolf in London). There aren’t half as many book shops in Hay-on-Wye as there used to be, but there are enough to make a visit very much worthwhile if you’re a bibliophile. I made a great number of amazing discoveries – beware, there’s a dedicated natural history bookshop (C. Arden) – and am really happy that I finally took the time to go there.

Caption: don’t go to Hay-on-Wye, it will be bad. Image: Darren Naish.

As I mention every now and again, I continue to remain involved in technical scientific research as and when I can, and late August saw the publication of my then-newest paper: a study of pelvic neural anatomy in pterosaurs and what the relevant details might mean for ecomorphology, co-authored with Liz Martin-Silverstone and Dan Sykes (Martin-Silverstone et al. 2018). This was the second 2018 paper that included an analysis of Vectidraco – a small Cretaceous azhdarchoid pterosaur I and colleagues described in 2013 (Naish et al. 2013) – the other being Rachel Frigot’s study of pelvic musculature included within the Geological Society special volume New Perspectives on Pterosaur Palaeobiology (Frigot 2018). A discussion on the new paper was provided here.

Caption: at left, an illustration of the Vectidraco pelvis, some key features labelled. At right: a pterosaur montage produced for the TetZoo article on pterosaur palaeoneurology. Images: Darren Naish.

September 2nd was the very final day of Dinosaurs in the Wild. I went on a final tour, attended the staff party, and said all those sad, final goodbyes. All things must come to an end, but hope remains that DITW will be able to open its doors again one day.

Caption: me (at left) with Tim Haines - of Impossible Pictures, Walking With Dinosaurs, Primeval and so on - doing some Dinosaurs in the Wild promotion for radio during May 2018. Image: Darren Naish.

Dougal Dixon, Crystal Palace, DHLTE: 2nd ed. Early September also brought the devastating news of the calamitous fire at Rio’s National Museum, a blow for human knowledge as a whole but especially for our Brazilian friends and colleagues. While at the museum in 2013, I took some reasonable number of photos, so have been submitting them to Brazilian colleagues. In happier news, September also saw the Dougal Dixon event at London’s Conway Hall (covered here at TetZoo) in which Dougal and I discussed his work and projects in front of a pretty substantial crowd. Original art, models and more were in attendance – it was great.

Caption: at Conway Hall, for the After Man-themed event with Dougal Dixon. Images: Darren Naish.

Just a few days later, and I was speaking at another London-based event, this time the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs Days event, part of the Heritage Open Days weekend occurring across the UK. Other speakers were in attendance too, and we had special up-close access to the models. I’m surely repeating myself, as all of this was covered in the December 2018 article Up Close and Personal With the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. As you may know, part of the reason for the publicity push surrounding the models is that funding is desperately needed for their care and upkeep, and September 2018 saw the launch of a crowd-funded project to get a bridge to the models constructed (said bridge then allowing the access that can otherwise only be obtained on rare occasion). The project reached its target (which was over £70,000) in December, which is excellent and exhilarating news.

Caption: special access to the islands at Crystal Palace, what a treat. Here, I’m talking about what the Victorians thought about ichthyosaurs. For more, see Up Close and Personal With the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. Image: Emma Wain.

The second edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved – my Natural History Museum book with Paul Barrett (Naish & Barrett 2018) – saw print in September. Again, thoughts on this have already appeared at TetZoo so I’ll avoid repeating things here. A review appeared in The Economist, which is kind of a big deal. Summer 2018 also saw the publication of the Russian edition of the book. It has the text of the second edition but the cover of the first.

Caption: screengrab from the Economist’s review of the second edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. The lead quote comes from Bob Nicholls, creator of the fuzzy Tianyulong we see at left. Image: (c) Economist.

TetZooCon 2018! And so to October, and the TetZoo-themed event of the year, by which I mean TetZooCon. As covered here on the blog, 2018’s TetZooCon was the first two day TetZooCon ever, and by far the biggest and (I think) the best. Speakers and presenters included Ian Redmond, Mark O’Shea, Aron Ra, Dougal Dixon and Gert van Dijk (on stage for a SpecBio discussion), Katrina van Grouw and myself. John Conway led a palaeoart workshop that occurred as a parallel session to some of the talks and I led a post-con fieldtrip to Crystal Palace the day after. A MonsterTalk episode with Blake Smith – done as a piece of TetZooCon promotion but mostly revolving around Jurassic Park – was released in early October (it’s here; episode 172).

Caption: scenes from TetZooCon 2018. At left, Albert Chen discusses TetZoo. At right: a box of Dinosaurs in the Wild plushies. Images: Darren Naish.

Hey, I had to turn down a free, all-expenses-paid birdwatching trip to Cadiz in Spain because it clashed with TetZooCon, talk about bad luck. The success of TetZooCon 2018 means that a 2019 event is just about guaranteed (or, it is now that John and I are back on speaking terms again); it will again be a two-day event but I can’t yet say any more than that. News will be announced as and when I have it.

Caption: TetZooCon 2018 included a dedicated SpecBio discussion, and here’s Gert van Dijk talking about his own Furaha project, at said event. Image: Darren Naish.

Dorling Kindersley. It was around this time in the year that I and Chris Barker put the finishing touches to a new kid’s book we’ve put together for Dorling Kindersley, titled Where on Earth? Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Life. I wouldn’t mention this (seeing as the book isn’t published yet), but it’s already being advertised.

Caption: screengrabs from the in-press Where on Earth? Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Life, by Chris Barker and Darren Naish. Images: Barker & Naish/Dorling Kindersley.

In fact, I did a huge amount of work for Dorling Kindersley during 2018 as I and colleagues at DK worked hard to overhaul their entire prehistoric animal picture library. One volume that benefited from this overhaul – John Woodward’s The Dinosaurs Book (Woodward 2018) – was published during the year (I was consultant). It should be obvious to anyone paying attention to children’s books on dinosaurs that this overhauling has resulted in a massive improvement as goes the sorts of images the books now contain.

Caption: Castle Urquhurt, as photographed from the surface of Loch Ness (a scene from 2014, not 2018). Image: Darren Naish.

Loch Ness, 99% Invisible. I’ve mentioned once or twice here my communications with Professor Neil Gemmell and my role in his eDNA-based work on the biology and ecology of Loch Ness. Neil and I met up in 2017 to discuss this work (a 2018 article on the backstory to Neil’s research – one of several – can be found here), and I published two magazine articles on the subject during the year: one in a kid’s magazine in October (Naish 2018a) and another for a more adult audience in December (Naish 2018b). It’s very easy to misunderstand, or ‘mis-frame’, this project as “SCIENTIST WASTES TAX-PAYER MONEY ON LOCH NESS MONSTER NONSENSE” and, indeed, at least one author did make this misunderstanding during the year. What should be noted, I’d argue, is that this is and was a phenomenally successful science outreach programme wherein the Loch Ness Monster was used as the hook to get journalists to cover eDNA and ecological and genetic research, and as such it was absurdly successful (Naish 2018a, b).

Caption: artwork accompanying Naish (2018b). I didn’t write that caption, since the ‘For centuries’ thing is not true. Image: (c) BBC Focus, Naish (2018b).

Late October also saw the release of an episode of the 99% Invisible podcast in which myself, Bob Bakker and John Conway discussed the portrayal of Mesozoic dinosaurs in art. The episode is called Welcome to Jurassic Art and can be found here. Alas, the three of us didn’t really sit around talking (though I have spoken to Bob Bakker, in person, on a few occasions). Instead, our interviews were recorded at different times, at different places. Anyway, it worked out alright.

Caption: one of the highlights of the ZSL book-themed event — Jules Howard tells us about the digital duck vagina app. Image: Darren Naish.

The ZSL zoology books evening. Articles on New Living Animals We Want to Find, Aldrovandi’s monstrous rooster, the second edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved and the pouches of the Sungrebe appeared at TetZoo during November. The article on Aldrovandi’s rooster includes a notable gaff, and an update is due to appear here soon (there is not enough time to do all this stuff, argh!!). Mid-November also saw the Zoological Society of London event From Stoned Sloths to Farting Fish: Comical Tales from the Animal Kingdom, in which myself, Dani Rabaiotti, Jules Howard and Lucy Cooke discussed our adventures in the world of zoology-themed publishing. I mostly spoke about dinosaur sex.

Caption: crew at the public engagement event of December’s Popularising Palaeontology event. L to r: Elsa Panciroli, Mark Witton, Chris Manias, Becky Wragg Sykes, Darren Naish. Image: Darren Naish.

Early in December, I stayed in Bournemouth, UK, for the Joint Scientific Meeting of the British Herpetological Society and Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, which has become one of my favourite small meetings. I spoke at last year’s event but not this one. And, later in the month, I attended the Popularising Palaeontology workshop, organised by Chris Manias and hosted by King’s College, London where I listened to some great presentations and participated in the public engagement event.

Caption: herpetology-themed snap cards, obtained at the Joint Scientific Meeting of the British Herpetological Society and Amphibian and Reptile Conservation. Image: Darren Naish.

And that brings us up to January, a month mostly spent in China and away from the long list of TetZoo-related things I aim to complete in 2019. While in China (specifically, Zigong in Sichuan) I visited Panda Base (properly Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding) and the Zigong Dinosaur Museum, among other places.

Caption: the entrance to Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, Sichuan, China. Image: Darren Naish.

Thus far, the year’s only TetZoo articles have been those on Heilmann’s Proavis and the life appearance of sauropods. I so wish I could publish more – there is still so much to do. On that note, here’s this…

Achievements for 2018: the pterosaur palaeoneurology paper (Martin-Silverstone et al. 2018), Tetrapod Zoology ver 4 is launched, 2nd edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved sees print (as does Russian translation), Loch Ness magazine articles (Naish 2018a, b), money raised for Eotyrannus monograph, the Dorling Kindersley overhaul, biggest and best TetZooCon so far.

Failures for 2018: not finishing the Eotyrannus monograph, not finishing The Big Book, not making any progress on the Tetrapod Zoology books, Cryptozoologicon Volume 2 or the various dinosaur-themed books planned with John Conway.

Caption: toy thylacines - did you know that there are this many? The grey 3D-printed one - and the painted version at far right (the sitting one) - were obtained at TetZooCon 2018 and were made by Rebecca Groom of palaeoplushies. Image: Darren Naish.

Ok, so that’s that. How does the year’s blogging do in terms of group representation?

Miscellaneous Musings

• The Tet Zoo 12th-Birthday Event, Part 2

• The Scientific Palaeoart of Dr Mark Witton

• Book Review: God's Word or Human Reason? An Inside Perspective on Creationism

• Coming Soon in 2018: Katrina Van Grouw's Unnatural Selection

• Sexual Selection at Chicheley Hall

• Summer 2018 at Tet Zoo Towers

• The End of Tetrapod Zoology, ver 3

• Welcome to Tetrapod Zoology ver 4

• Reasons to Attend TetZooCon 2018

• Reminiscing on Tetrapood Zoology: Book One…

• TetZooCon 2018: Best TetZooCon So Far

• TetZoo ver 3 and a Dark Day for the Dissemination of Knowledge

• New Living Animals We Want to Find

• Comical Tales From the Animal Kingdom, a Zoological Society of London Meeting

• The Much Belated Final Part of the Tetrapod Zoology 12th Birthday Event

• The Most Amazing TetZoo-Themed Discoveries of 2018

Mammals

• Fossil Bat Stories, Part 1

• Fossil Bat Stories, Part 2: What Are Noctilionids? What Are Noctilionoids?

• Fossil Bat Stories, Part 3: Bulldog Bats

• The Life Appearance of the Giant Deer Megaloceros

• Whatever Happened to the Kabomani Tapir?

Lepidosaurs

• The Tet Zoo Guide to Mastigures

Pterosaurs

• Postcranial Palaeoneurology and the Lifestyles of Pterosaurs

Non-avialan dinosaurs

• The Making of Dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight

• Enough with the "Duck-Billed Dinosaurs"

• Eberth and Evans's Hadrosaurs, a Book Review, Part 1 (currently offline due to action by SciAm)

• Eberth and Evans's Hadrosaurs, a Book Review, Part 2

• 25 Years after Jurassic Park, Part 1

• 25 Years after Jurassic Park, Part 2

• 25 Years after Jurassic Park, Part 3

• Dinosaurs in the Wild: An Inside View

• New Dinosaur Books, Part 1: Barrett on Stegosaurs

• New Dinosaur Books, Part 2: Ben Garrod’s ‘So You Think You Know About… Dinosaurs’ Series

• A 1996 Letter from Dr Phil Currie

• Could We Domesticate (Non-Bird) Dinosaurs?

• The Last Day of Dinosaurs in the Wild

• Brian Switek’s My Beloved Brontosaurus: A Belated Review

• The Second Edition of Naish and Barrett’s Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved

• Up Close and Personal With the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

• Heilmann, Thompson, Beebe, Tetrapteryx and the Proavian

• The Life Appearance of Sauropod Dinosaurs

Birds

• A Battle among Blue Tits

• The Enigma of Leguatia, 6-Foot-Tall Mauritian Super-Rail

• Pigeons and Doves 101

• Of Yellowhammer and Corn Bunting

• Avocets in Flight and Phylogeny

• Aldrovandi’s Monstrous Rooster, a 16th Century Dino-Chicken

• Erroll Fuller’s The Passenger Pigeon

• Pouches of the Sungrebe

Cryptozoology

• Misreading the Mokele-Mbembe (the Mokele-Mbembe, Part 1)

• Bigfoot’s Genitals: What Do We Know?

SpecBio

• Speculative Zoology, a Discussion

• The Dougal Dixon After Man Event of September 2018

So there we have it. Clearly, 2018 was dominated by non-bird dinosaurs and by articles that can only be classified as generic or miscellaneous and weren’t dedicated to any specific tetrapod group. Amphibians, croc-line archosaurs and so on received no coverage whatsoever. All in all, then, a total and epic failure of what I’ve been trying to achieve here. I figure, by now, that I should stop caring and just aim to write about whatever it is that I write about.

Caption: oh, fish. Image: Darren Naish.

So — happy 13th birthday, Tetrapod Zoology. As ever, I aim to continue to publish as much as I can here: to both present new ideas, new reviews and new takes on zoological topics of interest, and to up-date and correct those things I’ve covered in the past. There is so much to do, and finding time for blogging remains perpetually difficult in view of workload and the never-ending chasing of finances. Plus there’s that textbook I so desperately want to see finished. Here’s your reminder that I’m wholly reliant on funding at patreon, and that I would be able to devote just about all of my work-time to these projects – blogging and the textbook, and the other TetZooniverse-relevant books – if more TetZoo readers were prepared to support me. Huge thanks to those who do so already. Come back soon for another thrilling instalment.

For previous Tet Zoo birthday articles, see...

• Happy first birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part I)

• Happy first birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part II)

• Happy second birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part I)

• Tetrapods of 2007 (happy birthday Tet Zoo part II)

• Happy THIRD birthday Tet Zoo

• Tet Zoo = 4 years old today

• 2009, a year of Tet Zooery

• Four years of Tet Zoo: to infinity... and beyond!

• It is with some dismay that I announce Tet Zoo's first hemi-decade

• Tet Zoo 5th birthday extravaganza, part II

• Happy Birthday Tetrapod Zoology: SIX YEARS of blogging

• Happy 6th Birthday, Tetrapod Zoology (part II)

• Tetrapod Zoology enters its 8th year of operation

• Today marks NINE YEARS of Tetrapod Zoology

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 1: 2015 in Review

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th Birthday Extravaganza, Part II: the Rest of 2015 Reviewed

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 3: Tet Zoo's Tetrapod Treatment in 2015

• Today Is Tet Zoo's 11th Birthday

• The 12th Year of Tet Zoo

• The Tet Zoo 12th-Birthday Event, Part 2

• The Much Belated Final Part of the Tetrapod Zoology 12th Birthday Event

Refs - -

Conway, J., Kosemen, C. M. & Naish, D. 2013. Cryptozoologicon Volume I. Irregular Books.

Frigot, R. A. 2018. Pelvic musculature of Vectidraco daisymorrisae and consequences for pterosaur locomotion. In Hone, D. W. E., Witton, M. P. & Martill, D. M. (eds) New Perspectives on Pterosaur Palaeobiology. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 455, 45-55.

Martin-Silverstone, E., Sykes, D. & Naish, D. 2018. Does postcranial palaeoneurology provide insight into pterosaur behaviour and lifestyle? New data from the azhdarchoid Vectidraco and the ornithocheirids Coloborhynchus and Anhanguera. Palaeontology 2018, 1-14. doi: 10.1111/pala/12390

Naish, D. 2012. Palaeontology bites back… (response to Ford’s article on alleged aquatic habits of dinosaurs) Laboratory News May 2012, 31-32.

Naish, D. 2017. Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths. Arcturus, London.

Naish, D. 2018a. Will we ever find Nessie? In Lipscombe-Southwell, A. (ed) BBC Focus Big Book of Mind-Blowing Answers, pp. 16-21.

Naish, D. 2018b. The genetic hunt for Nessie. BBC Focus 329, 66-71.

Naish, D. & Barrett, P. M. 2018. Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. The Natural History Museum, London.

Naish, D., Simpson, M. I. & Dyke, G. J. 2013. A new small-bodied azhdarchoid pterosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of England and its implications for pterosaur anatomy, diversity and phylogeny. PLoS ONE 8 (3): e58451.

Woodward, J. 2018. The Dinosaurs Book. Dorling Kindersley, London.

The Much Belated Final Part of the Tetrapod Zoology 12th Birthday Event

Way, way back in January 2018 – back when TetZoo was hosted at SciAm – I published two articles on Tet Zoo’s 12th birthday (they’re here and here). Some time later – I think in late May 2018 – I finally published the third and final part. But, alas, its publication coincided with a time during which SciAm was – thanks to their new owners, the Springer Nature Group – becoming increasingly draconian as goes image use. Because I hadn’t completed the appropriate paperwork regarding use of an image (specifically, an image of me giving a talk at a conference, taken by someone more than happy to let me use said image), they pulled the entire article and it’s not online at the site right now. My plan on launching TetZoo ver 4 was therefore to eventually upload the article anew, mostly for reasons of having it published somewhere. Here it is. My apologies for posting something that’s now so, so, so far behind schedule, so much so that it’s scarcely relevant. But here we go…

2017 in the TetZooniverse: mostly Dinosaurs in the Wild and Hunting Monsters. But other stuff too. Images: Darren Naish.

Running this blog for 12 years is a pretty big deal to me, and for that reason I find it necessary to spend at least some time reviewing the year that’s passed and evaluating Tet Zoo’s performance. And so here – better later than never – we find the third and last of the 12th birthday articles. As per usual, these articles aren’t much fun if you dislike autocratic pontification or anything that might be interpreted as overt self-congratulation. Last warning.

​In which I gratuitously use Matt Baron (on the right) in the promotion of (the first edition of) Naish & Barrett’s Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. Have I ever mentioned my idea on how male Caucasian humans all look exactly alike when they grow facial hair? Image: Darren Naish.

So, to business once more. The previous article finished off with me discussing October’s TetZooCon 2017. With TetZooCon out of the way, it was back to work. I made the ‘finishing’ touches to the Eotyrannus monograph [UPDATE: HAAAA/ARGH], continued apace on the bird section of The Big Book, and spoke about Hunting Monsters (my cryptozoology book) for the Cambridge University Biological Society. I recognised a figure in the audience. It turned out to be none other than Matt ‘Ornithoscelida’ Baron. In person, he’s basically ok (I kid, I kid). White rhinos and tigers were covered at Tet Zoo at about this time.

​I’ve been drawing a whole lot of Paleogene birds for The Big Book. And the other birds as well. Image: Darren Naish.

November 2017 marked ten years since the publication of the seminal, ground-breaking, game-changing new sauropod dinosaur Xenoposeidon proneneukos (Taylor & Naish 2007). As summarised in the resultant Tet Zoo article, Xenoposeidon has not been ignored since its 2007 publication. And 2017 was an important year for this taxon given that a new paper on its phylogenetic position was proposed (Taylor 2017). My newest book – Evolution in Minutes (Naish 2017b) – appeared in November. It’s been well received and I’m really happy with it.

​It’s Evolution in Minutes, a book of bite-sized summaries of just about everything we understand about evolution. Image: Darren Naish.

On to December… and, right at the start of the month, it was time to attend (and speak at) another meeting: the Joint Scientific Meeting of ARC (Amphibian and Reptile Conservation) and the British Herpetological Society (BHS). My thoughts on the meeting were published here at Tet Zoo. I like zoology-themed conferences of all sorts, but I think herpetological ones might be best. My talk combined various ideas and bits of research on the British herpetofauna: are various of the supposedly introduced amphibians and reptiles we have in the country overlooked natives? Mostly they’re not, but the stories are interesting nonetheless.

Today, I’m the proud owner of a PalaeoPlushies thylacine - a Christmas 2017 gift from my mother-in-law, Sheila. He’s called Kid Cynoceph and I love him. Buy your own here! [UPDATE: currently sold out!] Image: Darren Naish.

​A few days later, and it was back to London for the second Popularising Palaeontology workshop, organised by Chris Manias and featuring a mix of talks from scientists, science historians and people in the museum world. My talk was on review volumes devoted to vertebrate palaeontology and on whether they’ve done a ‘fair’ job of covering the different vertebrate groups (spoiler: they totally haven’t). The talk is now online here (it’s about 20 minutes long). I will be publishing a full-length article about the talk – or, rather, its subject – here within the next few weeks [UPDATE: oops]. The talk is a sort of tie-in to The Big Book.

Preparing to present a fish-themed talk at PopPalaeo. Photo kindly provided by Jed Taylor.... whose work you absolutely have to check out if you’re interested in artistic depictions of dinosaurs (and other animals). Image: Jed Taylor. Oh yeah - this is the photo that caused this whole article to be pulled from SciAm.

​An article on Plica lizards (I sure do love the iguanians) appeared at Tet Zoo, Marilyn Munro (yup – honest) delivered the first seven volumes of Handbook to the Birds of the World to Tet Zoo Towers (only another ten volumes to go…), and Gabriel Ugueto and I worked together on a poster that still (as of late May 2018) hasn’t seen the light of day. I spent New Year (and the weeks around it) in the Tatras Mountains of far southern Poland. I went to places where there were bears, nutcrackers and assorted other neat animals… but didn’t see them (well, the bears would be hibernating, so that wasn’t a surprise).

Holy crap the High Tetras mountains are incredible. Image: Darren Naish.

​And that basically takes us up to January, which is where we bring things to a close (seeing as the actual blog birthday is January 21st). Work on a new book kicked off that month, and – with Tim Haines – I did my bit training the next batch of chrononauts for Dinosaurs in the Wild. Have I mentioned Dinosaurs in the Wild? I think I have.

​A sign that will greet you as you leave North Greenwich underground station, London. I’ll write, at length, about Dinosaurs in the Wild sometime soon.... [UPDATE: I eventually published both Dinosaurs in the Wild: An Inside View at ver 3 and The Last Day of Dinosaurs in the Wild here at ver 4]. Image: Darren Naish.

The megafaunal bias, 2017. So… standard annual procedure here is to then compile a list of the year’s articles, and to then see how things fared as goes taxonomic representation. The ultimate aim: to achieve fair balance of the different tetrapod groups. The reality: shameful bias towards charismatic megafauna. Let’s see how things turn out. Hold your breath…

Oh, I’ve used the same categories as per previous years but have combined ‘lissamphibians’ with ‘non-lissamphibian anamniotes’ given that keeping them separate now seems futile (cf Pardo et al. 2017).

Miscellaneous musings

• Animal Species Named from Photos

• Palaeoart Memes and the Unspoken Status Quo in Palaeontological Popularization

• Books That Influenced Me The Most

• Fossils We Want to Find

• An Ode to Britains Toy Animals

• The Fourth TetZooCon

• The TetZooCon of 2017

• Tet Zoo Reviews Zoos: Colchester Zoo

• Amphibian and Reptile Biology and Conservation, the 2017 Joint Scientific Meeting

• Zoology Books of 2017

• Closing Down for Christmas

Amphibians

• The Terrible Leaf Walker Frog

• The 2017 Amphibian Conservation Research Symposium

• The Microsaurs of Yore

Mammals

• The Sigmodontines

• Incredible Elephant Seals, Part 1

• Incredible Elephant Seals, Part 2

• Mountain Beaver, Boomer, Sewellel

• Darin Croft's Horned Armadillos and Rafting Monkeys

• For Rodent Week, the Gift of Jerboas

• How Many White Rhino Species Are There? The Conversation Continues

• The Tiger Subspecies Revised, 2017

Turtles

• J.Lo and Other Araripemydid Pleurodires

• Letters from the World of Turtle Evolution

• What—If Anything—Is a Geoemydid?

Mesozoic marine reptiles

• The Unique and Efficient 4-Flipper Locomotion of Plesiosaurs

• The Fall and Rise of Protoichthyosaurus

Pterosaurs

• Some Azhdarchid Pterosaurs Were Robust-Necked Top-Tier Predators

Non-avialan dinosaurs

• Ornithoscelida Rises: A New Family Tree for Dinosaurs

• Mass Survival of Multitudinous Dinosaur Lineages across the K–Pg Boundary

• Dinosaurs and the Anti-Shrink-Wrapping Revolution

• The Sensitive Face of a Big Predatory Dinosaur

• The Supracranial Sinus of the Horned Dinosaur Skull

• The "Birds Are Not Dinosaurs" Movement

• 10 Long, Happy Years of Xenoposeidon

Birds

• Secretary Birds: Weird, but Actually Not That Weird

• Raptor Raptor Raptor, Part 1

• Raptors Once More (Raptors, Part 2)

Lepidosaurs

• Predatory Actions of Amphisbaenians

• The Borioteiioids

• Stellagama the Rainbow Dragon

• The Tropidurine Treerunners

Cryptozoology

• The Soay Island Sea Monster of 1959

• The Ozenkadnook Tiger Photo Revealed as a Hoax

• A Review of Neanderthal: The Strange Saga of the Minnesota Iceman, Part 1

• A Review of Neanderthal: the Strange Saga of the Minnesota Iceman, Part 2

A graph...

​Image: Darren Naish.

And, there we have it…. surprise surprise, mammals and non-bird dinosaurs are about in the lead, and the ‘obscure’ groups I always aim to cover more (like stem-mammals and croc-line archosaurs) received no coverage at all. Cryptozoological issues were covered a bit during 2017, in part because of things connected to Hunting Monsters. I’m surprised that SpecBio received no coverage across 2017, but there we have it. Also interesting is that miscellaneous musings did pretty well, but then I find it easier these days to write ‘general’ articles where the thoughts meander across various subjects.

​I will keep drawing drawing drawing all the vertebrates until there is nothing left. Image: Darren Naish.

One final point: while I always blame myself for producing the sort of megafaunal biases you see here, the fact remains that – given the constraints of time that are now such a concern – it really is easier and quicker to generate articles on megafauna where available images are plentiful and to hand. In contrast, articles on weird, obscure animals are hard to do because getting useable images is that much harder. Would I do better, and produce more content for Tet Zoo, including on those weird, obscure animals, if only I could? Yes, I would. And should I be leaving Sci Am given that I’m now acutely aware of what a poor fit I am? [UPDATE: ummm].

And this is where we end. For previous Tet Zoo birthday articles, see...

• Happy first birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part I)

• Happy first birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part II)

• Happy second birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part I)

• Tetrapods of 2007 (happy birthday Tet Zoo part II)

• Happy THIRD birthday Tet Zoo

• Tet Zoo = 4 years old today

• 2009, a year of Tet Zooery

• Four years of Tet Zoo: to infinity... and beyond!

• It is with some dismay that I announce Tet Zoo's first hemi-decade

• Tet Zoo 5th birthday extravaganza, part II

• Happy Birthday Tetrapod Zoology: SIX YEARS of blogging

• Happy 6th Birthday, Tetrapod Zoology (part II)

• Tetrapod Zoology enters its 8th year of operation

• Today marks NINE YEARS of Tetrapod Zoology

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 1: 2015 in Review

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th Birthday Extravaganza, Part II: the Rest of 2015 Reviewed

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 3: Tet Zoo's Tetrapod Treatment in 2015

• Today Is Tet Zoo's 11th Birthday

• The 12th Year of Tet Zoo

• The Tet Zoo 12th-Birthday Event, Part 2

Refs - -

Naish, D. 2017a. Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths. Arcturus, London.

Naish, D. 2017b. Evolution in Minutes. Quercus Books, London.

Pardo, J. D., Small, B. J. & Huttenlocker, A. K. 2017. Stem caecilian from the Triassic of Colorado sheds light on the origins of Lissamphibia. Proceeding of the National Academic of Sciences, USA 114, E5389-E5395.

Taylor, M. P. 2017. Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur. PeerJ PrePrints 5: e3415.

Taylor, M. P. & Naish, D. 2007. An unusual new neosauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Hastings Beds Group of East Sussex, England. Palaeontology 50, 1547-1564.