Cronch Cats, Beasts of Gévaudan, Dinosauroids, Mesozoic Art and Much More: TetZooMCon 2021 in Review

Late last week, over 220 people from all around the world gathered online for TetZooMCon 2021, the year’s Tetrapod Zoology convention, organised and arranged by myself and John Conway….

Humanoid Dinosaurs Revisited Again: Russell and Séguin’s Dinosauroid at (Nearly) 40 Years Old

If you’re at all familiar with Speculative Zoology – with the history of speculative biology in general – you will of course be very much aware of the dinosauroid….

TetZooMCon 2021 Tickets Are Live

Yes, once again we’re holding a zoom-based annual convention, structured much like the very successful event of last year. I give you: TetZooMCon 2021, happening Friday September 3rd…

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Given that we organisers (myself and John Conway) live in the UK, we’re working in UK time zones. Our apologies to those of you on the other side of the world. Things kick off at 4pm, and we intend to run until late with both a palaeoart workshop, an informal discussion session and an unstructured after-party occurring during the evening. Speakers include Kannan Raja (on citizen science and the herpetofauna of Singapore), Riley Black (on the palaeobiology of the predatory fossil mammal Patriofelis), Elsa Panciroli (on mammal evolution and her new book Beasts Before Us), and myself (on the dinosauroid and its backstory).

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Myself and Duane Nash (yes, we’re different people) will be having a discussion about Duane’s ideas as portrayed in his book Dinosaur Enlightenment. There will also be a few surprise announcements. One or two other things have yet to be confirmed: for breaking news, check the comments here or follow #TetZooMCon on Twitter.

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Caption: art shown here is (l to r) by Raven Amos, Gabriel Ugueto and John Conway.

Caption: art shown here is (l to r) by Raven Amos, Gabriel Ugueto and John Conway.

As you’ll recall if you were there, last year’s TetZooMCon was a huge success and ran surprisingly smoothly. I wrote about it here. It’s difficult to predict whether as many people will attend as did last year (over 350), but already tickets are selling well. Get yours here.

That about sums things up for now. We look forward to seeing you on September 3rd!

Cases of Over-Enthusiastic Swallowing, Often (But Not Always) Ending in Death

Back in 2009 (at TetZoo ver 2, the ScienceBlogs version) I ran a series of articles on ‘over-enthusiastic swallowing’: on cases where carnivorous animals have died from choking. You see, carnivorous animals of many sorts often die from choking, and field biologists have done a good job of recording many such instances in the literature. In the interests of having this material available once more, rather than corrupted and only findable via the wayback machine, I’ve here gathered those articles together, and here they are again…

Baby Pterosaurs Were Excellent Fliers and Occupied Different Niches From Their Parents

Today sees the publication of a major new technical paper by myself, Mark Witton and Liz Martin-Silverstone, titled ‘Powered flight in hatchling pterosaurs: evidence from wing form and bone strength’ and appearing in Scientific Reports (Naish et al. 2021). Pass the champagne…