Extreme Cetaceans, Part 3

Hello faithful and noble readers. Recall the unfinished series on EXTREME CETACEANS? Today we continue with the next episode in said series.

Caption: Stenella longirostris, Phocoena dioptrica and Sousa chinensis, three of the cetacean species covered in the previous parts of this series. Image: Darren Naish.

If you don’t know what the deal is here, it’s that I’m writing about those cetaceans which I consider ‘extreme’, this meaning that they’re “weird, possessing anatomical specialisations and peculiarities that are counter-intuitive and little discussed, and most likely related to an unusual ecology, physiological regime, feeding strategy or social or sexual life”, to quote the first article in the series. And thus we get on with it…

Right whale dolphins. Many dolphin species are aesthetically pleasing because they’re of a beautifully streamlined, attenuate shape, and because they have clean, tidy colour schemes where contrasting blocks of colour are neatly separated, and sometimes augmented or marked by parallel, sweeping lines. This combination – an attenuate, streamlined form and a tidy, well-demarcated colour scheme – is carried to an extreme in the two Lissodelphis species, or right whale dolphins.

Caption: Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny’s 1847 illustration of the Southern right whale dolphin Lissodelphis peronii. The species is named for naturalist François Peron, the first European to report a sighting of this species. Image: public domain (original here).

Right whale dolphins are mid-sized as dolphins go (about 2-3 m long), short-beaked, and incredibly attenuate. Their pectoral flippers and tail flukes are small, a dorsal fin is absent, and the tailstock tapers to a ridiculous degree. They also have the flashiest, tidiest colour scheme of black and white. They look nothing like the enormous, super-bulky right whales, but do resemble them in lacking a dorsal fin. They’re also incredibly fast, among the fastest of all cetaceans,

Caption: a Southern right whale dolphin group, photographed in 2008. These dolphins are often seen in large groups of 100 individuals or more. Image: Lieutenant Elizabeth Crapo, NOAA Corp, public domain (original here).

Right whale dolphins, incidentally, are close kin of lags (the Lagenorhynchus and Sagmatias dolphins) and probably of the small, short-beaked Cephalorhynchus dolphins (the most familiar of which is the piebald Commerson’s dolphin C. commersoni) (McGowen et al. 2009). But in my headcanon they’re either miniaturised, late-surviving basilosaurids, or whale-mimicking, fully aquatic penguins that have time-travelled from the Dixonian Era to the present. Look at the pictures here and you’ll see what I mean.

Caption: old depictions of basilosaurs and other archaeocetes – those at top are from McEwan (1978) and Naish (1996) – reveal that right whale dolphins are actually descendants of a lineage outside of Neoceti. Or perhaps they’re future penguins, like the Vortex (from Dixon 1981). Images: McEwan (1978) and Naish (1996), Dixon (1981).

The Pesut. In 1989, I thought I knew all the extant cetacean species known to science at the time. So I was blown away when the Today newspaper, which I used to read, ran a two-page feature on a very odd cetacean which was touted as “the only new breed to be discovered in thirty-four years”, this being a reference to the number of years that had elapsed since the scientific naming of Fraser’s dolphin Lagenodelphis hosei in 1956. Evidently, the article was reporting a proposal – seemingly originating with Francois-Xavier Pelletier – in which the cetacean concerned was being considered a potential new species. Grey, toothless and prone to squirting jets of water for fun, it was said to be a freshwater inhabitant of Borneo’s Mahakam River, and was dubbed the Pesut. The what?

Caption: a Today newspaper article of 1989 reports ‘the Pesut’ as a new kind of dolphin. I regret that I don’t have the complete citation for this article; in my wisdom I clipped the date and other details at some point. Readers with exceptional memories might recognise the photo at upper right as the inspiration for a SpecZoo-themed piece of art…

Today, the Pesut isn’t regarded as a distinct species, but a local variant of the Irrawaddy dolphin Orcaella brevirostris. It’s known locally as the Pesut Mahakam, more formally as the Mahakam River dolphin, and is seemingly – with the rest of the Orcaella dolphins – an early-diverging member of the globicephaline clade (McGowen et al. 2009, Vilstrup et al. 2011), otherwise known for including killer whales, pilot whales and kin, the ‘blackfish’ [UPDATE: killer whales no longer appear to be part of Globicephalinae; see comments]. Pelletier’s proposal that the Mahakam River Orcaella population might be distinct is odd, since anyone familiar with the historical taxonomy of Orcaella knows (or should have known, even in 1989) that Pesut Mahakam is a local name for some riverine populatons of O. brevirostris (Marsh et al. 1989). Furthermore, there’s a long history of riverine Orcaella populations being considered distinct and of having their taxonomic status tested and re-evaluated.

Caption: an Irrawaddy dolphin photographed in Cambodia. Image: Stefan Brending, CC BY-SA 3.0 (original here).

Whatever, the Pesut does look kinda unusual. Books on whales very often say or imply that the Boto or Amazon river dolphin Inia geoffrensis and Beluga Delphinapterus leucas are the only two living cetaceans with an especially mobile neck, but this very probably isn’t true and Pesuts are often shown with the head being held at an obvious angle relative to the body. Other weird features that make the Pesut ‘extreme’ are its globular, short-snouted face and smiling mouthline, and the crease that runs along part of its dorsal midline.

Caption: an effort to portray an Irrawaddy dolphin in life. This dolphin can reach 2.75 m in length, males being larger. Image: Darren Naish.

If you know anything about cetaceans you’ll be aware of the fact that the Irrawaddy dolphin is superficially similar to the Beluga, and it’s this similarity which has led to the occasional suggestion that Orcaella might not be a dolphin but a tropical member of the same family as the Beluga (Monodontidae). This isn’t a ridiculous idea, but it isn’t supported by the detailed anatomy of this animal, or by molecular data.

Caption: I said the montage would become increasingly cluttered. And we’re not done yet. Image: Darren Naish.

And that’s where we’ll end things for now; the next article in the series will appear soon. And I’ll publish a lot more on whales here in the future. Here’s some of the stuff that exists in the archives (as always, much of the material at TetZoo versions 2 and 3 has been ruined by the removal of images, so I’m linking to wayback machine versions)…

• A 6 ton model, and a baby that puts on 90 kg a day: rorquals part I, October 2006

• From cigar to elongated, bloated tadpole: rorquals part II, October 2006

• Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III, October 2006

• On identifying a dolphin skull, July 2008

• Seriously frickin' weird cetacean skulls: Kogia, shark-mouthed horror, July 2008

• Scaphokogia!, July 2008

• Cetacean Heresies: How the Chromatic Truthometer Busts the Monochromatic Paradigm, April 2015

• Remembering Lyall Watson’s Whales of the World, June 2019 

• Whale Watching in the Bay of Biscay, August 2019

• Extreme Cetaceans, Part 1, September 2019

• Extreme Cetaceans, Part 2, September 2019

If you enjoyed this article and want to see me do more, more often, please consider supporting me at patreon. The more funding I receive, the more time I’m able to devote to producing material for TetZoo and the more productive I can be on those long-overdue book projects. Thanks!

Refs - -

Dixon, D. 1981. After Man: A Zoology of the Future. Granada, London.

Marsh, H., Lloze, R., Heinsohn, G. E. & Kasuya, T. 1989. Irrawady dolphin Orcaella brevirostris (Gray, 1866). In Ridgway, S. H. & Harrison, R. (eds) Handbook of Marine Mammals Volume 4. Academic Press (London), pp. 101-118.

McEwan, G. J. 1978. Sea Serpents, Sailors & Sceptics. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Henley & Boston.

McGowen, M. R., Spaulding, M., Gatesy, J. 2009. Divergence date estimation and a comprehensive molecular tree of extant cetaceans. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 53, 891-906.

Naish, D. 1996. Ancient whales, sea serpents and nessies part 2: theorising on survival. Animals & Men 10, 13-21.

Vilstrup, J. T., Ho, S. Y., Foote, A. D., Morin, P. A., Kreb, D., Krützen, M., Parra, G. J., Robertson, K. M., de Stephanis, R., Verborgh, P., Willerslev, E., Orlando, L. & Gilbert, M. T. P. 2011. Mitogenomic phylogenetic analyses of the Delphinidae with an emphasis on the Globicephalinae. BMC Evolutionary Biology 11: 65.

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

Welcome to another article on alternative timeline dinosaurs.

Caption: what’s this? It’s an unfinished sculpt of the head of Paranthropoharpax, by Mette Aumala. Read on for more. Image: (c) Mette Aumala.

The previous two articles looked at recent and current ideas on those non-bird dinosaurs that might have evolved in alternative timelines where the end-Cretaceous extinction event never happened, and where the modern world is occupied by the descendants of groups that otherwise went extinct about 66 million years ago. You can see those articles here and here. And the most recent of those two articles looked at the ‘would there be humans anyway?’ argument, always a mainstay of alternative timeline dinosaur discussion.

Caption: a whole bunch of dinosauroids, variously by (left to right) Mette Aumala, C. M. Kösemen, John McLoughlin, Matt Collins, John Sibbick.

The other big question that everyone asks about post-Cretaceous, alternative timeline dinosaurs is also about the evolution of intelligence, but this time of a non-human sort. If non-bird dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, surely they’d give rise to animals of primate-like, if not human-like, intelligence… right? The ‘intelligent dinosaur’ meme has been covered quite a bit here on TetZoo before (see links below), the problem as always being that my older articles on this subject are today plagued by hosting issues. For this reason I’ve linked below to the wayback machine versions of the articles concerned.

Caption: if you’ve ever opened a post-1980s dinosaur book, chances are high that you’ve seen photos of Dale Russell and Ron Séguin’s troodontid and dinosauroid models. This is the commonest set of images, as reproduced in Russell (1987, 1989) and other sources.

Conversations about big-brained dinosaurs invariably revolve – as well they should – around Dale Russell’s ‘dinosauroid’ of the 1980s, an imaginary humanoid theropod which Russell posited as a possible evolutionary descendant of troodontid theropods had they continued to evolve beyond the end of the Cretaceous. I’m keen to avoid saying too much about the dinosauroid here for fear of repeating content, but it’s worth noting that Russell’s vision of the dinosauroid was more fleshed out and detailed than many assume, and that its anatomy was more complex and nuanced than might first appear (Russell & Séguin 1982). Anyway, please read the older TetZoo articles if you want to dig deeper.

Caption: a rare photo of Dale Russell (at left) and Ron Séguin in the company of the dinosauroid; this photo belongs to the archives of the Canadian Museum of Nature and was shared in September 2019 by Jordan Mallon. Image: (c) CMN.

The dinosauroid’s infamy was and is due to the construction of an amazingly good life-sized model by sculptor Ron Séguin, who collaborated with Russell on the project (Russell & Séguin 1982). I saw the model in person in 1990 when it came to the UK for the Dinosaurs Past & Present exhibition, but failed to take the illegal photos I now so wish I had. You can read about my recollections of that amazing exhibition here (and be sure to read the comments).

Caption: Ely Kish’s dinosauroid models, used as the basis for a large painting which she finished; it remains in storage and has never seen print. These images were shared on Michael Ryan’s blog (here). Images: (c) Michael Ryan.

Séguin’s construction is well known, but a revelation new(ish) to some of us is that the late Ely Kish – another artist who collaborated with Russell (Russell 1987, 1989) – produced several amazing pieces of art that depict dinosauroids in assorted novel settings. One (a clay sculpture) shows a parent playing with a baby-faced youngster, and another – a large painting – shows a 1980s-era dinosauroid drawing attention to a reconstruction of an artistic scene. That scene is a piece of palaeoart, produced by the dinosauroids, and depicting their own kind during its cave-dwelling, ‘Palaeolithic’ phase of evolution. To my knowledge, the painting has never been published, perhaps because Dale Russell gave up on any dinosauroid-themed projects following the negative response the idea received after appearing in print during the early 80s. It was apparently produced for Russell’s 1989 book An Odyssey in Time: the Dinosaurs of North America (Russell 1989) but eventually excluded.

Caption: some post-Russell versions of the dinosauroid. At far left: a life-sized model on display at Dorchester’s Dinosaur Museum (I think made by Dougal Dixon); at centre, two views of the suit made by Peter Minister for the 1991 TV series Dinosaur!; at far right, John Sibbick’s take on the dinosauroid, from David Norman’s 1985 book The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs. Images: Jim Limwood, CC BY 2.0 (original here), Norman (1991), John Sibbick/Norman (1985).

The dinosauroid has proved such a mainstay of post-1980s dinosaur pop-culture that it’s mentioned and discussed in a vast number of popular books on dinosaurs and prehistoric life, and has often been redrawn (often incorrectly); models and even suits worn by actors have been constructed too. One day I should compile a bibliography. And dinosauroid-like animals have been invented by several writers and authors beyond Dale Russell, among them John McLoughlin’s big-brained dromaeosaur (McLoughlin 1984), Magee’s Anthroposaurus (Magee 1993), the hadrosaurian Voth of Star Trek: Voyager, and Mette Aumala’s Paranthropoharpax naishi.

Caption: at left, John McLoughlin’s dinosauroid (which I opted to name Bioparaptor). At right: the cover of Magee’s unusual book on big-brained dinosaurs (which Amazon now values at about £200). Images: McLoughlin 1984, Magee 1993.

I still say that the dinosauroid sucks. Its entire look is dependent on the idea that the human shape is the ‘best’ one for an intelligent, big-brained animal, an idea that Russell appears to find palatable if not preferable (Russell 1987, p. 130; Psihoyos & Knoebber 1994, p. 252). But this doesn’t mean that the entire concept of big-brained smart dinosaurs is a bad one. As has now been said many times, birds (parrots and corvids, at least) overlap with primates in relative brain size and cognitive abilities, meaning not only that big-brained smart dinosaurs evolved for real in our own timeline, but also that it could happen again in a timeline where other bird-like lineages exist.

And if big-brained, smart non-bird theropods really evolved, they would – I think – more likely be shaped like birds and other theropods: not erect-bodied and humanoid, but horizontal-bodied, feathery, and with the long-snouted faces and inward-facing, clawed hands more typical of the group. This argument is old hat now since it got a lot of coverage back in 2006 when C. M. Kösemen (aka Memo) – inspired, I think, by my writings on alternative timeline smart dinosaurs – invented Avisapiens saurotheos.

Caption: for a change, I’m not going to share Memo’s Avisapiens (well, it’s already visible in the montage at top), but Mette Aumala’s Paranthropoharpax naishi. For an article on this creature go here. Mette has recently been working on a CG portraits of this species (go here on Twitter). Image (c) Mette Aumala.

In the years since 2006, Memo has invented additional big-brained hypothetical dinosaurs and – via collaboration with Simon Roy – has devised a parallel world where big-brained dinosaurs of more than one species possess their own culture, technology and art, and are depicted alongside beasts of burden and other contemporaries. Post-2006, we’ve also seen the coming and going of the 2007 kid’s TV series Dinosapien, the appearance of some surprisingly pro-dinosauroid commentary from Richard Dawkins (I wrote about that event here), and the coverage of the dinosauroid in numerous articles and books (e.g., Hecht 2007, Naish 2008, Socha 2008, Switek 2010, Losos 2017).

Caption: screengrabs of pages from two recent-ish articles discussing the dinosauroid: Hecht (2008) and Socha (2008).

And the big-brained dinosaur trope continues to raise its head in the popular and semi-technical sphere, often from people who seemingly aren’t aware of Russell’s dinosauroid and appear to be discovering it for the first time. The increasing popularity of ideas about humanoid reptilian aliens and a cryptic elite of shape-shifting lizard-people (good work, David Icke) mean that people whose idea of research starts and ends with Google are discovering dinosauroids and somehow working them into a world view that involves the Illuminati and high-level One World Government conspiracies. In short, it’s an idea that isn’t going away, and Jonathan Losos was right in saying that “… to my surprise … The dinosauroid hypothesis was alive and thriving in cyberspace” (Losos 2017, p. 323).

And that, effectively, brings us up to date…. for now. What might happen next in the world of Alternative Timeline Dinosaurs?

My writing and research is dependent on crowd-funded support. Thanks to those whose patronage made this article, and the others you read here, possible. Please consider assisting me if you can, thank you!

 For previous TetZoo articles on alternative timeline dinosaurs and related issues of SpecZoo, see…

• Dinosauroids revisited, November 2006

• Dinosauroid cave art discovered, March 2007

• How intelligent dinosaurs conquered the world, March 2008

• Come back Lank, (nearly) all is forgiven, September 2008

• Belatedly, Nemoramjetia (= Avisapiens), November 2008

• Richard Dawkins and the crappy 'humanoid dinosaurs' that just won't die, November 2009

• Dinosauroids revisited, revisited, October 2012

• Of After Man, The New Dinosaurs and Greenworld: an interview with Dougal Dixon, April 2014

• Speculative Zoology at Tet Zoo, The Story So Far, May 2015

• Speculative Zoology, a Discussion, June 2018

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

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

• TetZoo Bookshelf, February 2019, Part 1, February 2019

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

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

Refs - -

Hecht, J. 2007. Smartasaurus. Cosmos 15, 40-41.

Losos, J. B. 2017. Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution. Riverhead Books, New York.

Magee, M. 1993. Who Lies Sleeping: the Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man. AskWhy! Publications, Frome.

McLoughlin, J. 1984. Evolutionary bioparanoia. Animal Kingdom April/May 1984, 24-30.

Naish, D. 2008. Intelligent dinosaurs. Fortean Times 239, 52-53.

Norman, D. 1991. Dinosaur! Boxtree, London.

Psihoyos, L. & Knoebber, J. 1994. Hunting Dinosaurs. Cassell, London.

Russell, D. A. 1987. Models and paintings of North American dinosaurs. In Czerkas, S. J. & Olson, E. C. (eds) Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume I. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County/University of Washington Press (Seattle and Washington), pp. 114-131.

Russell, D. A. 1989. An Odyssey in Time: the Dinosaurs of North America. NorthWord Press, Minocqua, WI.

Russell, D.A. & Séguin, R. 1982. Reconstruction of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauroid. Syllogeus 37, 1-43.

Socha, V. 2008. Dinosauři: hlupáci, nebo géniové? Svĕt 3/2008, 14-16.

Switek, B. 2010. Written in Stone: the Hidden Secrets of Fossils and the Story of Life on Earth. Bellevue Literary Press, New York.

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

In the previous article we looked at alternative timeline dinosaurs, and in particular at Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, at the Speculative Dinosaur project, and at a few things that connect these two endeavours.

We finished that article by introducing an idea mentioned or discussed several times in discussions about SpecZoo: given that mammal evolution would surely continue in a dinosaur-dominated, post-Cretaceous world, could big-bodied mammals evolve, and could they give rise to humans... or, at least, to human-like primates?

Before I continue, I should add that this issue is especially topical at the time of writing (early December 2019) since a BBC World Service radio programme featuring this very issue has just appeared. It’s part of the CrowdScience series, is titled ‘Would humans exist if dinosaurs were still alive?’ and can be found here. It features me, Memo Kosemen, Elsa Panciroli, Anjali Goswami and Nicola Clayton.

Caption: a whole radio show on speculative dinosaurs! You need a BBC account to access it. Image: BBC (from here).

Could there be humans? Well, this would require the (mostly) terrestrial evolution of a big-bodied primate group, and I said in the previous article (where I called it the no megamammals rule) that that might not be possible in a dinosaur-dominated world (and I mean because dinosaurs and other archosaur groups were filling up the available niche space, not because predatory species were perpetual eliminators of animals that dared set foot on the ground or anything like that). Could, then, we have hypothetical ‘human-level’ apes (thinking here of cultural and technological sophistication, and/or relative intelligence) evolve in an arboreal setting?

Here it’s worth saying that the existence of hypothetical climbing and flying predatory archosaurs might not be an evolutionary obstacle to the existence of relatively big arboreal mammals. I say this because large, scansorial and arboreal mammals have already evolved in a world where they’re predated upon by large, predatory flying theropods, some of which can reach into cavities with flexible legs and feet, or pull relatively big prey items (like sloths and big monkeys) from treetops and branches.

But… if I let my archosaur bias run away with me, I might propose that the existence of arboreal mammals in a dinosaur-dominated world could encourage the evolution of specialised scansorial or arboreal archosaurs (presumably theropods) that have somehow influenced primate evolution, and ultimately derailed any potential evolution of proto-humans. I like this idea, and it isn’t entirely without precedent in our own timeline, since it’s been formally suggested that the predation pressure exerted upon primates by large predatory reptiles – snakes, specifically – has indeed shaped primate evolution (Isbell 2006).

Caption: a speculative arboreal maniraptoran from an alternative timeline. It runs and leaps about in tropical tree-tops, has extremely powerful, prehensile feet, and predates on primate-like mammals. Image: Darren Naish.

Here’s another possibility: could human-like apes evolve on an island refugium where archosaurs weren’t dominant? The idea that ‘unusual’ animals can evolve and persist on islands is already a mainstay of island biogeography theory and verified by many real-world examples. A dinosaur-dominated post-Cretaceous world must be allowed to include similar diversity, and maybe this is where you find your big, atypical mammals (and perhaps big tortoises, arthropods and whatever else).

Could human-like primates evolve on islands? Well, this would require that your ancestral primates occurred in such places in the first place, and that the relevant selection pressures would have led to the evolution of human-like animals. While this isn’t impossible, it seems unlikely: there are good reasons for thinking that the ecological conditions specific to certain regions of Neogene continental Africa are what ultimately resulted in the emergence of hominins and hence humans (Kingdon 2003). My conclusion here is that an alternative evolutionary pathway for primates doesn’t give you humans as one of its ‘products’.

Finally, if we have an alternative timeline where apes evolve, is it conceivable that human-like primates, and, ultimately, alternative timeline humans, evolve anyway, dinosaurs or not? After all, humans and human ancestors spent their entire history living alongside formidable predators and competitors which either had to be avoided, defeated or out-smarted, and we might argue that the technological and other behavioural sophistications of hominids could make them exempt from the ‘no megamammal rule’ introduced above. The result would be what I’m going to call a Flintstones Universe.

Caption: non-bird dinosaurs and humans live alongside one another in the episode In Dino Veritas (season 2, ep 7) of the TV series Sliders, which aired in April 1996.

As appealing as this model might be for the purposes of human-oriented drama and adventure (it’s been done before, in Sliders - a TV series about travel between alternative timeline versions of Earth - and I’m sure elsewhere), I’m worried, since it also sounds a lot like the ‘inevitable humans’ model promoted  by those who seem to regard humans as The Best Animals. Some of you might have seen the 2010 episode of the BBC TV series Horizon (it’s here) where Simon Conway Morris – who’s well known, these days, as something of an opponent to the late Stephen Jay Gould’s argument that nothing in evolution is inevitable and that events wouldn’t have run the way they did if we were to “replay life’s tape”* (Gould 1990, p. 48) – proposed both that humans could well have evolved in a dinosaur-dominated world and that smart humanoid dinosaurs could well have evolved as well. Even better, Conway Morris suggests in the same TV show that humans and big-brained dinosaurs could have forged an alliance. True, true, symbiosis is not uncommon in the living world – ants and aphids, cleaner fishes and big reef fishes, Godzilla and Mothra – but the real-world history of humans shows either that we smashed competitors into bloody fragments or absorbed them into our collective via sexy, sexy ways. The latter option is unlikely to play out in a world where humans and humanoid dinosaurs live together, but the former suggests a less than happy outcome for one of the players.

Caption: some of the key books relevant to the discussion here.

So, excuse me if I’m a little sceptical of any proposed human-dinosauroid buddy-flick partnership. And am I sceptical of the idea that hominids, hominines and hominins were indeed exempt of the ‘no megamammals rule’? Yes. Incidentally, Conway Morris’s inevitability vs Gould’s contingency formed the subject of a long-running dispute: Riley Black wrote about this discussion here.

* Does this analogy still work given that hardly anyone uses recording tape anymore?

Caption: Simon Conway Morris talks about the evolution of intelligence while a dinosauroid reads a newspaper in the background. This is a screengrab from the 2007 episode of BBC Horizon titled My Pet Dinosaur.

Other, more recent alternative timeline dinosaur thoughts. As should be clear from this article and its predecessor, interest in alternative timeline dinosaurs is at an all-time high. The current resurgence of monster movies that feature King Kong, Godzilla and the like also means that such creatures have appeared in big-budget, mainstream movies. Peter Jackson’s 2005 movie King Kong featured several post-Cretaceous dinosaurs (among them Vastatosaurus rex, Brontosaurus baxteri and Venatosaurus saevidicus), the design and backstory of which makes at least some sense on the basis of things that happened in the real timeline… though the idea of a dinosaur genus persisting relatively unchanged for 150 million years or so can’t be considered sensible in view of what we know.

Caption: I don’t especially like the dinosaurs of Jackson’s King Kong (they’re too conservative), but a lot of the artwork is neat. This concept art depicts Vastatosaurus rex, a giant Holocene tyrannosaurid that evolved from Tyrannosaurus. Image: The World of Kong (here).

Pixar’s 2015 The Good Dinosaur also has to be mentioned, but I wish it didn’t because I think it’s a terrible film and an abhorrent waste of an opportunity. It’s supposed to be an alternative timeline movie but instead it just seems like a Flintstones reboot without the Flintstones.

Caption: opening spread from Pickrell (2017), art by James Gilleard. Some of the creatures here are based on those of TND and the Speculative Dinosaur Project. Image: BBC Focus magazine.

A 2017 article by John Pickrell is one of the newest published pieces on alternative timeline dinosaurs, and it’s well worth tracking down for those seriously interested in this stuff (Pickrell 2017: there’s an online version here which includes some extra stuff relative to the printed one). It features some fairly outré artwork (by James Gilleard; it’s not included in the online version) depicting creatures inspired by those of The New Dinosaurs, and include quotes from Steve Brusatte, Tom Holtz, Andrew Farke, Matthew Bonnan and Victoria Arbour (and Paul Barrett and me, but in the online version only) (Pickrell 2017).

Caption: the Gourmand Ganeosaurus tardus, a carrion-feeding tyrannosaur whose ancestors migrated to South America during an alt-timeline version of the Great American Biotic Interchange. I’ve never been able to figure out what it’s eating. Image: art by Steve Holden, from Dixon (1988).

A few interesting, specific speculations are made in John’s article. Tom notes that the Gourmand of TND is maybe not so ridiculous given recent discoveries concerning abelisaurs (rather than tyrannosaurs), Matthew suggests that arboreal (non-bird) dinosaurs might have co-evolved with flowering plants, and Victoria proposes that the neornithine bird radiation might not have been as bushy and explosive if pterosaurs had never died out (Pickrell 2017). Other ideas mooted in the article are that climbing, monkey-like theropods might evolve, and that there might be shaggy-coated Arctic specialists, speedy grassland herbivores and whale-like descendants of spinosaurs; in part, they’re seemingly inspired by the Dixonian creatures of TND.

Caption: more art from Pickrell (2017), by James Gilleard. Image: BBC Focus magazine.

The online version of the article includes comments on some of the events of post-Cretaceous times that – if they happened in an alternative timeline – would likely have some impact on the evolution of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and so on. Examples: what would the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum mean for dinosaurs, how might dinosaurs and pterosaurs respond to the cooling and drying of the Miocene, the spread of grasslands and so on, and what might happen in the cool, dry conditions of the Pleistocene? There’s vast scope for speculation here and even for some actual science, since we have enough data to show that organisms evolve in predictable directions when faced with increasing or decreasing temperatures and other such changes.

It's at this point that I have to stop – but there’s more to come. The next article (last in this series) covers ‘dinosauroids’ and other hypothetical big-brained dinosaurs.

My writing and research is dependent on crowd-funded support. Thanks to those whose patronage made this article, and the others you read here, possible. Please consider assisting me if you can, thank you!

 For previous TetZoo articles on alternative timeline dinosaurs and related issues of SpecZoo, see…

• Dinosauroids revisited, November 2006

• Dinosauroid cave art discovered, March 2007

• How intelligent dinosaurs conquered the world, March 2008

• Come back Lank, (nearly) all is forgiven, September 2008

• Belatedly, Nemoramjetia (= Avisapiens), November 2008

• Richard Dawkins and the crappy 'humanoid dinosaurs' that just won't die, November 2009

• Dinosauroids revisited, revisited, October 2012

• Of After Man, The New Dinosaurs and Greenworld: an interview with Dougal Dixon, April 2014

• Speculative Zoology at Tet Zoo, The Story So Far, May 2015

• Speculative Zoology, a Discussion, June 2018

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

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

• TetZoo Bookshelf, February 2019, Part 1, February 2019

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

Refs - -

Dixon, D. 1988. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution. Salem House Publishers, Topsfield, MA.

Gould, S. J. 1990. Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. Hutchinson Radius, London.

Isbell, L. A. 2006. Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brain. Journal of Human Evolution 51, 1-35.

Kingdon, J. 2003. Lowly Origins: Where, When, and Why Our Ancestors First Stood Up. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.

Pickrell, J. 2017. What if the dinosaurs had survived? In Bennett, D. (ed) Dinosaurs: the Ultimate Guide to the Prehistoric Beasts. Immediate Media, Bristol, pp. 74-83.

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

Speculative Biology, Speculation Zoology and Speculative Evolution (technically speaking, they’re not all the same one thing) have been perennially popular here at TetZoo, and I think it’s fair to say that interest in these issues is currently at an all-time high. And among the various branches of the SpecVerse that enjoy the most attention and interest is that concerning Alternative Timeline Dinosaurs… and pterosaurs, and marine reptiles, and their contemporaries. These being those hypothetical animal lineages that might have evolved in a timeline where the end-Cretaceous extinction event (properly the KPg Event) didn’t occur.

Caption: a montage of speculative dinosaurs, and one pterosaur. From left to right: McLoughlin’s Bioparaptor, Dixon’s Lank (at back), Kosemen’s Avisapiens, Dixon’s Balaclav, and a tree maniraptoran from Pickrell’s 2019 article. Some of these animals will be discussed in future TetZoo articles.

Such is the popularity of alternative timeline dinosaurs that new articles, opinions, ideas and artworks devoted to them are published on a fairly regular basis. At least some of these projects tend not – in my opinion – to give appropriate credit or mention to what’s happened before, but others certainly do. My aim in this article here (and its successors, to be published later this year) is to discuss most of the key ideas that have been covered in takes on alternative timeline dinosaurs, and to review and cite relevant literature old and new. To work.

Caption: the benchmark in the world of alternative timeline dinosaurs is this book, appearing in 1988… the same year that one or two other influential books on dinosaurs appeared in print (looking at you, Predatory Dinosaurs of the World). Image: Darren Naish.

It’s fair to say that hypothetical post-Cretaceous non-bird dinosaurs have featured in fictional scenarios for almost as long as non-bird dinosaurs have been known to science, such that they star in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and others since well prior to the dinosaur renaissance. As significant as these works are, however, they mostly don’t get classed as SpecZoo given that they aren’t contingent on the idea that the animals have changed since Mesozoic times. With that in mind, we mostly owe the genesis of the alternative timeline dinosaur trope to two pieces of literature: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution of 1988, and Dale Russell and Ron Séguin’s 1982 Syllogeus article on hypothetical big-brained theropods.

Caption: my introduction to alternative timeline speculative dinosaurs was in part thanks to David Lambert’s Dinosaur Data Book (Lambert 1990), which features this really nice montage: there are Dixonian dinosaurs from The New Dinosaurs, and Russell and Séguin’s dinosauroid at far right. The brief BBC Wildlife magazine ad on The New Dinosaurs - featuring the Kloon (top right) - also caught my imagination. For all kinds of reasons, I never saw The New Dinosaurs in bookshops. Images: Dixon 1988, Lambert 1990.

Dixon (1988) – the sequel to Dougal’s hugely successful and highly popular After Man of 1981 – portrays a modern world where dinosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs and other groups occupy the roles taken today by placental and marsupial mammals, as well as by various snakes, birds and so on. I won’t start reviewing the pantheon of creatures covered in the book here, but the illustrations below gives some idea of what we get.

Caption: a montage that depicts various of the creatures of Dougal Dixon’s TND. We see here a combination of flightless pterosaurs, climbing and terrestrial, predatory theropods, aquatic ornithischians, amphibious pterosaurs and theropods, and others. These illustrations are redrawn from those featured in Dixon (1988). Image: Darren Naish, colouring by Ethan Kocak.

I think it’s fair to say that The New Dinosaurs (TND) enjoyed a mixed response, with some reviewers hating it and others praising it (e.g., Gee 1988, Tudge 1988, Unwin 1992). The most interesting and detailed review (and, for a long time, the most difficult to obtain) is that by Greg Paul (1990). Paul was highly critical (perhaps ironically, given that his own writings and illustrations were partly inspirational) and made the interesting point that some of the most embracing of Dougal Dixon’s colleagues – Desmond Morris was one of them (he wrote the foreword) – were neither palaeontologists nor especially connected to studies of Mesozoic life. A bonus feature of Paul’s review is that it includes a novel illustration depicting his own take on alternative timeline dinosaurs, his ideas (Paul 1990) being interesting and innovative enough that they’ve inspired more recent views, on which read on.

Caption: alternative timeline dinosaurs of the modern era, as imagined by Greg Paul (1990). Plains-dwelling hadrosaurs and ceratopsians are hunted by cursorial tyrannosaurs. They live alongside small, cud-chewing bipedal ornithischians, burrowing mammals and geese. Image: (c) Greg Paul.

But enough on the critical reception. If anything, the pendulum has swung the other way in recent years, it being increasingly recognised that at least some of the creatures invented for TND were actually insightful and predictive. The Lank – a flightless, giraffe-like, striding pterosaur adapted to life on the grasslands – now appears oddly prescient in view of our thoughts on the ecology and lifestyle of the long-limbed, terrestrially competent azhdarchids (Witton & Naish 2008), and I wrote a 2008 article making this point. The well insulated, cool climate maniraptoran theropods and chubby, insulated ornithischians of TND also no longer look as weird as they might have in 1988 given recent fossil finds, and real-world discoveries like alvarezsaurids, scansoriopterygids, Halszkaraptor and Liaoningosaurus certainly have a Dixonian vibe to them. This was Riley Black’s point, made in this 2011 article at Laelaps.

Caption: the Lank has sometimes been criticised as one of the worst creatures of TND. But maybe this isn’t at all fair… Image: (c) Dixon 1988/Steve Holden.

Of Manga and SpecWorld. There are two other things worth saying about TND before we move on. One is that several of the species in the book appeared in a 2006 Manga volume, illustrated by Takaaki Ogawa (Dixon & Ogawa 2009). I tweeted about the book here; it’s hard to get but is a must-have if you’re a serious SpecZoo aficionado.

Caption: at left, the cover of Dixon & Ogawa (2009). At right, one of the several colour pieces included within. Images: (c) Dixon & Ogawa (2009).

The stories in the book are great fun (and you don’t need to read Japanese to follow them), but often very odd because they show the animals of the book living alongside, and interacting with, real-world animals, including crows, arapaima and Passenger pigeons Ectopistes migratorius! That’s a no-no if we’re keeping to canon, since TND actually describes a world where ‘Mesozoic’ animals have evolved to fill the niches occupied in our timeline by other animals. The second thing worth saying is that Dougal’s visions of alternative timeline dinosaurs inspired others to do the same, but in different fashion.

Caption: scenes from Dixon & Ogawa (2009), one from a Harridan-themed story (the Harridan is a raptor-like, mountain-dwelling pterosaur), and one from an Amazon-themed story involving a Pangaloon and a Watergulp. Images: (c) Dixon & Ogawa (2009).

The Speculative Dinosaur Project kicked off in 2001 and involved the invention of a substantial number of speculative animals. The website is impressive and well designed, and it’s clear that a lot of thought and discussion went into the various animals. They include long-legged, often shaggy-coated tyrannosaurs, the artiodactyl-esque ungulapedes, the sometimes gigantic cenoceratopsians (which, like Greg Paul’s alt-timeline ceratopsians, descend from non-ceratopsid ceratopsians) and many others. There’s always been talk of a Speculative Dinosaur Project book, interest in the site remains high, and there are indications right now from various minor tweaks and updates that it might be undergoing an upgrade or something sometime soon.

Caption: brilliant artwork appears throughout the Speculative Dinosaur Project. This illustration depicts a group of Eastern balundaurs, with mulongs, perfects and jaubs in attendance. Image: CC BY-SA 2.5, Speculative Dinosaur Project (original here).

A nice thing about the Speculative Dinosaur Project is that it never was devoted to non-bird dinosaurs alone, but also covered birds, crocodylomorphs, squamates and mammals in appropriate detail too. In fact, the pages on those groups were among the best parts of the site. This leads us nicely to the next area I want to discuss.

Don’t Ignore the Mammals. Of the several questions always asked in discussions about alternative timeline dinosaurs, one is ‘would humans have evolved, even in a world still dominated by non-bird dinosaurs?’. This is a good question, even if its motivation is that we might get to imagine medieval knights using dinosaurs as mounts, a line of armour-plated war ceratopsians at the Battle of Ipsus, or wonder about the role of giant dinosaurs as beasts of burden or quarry hunted by intrepid human bands equipped with specialised weapons.

The human/dinosaur coexistence thing formed the focus of a 2019 Italian magazine article by Giovanni Camardo (Camardo 2019) – titled ‘If they hadn’t died out, who would have won: us or them?’ – for which I was interviewed (the full text of my interview – in Italian – is here).

Caption: opening pages of Camardo (2019). By now, James Keuther’s CG dinosaurs might be somewhat familiar (I’ve worked with James on several projects, most notably various recent Dorling Kindersley books). Image: (c) Focus magazine.

My suggestion – which was inspired by the Greg Paul article discussed above – is that the Cretaceous record of fossil mammals shows us both that interesting things were happening in mammal evolution late in the Mesozoic, and that at least some of the major mammal lineages were already in existence before the end of the Cretaceous. Ergo, at least some of the things that happened for real in our own timeline might still have happened in a dinosaur-dominated post-Cretaceous world. Because non-bird dinosaurs would have occupied most terrestrial niches in post-Cretaceous world, it might – I suggest, with caveats – have been difficult or impossible for mammals to get an evolutionary toehold at large body size (say, above 30-40kg or so). I’m going to call this the no megamammals rule (we’ll come back to it in the next article).

Caption: the Speculative Dinosaur Project was and is particularly good on mammals. Here are two I chose at random: the Amazonian Nekopossum (left) and the apocryphal Drop-bear, also native to South America (unlike our own timeline’s Drop-bear). Image: Speculative Dinosaur Project.

Lineages producing species below this size, however, could still have evolved pretty much as they did in our own timeline. Which means that burrowing, swimming, climbing, gliding and flying mammals – monotremes, placentals and marsupials – might still have evolved in a dinosaur-dominated world, and that a post-Cretaceous world dominated by dinosaurs might still have pangolins, shrews, moles, bats…. and primates. And if there are primates, there might still be tarsiers, lemurs, monkeys and even apes. And if there are apes, could there be the apes we call humans?

This is where we’ll pick up next. Come back soon for Part II.

We’ll finish with the usual reminder that I basically have an infinite number of articles I want to write for TetZoo, but workload and the quest for solvency prevents me from being more productive. If you like what I do, you can help by supporting me at patreon. Thank you!

For previous TetZoo articles on alternative timeline dinosaurs and related issues of SpecZoo, see…

• Dinosauroids revisited, November 2006

• Dinosauroid cave art discovered, March 2007

• How intelligent dinosaurs conquered the world, March 2008

• Come back Lank, (nearly) all is forgiven, September 2008

• Belatedly, Nemoramjetia (= Avisapiens), November 2008

• Richard Dawkins and the crappy 'humanoid dinosaurs' that just won't die, November 2009

• Dinosauroids revisited, revisited, October 2012

• Of After Man, The New Dinosaurs and Greenworld: an interview with Dougal Dixon, April 2014

• Speculative Zoology at Tet Zoo, The Story So Far, May 2015

• Speculative Zoology, a Discussion, June 2018

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

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

• TetZoo Bookshelf, February 2019, Part 1, February 2019

Refs - -

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

Dixon, D. 1988. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution. Salem House Publishers, Topsfield, MA.

Dixon, D. & Ogawa, T. 2009. The New Dinosaurs. Futanasha, Tokyo.

Gee, H. 1988. Tales of future past. Nature 335, 505-506.

Lambert, D. 1990. Dinosaur Data Book. Facts on File, New York.

Paul, G. S. 1990. An improbable view of Tertiary dinosaurs. Evolutionary Theory 9, 309-315.

Tudge, C. 1988. End points of an alternative evolution. New Scientist 120 (1641), 65-66.

Unwin, D. M. 1992. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution (review). Historical Biology 6, 61-71.

Witton, M. P. & Naish, D. 2008. A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology. PLoS ONE 3 (5): e2271.

Suburban Birdwatching in Queensland, Australia

I recently spent time in Australia, and specifically in Brisbane, Queensland (this was for the 79th Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting), and, while there, I got to see a pretty good selection of birds. I photographed as many as I could, and in this article I’m going to talk about them. All the birds I’m going to discuss here were encountered in urban and suburban settings in close proximity to people, and none are especially exotic or obscure. But they were entirely novel to me, and I was hugely excited to encounter them in the wild. I hope you’ll enjoy reading about them.

Caption: Dusky moorhen, Australian white ibis and Little black cormorant captured in the same one shot (at left). At right: a wonderful Torresian crow. Images: Darren Naish.

One more bit of preamble: if I had the time and foresight, I could have organised a special birdwatching tour, in which case I could have been taken to various specific locations at which I might have seen a rather more impressive list of Australian birds not ordinarily encountered by mere chance. But… I didn’t. I wish I had.

Caption: if you’re truly interested in animals, you’re interested in invasives, aliens and introductions, and there’s no shame in paying attention to them or studying them. So go ahead and photograph that feral pigeon. Image: Darren Naish.

My very first Australian bird sighting was of Welcome swallows Hirundo neoxena, seen flying around the outside windows of Perth Airport. I was to see this species on several subsequent occasions (it occurs across virtually the whole of Australia except for some north-central sections), but no photos, sorry. My second species: the feral Rock dove or Rock pigeon Columba livia! I don’t care what anyone says: I always take time to look at feral pigeons, and one thing you notice is that populations differ from place to place, mostly because they descend from different founding populations of escapees or released birds. Brisbane pigeons were especially dark relative to the majority of familiar urban pigeons in Europe, and on the large size too. Brisbane: make of that what you will.

Caption: my first bin chicken. This individual spent time probing into the gap between the pavement and a retaining wall, searching for arthropods. Image: Darren Naish.

My second Aussie bird was something far more exotic (to me): an ibis, and specifically an Australian white ibis Threskiornis molucca. This species was included within T. aethiopica – the species currently referred to as the African sacred ibis – until the mid-2000s, and some authors still regard the two as conspecific. The Black-headed ibis, Black-necked ibis, Oriental white ibis or Indian white ibis T. melanocephalus is part of this complex too (all three are regarded as part of the same superspecies). Apparently, there are Australian people who still refer to T. molucca as the Sacred ibis but --- as any Australian will tell you within 0.5 seconds of you expressing interest in this bird, it’s not ‘the Australian white ibis’ to the vast majority of urban Australians but ‘the bin chicken’: an animal that people associate with rubbish, waste food and urban filth in general. I get the impression that Aussies love to hate the ibis the same way people also dislike urban gulls and pigeons. Hey idiots... the shitty trash the bird is eating is, like, YOUR trash and YOU put it there.

Caption: Australian white ibis out and about in town. Image: Darren Naish.

Australian white ibises seem to be both abundant in Brisbane and extremely bold. Large groups are present in the parks throughout the city, groups can be seen nesting at the tops of palms and other trees in the parks, and individual birds can be seen walking around in crowded pedestrianised areas and even right into cafes and restaurants… though they aren’t exactly welcome in such places.

Caption: large numbers of ibises are readily visible in parks and other green places in Brisbane. The birds stand or sit on the grass and rest in trees. The first individual I saw (the one probing in the paved area, shown above) was initially sat on the grass, chest against the ground. Image: Darren Naish.

Caption: aaaand… even more ibises. Image: Darren Naish.

Go near the water most places in the world, and you’ll very likely see members of the duck, goose and swan family Anatidae, and such it is in Australia. I saw three species, all new to me, all in close proximity to the ponds in Brisbane’s Botanical Gardens. We’ll start with the Australian wood duck, Maned duck or Maned goose Chenonetta jubata, a heavily terrestrial, pan-Australian, cavity-nesting duck that might be a member of the shelduck clade Tadorninae. The birds I saw were asleep (or pretending to be asleep) and thus standing and sitting still with their eyes closed.

Caption: at left, two Australian wood ducks. resting or sleeping. At right: a Hardhead heads across the water towards me. Presumably, it (and its partner) was used to being fed by people. Image: Darren Naish.

Pacific black ducks Anas superciliosa – PBDs in birding vernacular – were also seen; this is an especially handsomely marked member of the mallard complex, the different forms of which are quite variable across its southwest Pacific/Australasia range. Another first for me was Hardhead or White-eyed duck Aythya australis, a Pacific/Australasian member of the scaup and pochard lineage (Aythyini).

Caption: Pacific black duck. Of the three recognised subspecies, the Australian one is A. superciliosa rogersi. This subspecies also occurs in Indonesis and New Guinea. Image: Darren Naish.

My biggest surprise at the ponds, however, was an Australian darter or anhinga Anhinga novaehollandiae (here I’m following recent studies in recognising this as a distinct species from African and Asian anhingas), which I watched for some time as it foraged and hunted close to the water’s edge. On occasion, it would disappear entirely from view before stretching its long, slender neck out of water while swallowing a fish. And on other occasions, its long tail could be seen part emerging above the surface while the bird was part swimming, part floating, just beneath the surface. I’ve never seen a live anhinga before. This one was smaller than I expected.

Caption: an anhinga surfaces and swallows what I presume is a fish. Image: Darren Naish.

Caption: more swimming anhinga action. Image: Darren Naish.

Caption: Little pied cormorant, foraging in a shallow pool with abundant algae and other aquatic plants. Its appearances at the surface were really brief compared to the other cormorants I’ve watched, and this is the only photo that clearly shows its head and bill. Image: Darren Naish.

Two cormorant species were also present at the ponds: Little black cormorant Phalacrocorax sulcirostris (see photo at the top of the article) and Little pied cormorant P. melanoleucos (or Microcarbo melanoleucos, if you follow Siegel-Causey’s (1988) taxonomy). The one individual of the latter I saw was diving for food in a heavily vegetated pool. A group of three Dusky moorhens Gallinula tenebrosa were paying close attention to its activities, and would circle and peck at the surface every time the cormorant would dive. I assume that they were interested in bits of vegetation and small animals brought to the surface by the cormorant’s activities. Indeed, numerous small fish and tadpoles were present in the pools. The tadpoles looked like those of a toad and I presume they were Cane toad Rhinella marina larvae, indeed I know that Cane toads were present since I found two dead ones in the park grounds.

Caption: Dusky moorhens search for food in an area where the water is being disturbed by a swimming Little pied cormorant. Image: Darren Naish.

Dusky moorhens were frequently encountered and easily approached. As suggested by the name, they looked darker than the Eurasian moorhens G. chloropus I know well, and they appeared larger and chunkier too. I watched them foraging on lawns, and a bit of squabbling, chasing, fighting and mating was seen as well.

Caption: Silver gulls look similar to Northern Hemisphere species like the Black-headed gull Chroicocephalus ridibundus, and there’s a reason for that. Image: Darren Naish.

Finally on birds associated with watery places, I also visited an artificial beach close to the Brisbane River where there were numerous Silver gulls Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae. This is Australia’s most widespread gull and occurs around the country’s entire coast as well as in many inland locations. The Silver gull is surrounded in phylogeny by species that have grey, black or brown heads (Chu 1998) and is thus generally agreed to be part of the Chroicocephalus group (and is thus not part of Larus in the new, restrictive sense). At least a few other Chroicocephalus species are like the Silver gull in being white-headed too, so it might be that a transition from a dark head back to a white one happened a few times in this group. The Silver gull is a mid-sized, slender-billed gull.

Caption: Masked lapwing, or Black-shouldered lapwing if you’re so inclined. Note that the carpometacarpal spurs aren’t readily visible here. Image: Darren Naish.

I also saw a single plover, specifically a Masked lapwing Vanellus miles… and, more specifically, the black-shoulder form V. m. novaehollandiae (jeez, colonial Europeans: couldn’t you be a bit more creative with the scientific names?) sometimes recognised as the distinct species V. novaehollandiae, the Black-shouldered lapwing. This bird was wandering around on a lawn close to a restaurant. Lapwings – technically called vanellines – are conventionally included within Charadriidae, the plover family. Lapwings are interesting in that they possess large spurs on the carpometacarpus, which are typically (but not always) visible when the wings are closed. These are used in defence against predators (like cats, dogs and corvids) and also in intraspecific fights. There’s an apparent common folk belief that the spur is venomous! Here’s your regular reminder that TetZoo ver 3 includes two fairly comprehensive articles on the spurs, claws and clubs present on the wings of birds (part 1 here, part 2 here; I’ve linked to wayback machine versions as they include the illustrations).

Caption: a Laughing kookaburra in the wild, perched and vigilant. Image: Darren Naish.

I was surprised (hey, I’m from Europe) to see a Laughing kookaburra Dacelo novaeguineae in an urban park, sat on top of a streetlight and also in flight in the same park. I gather than kookaburras are pretty typical park and garden birds in parts of Australia, well known for their habit of grabbing food from tables and barbeques and such. Most of you will know that kookaburras are especially big kingfishers, closely related to Halcyon kingfishers and kin, and that the bulk of kingfisher diversity exists in the islands and coastal regions of Australasia. Kingfishers have conventionally all been included within the same one family (Alcedinidae), and this is still a popular view. However, the idea that lineages within the group are ‘distinct enough’ that several kingfisher families should be recognised is also popular, in which case kookaburras and their close kin belong within Halcyonidae (previously known, incorrectly, as Dacelonidae; Sibley & Ahlquist 1990). Miners (more on them in a minute) are not fans of kookaburras and a few individuals took time to mob the individual sat on top of the streetlight.

Caption: a Noisy miner (at left) arrives to harass a Laughing kookaburra. Image: Darren Naish.

I was also pleased to see Rainbow lorikeets Trichoglossus moluccanus at a few places, though none of my photos are at all good. Lorikeets mostly eat pollen and nectar and their specialised brush-like tongues explain their generic name – Trichoglossus means ‘hair tongue’. I actually saw parrots of a few other species as well, but they were right at the top of really tall trees and mostly seen in silhouette, so I never saw any of the detail that might allow them to be identified.

Caption: Rainbow lorikeet at the top of a palm tree. The green collar confirms the identification, since similar lorikeet species (like the Red-collared lorikeet T. rubritorquis) lack this feature. Image: Darren Naish.

As everyone who knows anything about birds knows, the majority of living bird species (over 60% of them) are passerines (or perching birds), and most of the Australian species I saw were members of this enormous group. I didn’t see any feral European starlings or sparrows, or indeed any introduced European species at all, and nor did I see any small endemic Australian endemics, like fairywrens, pardalotes or sunbirds.

Caption: a Noisy miner, eating parts of a Mexican burrito on a restaurant table. Image: Darren Naish.

We’ll start with Noisy miners Manorina melanocephala. These are mostly grey, thrush-sized passerines – happy to take to the ground as well as forage in trees and shrubs – that have a robust bill and naked yellow patch of skin behind the eye. They’re bold and look to have made the full transition to life in urban settings. I saw them jump around on tables and eat food from plates just moments after people had left, and I also saw them waiting for dropped food scraps right next to a person sat on the grass. In one case, a man eating his lunch while sat in the park was literally slapping the birds out of the way.

Caption: Common or India mynas are one of the most important alien birds in Australia (‘important’ in economic and ecological terms). Note that this individual is afflicted by a problem most commonly associated with urban pigeons: mangled toes and missing toe segments (the hallux claw is missing on the left foot). Image: Darren Naish.

The fact that these birds are called ‘miners’ is a bit confusing, since this makes it sound as if they’re ‘mynas’ (also spelt ‘mynahs’); that is, members of the starling and myna family Sturnidae. But they’re not, they’re honeyeaters (Meliphagidae). There are, incidentally, proper mynas in Australia: namely, the introduced Common or Indian myna Acridotheres tristis from tropical southern Asia. I saw some of these as well (I also saw them while on the journey home, in Singapore). Back to honeyeaters: Australia is the land of honeyeaters, the country being home to about half of the c 190 extant species. For all that I only saw one other meliphagid species: the Blue-faced honeyeater Entomyzon cyanotis.

Caption: a Blue-faced honeyeater, photographed at distance while it was on the top of a building. The area of blue facial skin is variable in these birds; this individual seemed to have only a small amount of blue. The skin is green in juveniles. Image: Darren Naish.

Moving on, Australia is also home to a really exciting assortment of sometimes large, omnivorous and predatory, superficially crow-like passerines, namely butcherbirds, currawongs and Australian magpies. I bet most people assume that these are corvids, but they aren’t: they’re conventionally allied within the family Cracticidae but a close relationship with woodswallows and kin means that the best course of action might be to include them within Artamidae, the woodswallow family. These birds are part of Corvoidea – the large passerine clade that includes shrikes, vireos, birds-of-paradise and corvids proper – but they’re some distance away from corvids, instead belonging to Malaconotoidea (also written Malaconotidea), a group that includes African bushshrikes and vangas (Cracraft et al. 2004, Cracraft 2014, Selvatti et al. 2015).

Caption: a Grey butcherbird (at left) waits for food in a park; to the right are a group of Noisy miners. Image: Darren Naish.

I saw a single Grey butcherbird Cracticus torquatus, hanging out in a park in close proximity to a group of miners. It was part of the group mentioned above, seen waiting near a person eating their lunch.

Caption: a (slightly blurry) Pied currawong caught in the middle of a run, just prior to takeoff. Image: Darren Naish.

Caption: Pied currawong from below. There are supposed to be three currawong species, but there are so many local variants, intermediate grades and island endemics that the story is quite difficult to resolve. Images: Darren Naish.

Pied currawong Strepera graculina were seen in trees, on tall buildings and structures attached to buildings, and on the ground. A pair were actually nesting on metal support structures just outside the conference venue but their nest was so high up and far from the ground that they were constantly at the edge of my camera’s range. Anyway, some of my photos aren’t terrible. And I did see Australian magpies on several occasions, but it was always while I was in cars, away from the city, and I never had the chance to get a photo.

Caption: Torresian crow, what an excellent bird. Image: Darren Naish.

Finally, Australia is also home to corvids proper. Australian crows are weird. To a European eye, they don’t look quite right – as if they might not be crows proper (which they are) – and yet they all look about enough alike that they could conceivably be close relatives (which they are: Jønsson et al. 2012). I saw members of two species, the first being a beautifully glossy, iridescent  bird, about similar in size to typical Corvus crows like the Eurasian Carrion crow C. corone, and with a prominent pale iris. This was the Torresian crow C. orru, I assume named for the Torres Strait (the stretch of water between New Guinea and Australia). I saw this species both as a singleton and in a large group, often right in the middle of town.

Caption: more Torresian crows, both in a group, in a tree, and foraging on the ground in an urban area. Images: Darren Naish.

Caption: Torresian crows and flowers. I like the artiness of this photo. Image: Darren Naish.

The second crow species I saw was the larger, bulkier Australian raven C. coronoides. I saw a group of three of these, walking around together on a lawn. The large group of Torresian crows I saw appeared to be gathered together because they were unhappy about the proximity of these ravens, and they were peering in the ravens’ direction while noisily calling. I wanted to watch all of these corvids for longer, but my time was short and I had to run.

Caption: a pair of Australian ravens forage on a lawn, to the displeasure of nearby Torresian crows. Image: Darren Naish.

And that brings things to an end. There’s a vast amount of stuff that I never saw, much of it living in very close proximity to the part of Brisbane in which I was staying. But it wasn’t to be. One day I’ll visit Australia again, and I hope for better luck, more time, and more experience of the region’s remarkable wildlife.

For previous TetZoo articles on birds and birdwatching, see…

• To the Sahara in quest of dinosaurs (living and extinct), December 2008

• From Morocco, with larks, babblers, gazelles, owls and GIANT DINOSAUR BONES, December 2008

• Birding in Brazil: a view from suburban Rio de Janeiro, June 2013

• Birdwatching in Suburban China, May 2018

• Avocets in Flight and Phylogeny, October 2018

• Cocks-of-the-Rock, Extreme Cotingas, April 2019

If you enjoyed this article and want to see me do more, more often, please consider supporting me at patreon. The more funding I receive, the more time I’m able to devote to producing material for TetZoo and the more productive I can be on those long-overdue book projects. Thanks!

Refs - -

Chu, P. C. 1994. 1998. A phylogeny of the gulls (Aves: Larinae) inferred from osteological and integumentary characters. Cladistics 14, 1-43.

Cracraft, J. 2014. Avian higher-level relationships and classification: Passeriformes. In Dickinson, E.C. & Christidis, L. (eds) The Howard and Moore Complete Checklist of the Birds of the World (fourth edition), Volume 2: Passerines. Aves Press, Eastbourne, pp. xvii-xlv.

Cracraft, J., Barker, F. K., Braun, M., Harshman, J., Dyke, G. J., Feinstein, J., Stanley, S., Cibois, A., Schikler, P., Beresford, P., García-Moreno, J., Sorenson, M. D., Yuri, T. & Mindell, D. P. 2004. Phylogenetic relationships among modern birds (Neornithes): towards an avian tree of life. In Cracraft, J. and Donoghue, M. (eds) Assembling the Tree of Life. Oxford University Press (Oxford), pp. 468-489.

Jønsson, K. A., Fabre, P.-H. & Irestedt, M. 2012. Brains, tools, innovation and biogeography in crows and ravens. BMC Evolutionary Biology 12: 72.

Selvatti, A. P., Gonzaga, L. P. & Russo, C. A. de M. 2015. A Paleogene origin for crown passerines and the diversification of the Oscines in the New World. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 88, 1-15.

Sibley, C. G. & Ahlquist, J. A. 1990. Phylogeny and Classification of Birds. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Siegel-Causey, D. 1988. Phylogeny of the Phalacrocoracidae. The Condor 90, 885-905.

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

Among the most famous sea monster cases of all time is that of the Gloucester Sea Serpent of New England, USA. This giant, serpentine creature was seen on numerous occasions between 1817 and 1824, often at relatively close range by large numbers of people, and often by people of respectable standing. Many drawings of the creatures were produced, but physical evidence of its existence was never obtained, the one relevant incident being the 1817 recovery of a small snake with a peculiar lumpy dorsal outline. This was very obviously a Black or Eastern racer Coluber constrictor afflicted with a spinal deformity.

Caption: the most famous depiction of the Gloucester Sea Serpent is this fanciful one dating to August 1817, said to have been drawn from life. I don’t think the name of the artist is on record. Image: public domain.

The case of the Gloucester Sea Serpent is familiar enough that it’s covered in most works that review sea monsters and their claimed existence (e.g., Heuvelmans 1968), and indeed a few books are dedicated entirely to the creature itself (O’Neill 1999 [republished by Paraview in 2003], Soini 2010). How has the monster been identified? The opinion promoted most frequently by writers specialising in cryptozoology has been that it was a scientifically unrecognised, serpentine mammal with a series of dorsal humps arranged along its length (Heuvelmans 1968, Woodley 2008) or perhaps a giant sea reptile of the sort otherwise known only from the fossil record (O’Neill 1999).

Caption: two books dedicated to the Gloucester Sea Serpent - written for adults - are in existence, and both are worth reading. June O’Neill’s book of 1999 (though this is the cover of the 2003 Paraview edition), and Wayne Soini’s of 2010.

Robert France’s Disentangled is yet another volume dedicated to the Gloucester Sea Serpent, but it’s unlike any other. For all the popular and sensationalist interest in sea monsters, academic treatments of the subject are rare, making this book a significant addition to the literature; more so given that it was written by a qualified scientist with a substantial number of technical, peer-reviewed publications to his name. At this point I must spoil the surprise and reveal France’s primary hypothesis: that the appearance and occurrence of the Gloucester Sea Serpent was intimately tied to the economic and social history of the New England coast, and that sightings of this creature were actually of large vertebrate animals entangled in fishing gear (France 2019).

Caption: this is another especially famous depiction of the Gloucester Sea Serpent from 1817, and again it’s by an anonymous artist. The idea that the monster was seen at relatively close range is again emphasised. Image: public domain.

France on cryptozoology and cryptozoologists. What does France (2019) make of those authors who have gone before him, most of whom have been rather kind to the possible existence of sea monsters as valid zoological entities (that is, as giant marine animal species awaiting scientific recognition)? He is overwhelmingly critical of such writers, I think rightly dismissing their efforts as unscientific or, at least, as ‘bad science’. LeBlond and Bousfield’s infamous work on ‘Cadborosaurus’ (much written about here at TetZoo; see the links below) is not viewed favourably, nor is Michael Woodley’s 2008 book In the Wake of Bernard Heuvelmans (Woodley 2008). Michael (who no longer publishes cryptozoological articles; he and I co-authored some works between 2008 and 2012) has indeed promoted some unusual ideas that cannot be correct, these including that the ‘super otter’ and ‘many-humped’ sea monsters of Heuvelmans (1968) might actually be literal super-sized otters. France (2019) sees red, and describes Woodley’s writings here as “one of the most blatant displays of cryptozoological fancy” and a “ridiculous bit of science fiction” (p. 169).

Caption: books that discuss sea monster reports - here are some (albeit not all) of them - mostly interpret the relevant encounters as descriptions of giant, scientifically unrecognised animal species. Image: Darren Naish.

Henry Bauer has argued that sea monsters and lake monsters are based on reliable evidence supported by trustworthy experts, and that critics of cryptozoology are misguided and unscientific (e.g., Bauer 1982, 2002). But watch his public speaking and read enough of his articles and you’ll find that he endorses research denying a link between HIV and AIDS, and regards homosexuality as an illness. France has noticed this too and regards Bauer as a “fringe scientist” (p. 16).

As for the ‘Father of Cryptozoology’ Bernard Heuvelmans, France is highly critical, accusing him of sloppy scholarship, selective bias, manipulation of facts, an inability to identify hoaxes and misinterpretations of natural phenomena, of being “delusional at best, or outright dishonest at worst”, and of compiling “a house of cards assembled from a Trumpian world of ‘alternative facts’” (p. 30). Meurger (1988) is cited here as providing inspiration (it should really be cited as Meurger & Gagnon (1988)) but this takedown of Heuvelmans much more recalls Ulrich Magin’s critique (Magin 1996), paraphrased in Hunting Monsters (Naish 2017). I’ve even specifically likened the cryptozoological literalism of Heuvelmans and his followers to a house of cards, but I don’t doubt that this use of allegory could be coincidental. Cryptozoological classification schemes – the meat-and-potatoes of works by Heuvelmans, Coleman and Huyghe, Woodley and others – are described as a ‘nomenclature of nonsense’ by France (2019, p. 165).

Caption: the most influential sea monster book of them all is Heuvelmans (1968). Therein, he argued for the existence of nine distinct sea monster types, illustrated at left by Cameron McCormick. Their purported existence hasn’t exactly been embraced by biologists at large. Images: Cameron McCormick, Heuvelmans (1968).

When it comes to those who’ve been critical of cryptozoological literalism, France is quite the fan. Konar (2009) – an article I cannot claim to know – is cited and discussed since its author argues that cryptozoology is a pseudoscience. France writes favourably of Michel Meurger’s argument – promoted most famously in Meurger & Gagnon (1988) – that efforts to interpret the creatures of myth, folklore and anecdote as valid undiscovered animal species miss the point (“aquatic cryptids are ‘real’ only in the sense that they are mental constructs that have their origin in folklore and exist within a mythological landscape”; France 2019, p. 33), and he likes Daniel Loxton and Don Prothero’s Abominable Science (Loxton & Prothero 2015) and cites it frequently.

My own writings on sea monsters and cryptozoology in general are abundantly cited and fairly credited but mostly in a single paragraph on page 32 rather than scattered throughout the text as might seem appropriate. This (perhaps falsely) creates the impression that France only discovered my writings late in his project and opted to crowbar them in somewhere, but no matter.

After all this, what does France make of cryptozoology overall? Does it have value, has it been mis-framed, or is it just a pile of shit? I found France’s take on this issue difficult to parse and inconsistent. Despite strong agreement with those who argue that the study of cryptids is more to do with a sociocultural interpretation of the world, France argues in part of the book that it should be regarded as “an anachronistic form of natural history” (p. 35). He takes time to dismiss the notion that cryptozoology might be considered part of ecology. Which is odd, because surely the identification of entities reported via anecdote and observation is very obviously not ecology (assuming that ‘ecology’ relates to the study of how organisms relate to their physical surroundings) but instead more to do with systematics, biodiversity monitoring and/or social anthropology and folklore. Indeed, if the bulk of the cryptozoological literature involves the collecting of anecdotes about things implied or believed to be animals, and the evaluation of these anecdotes such that flesh and blood animals can be ‘shown’ to be at the bottom of the reports, we’re not talking about natural history or ecology but ethnozoology. France ends Chapter 1 with a hearty endorsement for the value of ethnozoology as a valid field of study, the takehome being that what people have been calling cryptozoology is ethnozoology.

The entanglement hypothesis. Introduction out of the way, France devotes the next section of the book to the 19th century ‘eco-cultural seascape’ of the North American eastern seaboard, covering the region’s geography, economy and cultural history. A classical and biblical background gave the region’s European colonists a belief system whereby elongate, unidentified marine objects (France uses the acronym UMO throughout the book) might be interpreted as gargantuan marine serpents, and some appropriate section of text is devoted to 19th century fishing methods and the technology employed. This looks on initial reading like an aside but is crucial for the argument that France (2019) later compiles, this being that entanglement explains the sea monster sightings.

But waitaminute – isn’t entanglement with marine debris (‘ghost gear’ and so on) a modern issue, linked to the use of modern fishing materials? No. It turns out that fishing gear has been lost or dumped at sea for as long as people have been making such things, that animals large and small have been becoming entangled in lost or dumped fishing gear since forever, and that seafaring people have been aware of this issue but have not had cause to report it, or have wilfully under- or unreported it, since time immemorial. Entanglement is a pretty horrible thing. Individual animals can remain bound in or connected to debris for literally years, and both old and modern materials used in fishing are made of materials that persist for decades and, potentially, centuries. As France (2019) shows via his analysis of Gloucester Sea Serpent reports, people’s descriptions of the UMOs concerned pertain to animals entangled in ropes, or swimming while connected to floats, buoys, barrels, kegs or netting. I found his case compelling.

Caption: some, perhaps many, of the sea monsters endorsed at times by cryptozoologists now need to be reinterpreted as observations of known animal species entangled with marine debris. Among them is the supposedly tadpole-like ‘yellow belly’ of Heuvelmans (1968). This imagined creature has been discussed at TetZoo on several occasions over the years. Images: Heuvelmans (1968), Darren Naish, Tim Morris.

By now it will be obvious why the book has the title that it does. Disentangled refers not only to the fact that entanglement with fishing gear explains many, most or all of the sea monster accounts relevant to the Gloucester case, but also that France (2019) has succeeded in disentangling the strands of a story that hasn’t previously been understood. Is this definitely so, though?

In view of the drubbing that cryptozoological literalists receive throughout France’s book, it’s ironic that Heuvelmans (1968) was the first to propose the entanglement hypothesis. In attempting to interpret a sea monster seen in Cape Town Harbour in 1857, and reported by a Dr François Biccard and seven other observers, Heuvelmans (1968) wrote that “This so-called body is so unlike any part of an animal that one cannot help thinking that it may have been a net or rope towed by a shark or [France has ‘of’ here] porpoise which had got caught in it and whose wounded body appeared to be what the doctor called the head” (Heuvelmans 1968, p. 242). But, alas, poor Bernard, here “Demonstrating a degree of perceptive reasoning markedly absent from the rest of his tome…” (France 2019, p. 194). Damned with faint praise. Incidentally, France (2018) has written a whole paper on the Cape Town Harbour case and its significance.

Caption: Biccard’s illustration of the 1857 sea monster (or UMO) seen from Table Bay, Cape Town. There weren’t two monsters - the picture shows two views of the same object. Heuvelmans (1968) was unable to place this creature within any one of his nine sea monster categories. Image: public domain.

But if the Gloucester Sea Serpent (and at least some other sea monsters too) really was an animal entangled in lost or discarded fishing gear, what specific animal are we talking about? France (2019) eliminates whales for various reasons and favours the view – in part based on the swimming speed of the monster, its ability to make extremely tight turns and its propensity to frequent very shallow water – that the most likely candidate was the Bluefin tuna Thunnus thynnus. “Most likely”? Is that the best we can do? The fact that the monster’s true identity can’t be precisely determined and remains unresolved is slightly awkward given France’s (2019) determination earlier in the book that cryptozoology is unsatisfyingly unspecific, and France readily admits this. But as a committed advocate of the notion that providing a provisional or ad hoc scientific conclusion is by no means problematic, I don’t see an issue.

Caption: tuna are remarkable fishes, and France (2019) emphasises how incredible they are. Strong, fast, and surprisingly big (this life-sized model - formerly on show at London’s NHM - is about 2 m long), they might help explain the Gloucester Sea Serpent UMO. Image: Darren Naish.

Yes, I agree with Robert France that entangled marine vertebrates are the real explanation behind some, if not many, sea monster sightings… or UMOs, if you prefer… and specifically those associated with Gloucester Harbour, Massachusetts. I’m slightly embarrassed not to have noticed this earlier. But, then, to reach this conclusion and write authoritatively about it requires not only a familiarity with the sea monster literature and cryptozoological lore but also with the anthropology, economy and industry of North America’s eastern seaboard, and few of us have been focused enough, or expert enough, to do that. Professor France, I raise my glass.

Caption: the entanglement hypothesis doesn’t mean that all ‘sea monster’ reports describe animals that can be interpreted in the same way: some accounts are, more likely, just misidentifications. One example mentioned by France is that of the ‘baby Cadborosaurus’, reinterpreted by myself and colleagues in 2011 (Woodley et al. 2011). Image: Woodley et al. (2011).

A few statements and proposals made in the book are objectionable and might be deemed wrong by a reader with specialised knowledge. The idea that the Spicer land sighting of the Loch Ness Monster was inspired by a scene in King Kong (mentioned favourably by France on p. 32) has experienced something of a pushback recently and should not be mentioned as if we know that it actually happened. France also refers to the kraken as if it’s the same thing as Architeuthis, the giant squid. This notion, while still popular, is not consistent with evidence (Paxton 2004, Naish 2017). Tim Dinsdale’s famous Loch Ness film of 1960 is not “waves plus a little imagination”, as France states (p. 181), but a boat. It is also wrong to state that lake monsters (like the Loch Ness Monster) are “known to [be] misidentified natural phenomena” (p. 173) and to cite ‘Binns 2017’ as if this is what Binns (2017) is all about: sure, misidentified natural phenomena have contributed to belief in lake monsters, but they don’t provide ‘the’ explanation given that there are lake monster sightings that involve known animal species, boats and so on. Binns (2017), incidentally, was reviewed here at TetZoo.

A curious aside concerns a case irrelevant to France’s entanglement hypothesis, this being Captain Hanna’s mystery fish of 1880. Hanna’s fish has variously been considered a mysterious long-bodied chondrichthyan (Heuvelmans 1968), a possible new species of long-bodied teleost (Roesch 1997; though note that a modern Ben Speers-Roesch does not support this idea) or an oarfish. France (2019) considers the last of these suggestions correct, the fish being “clearly recognizable” as a member of this species (p. 241). In the same section of text, France also notes that Frilled sharks Chlamydoselachus anguineus are sufficiently monster-like that a sighting of a live one near the sea surface “would be all that it would take to raise the cry of ‘sea serpent!’” (p. 242). More exciting is that France (2019) takes seriously the suggestion (made in an online 2015 National Geographic article) that “an 8 metre-long related animal was caught in 1880” (p. 242), the implication being that giant frilled sharks might be out there and awaiting discovery. That’s not altogether ridiculous given the recent discovery that Goblin sharks Mitsukurina owstoni - long assumed to not exceed 1.5 metres in total length - have been shown to sometimes exceed 6 metres in total length (Parsons et al. 2002). But there’s some confusion here: the 1880 ‘related animal’ is one and the same as Captain Hanna’s mystery fish!

Caption: S. W. Hanna’s sketch of the giant mystery fish - 7.6 m long - captured in a net off New Harbor, Maine, in 1880. Most books on sea monsters mention or discuss this animal, most frequently with the (frankly very silly) idea that it might have been a giant serpentine shark. Image: public domain.

My biggest gripe concerns the book’s editing. Alas, this otherwise fine and well-designed book does not appear to have been thoroughly proofed, for conspicuous and often amusing typos abound. Among those I spotted are ‘Huevelmans’ (p. 30, for Heuvelmans), ‘by his by living’ (p. 34, for ‘by his living’), ‘gapping mouth’ (p. 63, for ‘gaping mouth’), ‘sheds her objectively’ (p. 90, for ‘sheds her objectivity’), ‘as to creature’s identity’ (p. 92, missing ‘the’), ‘crypotozoologists’ (p. 141), ‘flour legs’ (p. 161, for ‘four legs’!), ‘pinnepeds’ (p. 169, for ‘pinnipeds’), ‘in in 1809’ (p. 184), ‘Prionace glavca’ (p. 227, it should be P. glauca), ‘more than a three hundred m’ (p. 227), ‘odentocetes’ (p. 228, for ‘odontocetes’), ‘merebeing’ (p. 265, for ‘merbeing’), and ‘preciously here’ (p. 246, for ‘precisely here’). I have to add that the lack of an index is a major and surprising weakness.

Oh, one final complaint, and it’s one that, regretfully, I so often voice in my book reviews: this book is phenomenally expensive. It’s £50 in the UK, €68 in continental Europe, and $77 in the USA. As per usual, the argument here - I suppose - is that it’s meant for institutions and their libraries, and not for individual researchers. Huh.

Caption: France (2019), one of the most important volumes now published on sea monsters, and certainly the most technical. Image: Darren Naish.

These issues aside, Disentangled, then, is a thoroughly worthy and interesting book, and those seriously interested in sea monsters, anthropological use of the sea, marine folklore and marine ecology and pollution should read it. The book itself is dense, with small print and copious black and white illustrations, and I like its design. With the publication of this book, we have entered a new era in our understanding of sea monsters and every subsequent work on the subject will have to cite and mention it. And it is a sad indictment on our species, on our impact on the planet and its other animal species, that the solution to what was long deemed one of nature’s greatest mysteries is resolved as but a deleterious consequence of our unthinking, wasteful and harmful ways.

France, R. L. 2019. Disentangled: Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent. Wageningen Academic Publishers, Wageningen, The Netherlands. pp. 289. ISBN 978-90-8686-335-8. Softback. Refs. Here at publishers. Here at amazon. Here at amazon.co.uk. 

For previous TetZoo articles on sea monsters (and lake monsters too), see… (reminder: articles at ver 2 and 3 are mostly ruined by hosting issues)…

• The Loch Ness monster seen on land, October 2009 (now missing all images due to hosting issues)

• Dear Telegraph: no, I did not say that about the Loch Ness monster, July 2011 (now missing all images due to hosting issues)

• A baby sea-serpent no more: reinterpreting Hagelund’s juvenile Cadborosaurus, September 2011 (now missing all images due to hosting issues)

• The Cadborosaurus Wars, April 2012 (now missing all images due to hosting issues)

• Photos of the Loch Ness Monster, revisited, July 2013 (now stripped of all images, so completely useless)

• Is Cryptozoology Good or Bad for Science? (review of Loxton & Prothero 2013), September 2014 (now stripped of all images)

• My New Book Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths, February 2016 

• Books on the Loch Ness Monster 1: Ronald Binns’s The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded, March 2019

• Books on the Loch Ness Monster 2: Gareth Williams’s A Monstrous Commotion, March 2019

• Usborne’s All About Monsters, April 2019 

• Sea Monster Sightings and the ‘Plesiosaur Effect’, April 2019

Refs - -

Bauer, H. H. 1982. The Loch Ness monster: public perception and the evidence. Cryptozoology 1, 40-45.

Bauer, H. H. 2002. The case for the Loch Ness “monster”: the scientific evidence. Journal of Scientific Exploration 16, 225-246.

Binns, R. 2017. The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded. Zoilus Press.

France, R. L. 2018. Illustration of an 1857 “sea-serpent” sighting re-interpreted as an early depiction of cetacean entanglement in maritime debris. Archives of Natural History 45, 111-117.

France, R. L. 2019. Disentangled: Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent. Wageningen Academic Publishers, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

Heuvelmans, B. 1968. In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents. Hill and Wang, New York.

Konar, G. 2009. Not your everyday animals: applying Occam’s Razor to cryptozoology. The Scienta Review, MIT.

Loxton, D. & Prothero, D. R. 2013. Abominable Science! Columbia University Press, New York.

Magin, U. 1996. St George without a dragon: Bernard Heuvelmans and the sea serpent. In Moore, S. (ed) Fortean Studies Volume 3. John Brown Publishing (London), pp. 223-234.

Meurger, M. & Gagnon, C. 1988. Lake Monster Traditions: A Cross-Cultural Analysis. Fortean Times. London.

Naish, D. 2017. Hunting Monsters. Arcturus, London.

O’Neill, J. P. 1999. The Great New England Sea Serpent: An Account of Unknown Creatures Sighted by Many Respectable Persons Between 1638 and the Present Day. Down East Books, Camden, Maine.

Parsons, G., Ingram, G. W. & Havard, R. 2002. First record of the goblin shark Mitsukurina owstoni, Jordan (Family Mitsukurinidae) in the Gulf of Mexico. Southeastern Naturalist 1 (2) 189-192.

Paxton, C. G. M. 2004. Giant squids are red herrings: why Architeuthis is an unlikely source of sea monster sightings. The Cryptozoology Review 4 (2), 10-16.

Roesch, B. S. 1997. A review of alleged sea serpent carcasses worldwide (part one – 1648-1880). The Cryptozoology Review 2 (2), 6-27.

Soini, W. 2010. Gloucester’s Sea Serpent. The History Press, Salem, Massachusetts.

Woodley, M. A. 2008. In the Wake of Bernard Heuvelmans. CFZ Press, Bideford.

Woodley, M. A., Naish, D., & McCormick, C. A. 2011. A baby sea-serpent no more: reinterpreting Hagelund’s juvenile “cadborosaur” report. Journal of Scientific Exploration 25, 495-512.

The Sixth TetZooCon

The sixth TetZooCon – the annual TetZoo-themed meeting of people relevant to the TetZooniverse – happened on the weekend of the 19th and 20th October, 2019, and was held at University College London’s The Venue. As predicted, this year’s was the biggest and best so far, and that opinion isn’t just down to me but also to many of the people in attendance. As per usual, this article is going to include a brief review of what went down at the meeting as well as more general thinkings on where TetZooCon is heading and what the future holds.

Caption: TetZooCon 2019 was merchandise heaven… or maybe hell if you wanted to limit your spending. Here’s a shot of just some of the palaeoplushies on sale at Rebecca Groom’s stall. I’m now the proud owner of a Yellow-legged gull. Image: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

Caption: it was a busy event: here’s a scene from the palaeoart workshop. Image: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

My intro out of the way, we were into talks proper, the first being Ellen Coombs’s brilliant review of her work on stranding records of whales and what they tell us about whale distribution, population trends, and biology. Ellen’s recent publications include those on True’s beaked whales Mesoplodon mirus in the Bay of Biscay (Robbins et al. 2019) (recall that I myself was watching beaked whales – albeit not True’s – in the Bay of Biscay back in August) and the life history of Hope, the Blue whale Balaenoptera musculus currently on display in the main entrance hall of London’s Natural History Museum (Trueman et al. 2019).

Caption: Ellen Coombs talks whales at TetZooCon 2019 - a fantastic talk. Image: Darren Naish.

Jack Ashby was next and discussed natural history museums, specifically on biases in what gets put on display. He also focused on various remarkable animals with really interesting histories, including echidnas, walruses and beavers, and finished with a book signing (the first of several). Jack’s book is Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects (Ashby 2017), and very nice it is too. We followed with our roundtable event on dinosaur and pterosaur palaeobiology, involving myself, Chris Barker, Jordan Bestwick, Dave Hone and Rebecca Lakin. Topics covered included the biology of ‘super-powered’ extinct animals, the reliability (or not) of phylogenetic bracketing, the dinosaur sex wars, and the All Yesterdays movement.

Caption: a dinosaur and pterosaur palaeobiology discussion roundtable. It went alright.. Left to right: Chris Barker, Jordan Bestwick, Dave Hone, Rebecca Lakin, Darren Naish. Image: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

Mike Dickison followed up with his ‘What Is a Native Bird?’. Birds in places like New Zealand are conventionally regarded as either ‘native’ or ‘introduced’, but things are actually much more complex and this dichotomous view is not accurate nor representative of historical events. Mike’s talk included diversions on Haast’s eagle and its life appearance and much else. Alice Pawlik discussed Adventures in Native Amphibian Conservation and told us about her work on Pool frog Pelophylax lessonae reintroduction to the UK.

Caption: Mike Dickison’s talk on New Zealand’s birds was full of up-to-the-minute science and surprises from the world of palaeontology and genetics. Image: Darren Naish.

Another excellent talk on extant British wildlife was given by Amy Schwartz who told us about Project Splatter, a citizen science project devoted to the monitoring of roadkill. The project has accrued tens of thousands of records and revealed significant new information on how wildlife is being affected by roads, and which species are being affected in particular. A technical publication on this work is due to appear soon.

Caption: this picture conveys some idea of how much palaeoart-themed stuff there was at TetZooCon 2019. Look: poster boards with actual art, people like Steve White (with glasses, on left), and stands and stalls covered in art for sale. Image: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

Palaeoart at TetZooCon. Two parallel sessions happened after lunch on the Saturday. Away from the main hall, our Palaeoart Workshop occurred, with short talks from Joschua Knüppe, Agata Stachowiak, Rebecca Groom and Jed Taylor. These were followed by a practical session in which people were invited to create art in a given style. As ever, I was unable to attend, so missed out. 3D art was a theme for part of the workshop: Rebecca discussed the making of her palaeoplushies (which, as usual, were on sale this year), Jed spoke about the contruction of theropod models, and Agata’s talk was on the construction of her amazing Megaloceros model. The look of this model is very much inspired by 2018’s TetZoo article on the life appearance of this animal. Several depictions of Megaloceros, actually, are based on the information provided in that article. I’ll write about them here, in time. Finally as goes the palaeoart session, Joschua spoke about his #Paleostream project.

Caption: I absolutely adore Agata Stachowiak’s Megaloceros model, and was extremely pleased to see it at TetZooCon 2019. Images: Darren Naish.

I should add that palaeoart was a major theme of this year’s TetZooCon. We not only had a ton of palaeoart-themed stalls, we also had an evening event on the Saturday – featuring, in cases, original art (Luis Rey’s many originals being especially memorable) – as well as a set of models and a diorama brought along by film-maker Paul Glynn.

Caption: Luis Rey original artwork was on show at TetZooCon 2019 (actual, physical, painted artwork). Luis himself appears in the image at right. Images: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

Caption: a small section of Paul Glynn’s excellent and enormous Cretaceous diorama. We hope to see more of Paul’s models and model landscapes at future events. Image: Darren Naish.

Several of our palaeoartists sold and signed books. Luis’s new book is Extreme Dinosaurs 2: the Projects, Steve White’s is Thunder Lizard: The Art of Steve White, and James McKay’s is Trilobites, Dinosaurs and Mammoths: An Introduction to the Prehistory of the British Isles. Mark Witton was also selling copies of The Palaeoartist’s Handbook, and Gareth Monger A Disarray of Palaeoart. John bought along a stack of All Yesterdays to sell but, as usual, forgot about them and left them under a table or something.

Caption: more artwork: a John Conway print of a mega-giant Barosaurus standing alongside other dinosaurs. Some of you will know that this image is based on finds discussed over at SV-POW! Image: Darren Naish.

Having mentioned stalls, I must also add that Dougal Dixon was in attendance as were Breakdown Press (publishers of the new edition of After Man), so here was a chance to get signed copies of Dougal’s books. I’m extremely happy to have Dougal as a guest at TetZooCon, and the word on the street is that he’ll be in attendance next year too.

Caption: Dougal Dixon (at left) and Tom of Breakdown Press, both selling books. Image: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

Natural History Film-Making. Meanwhile, an entire afternoon dedicated to natural history film-making occurred in the main hall. Amber Eames spoke about her award-winning film Swans: Mystery of the Missing, dedicated to the plight and decline of Europe’s Bewick’s swans Cygnus bewickii. This was followed by a roundtable event involving several members of the BBC Natural History Unit, namely Paul Stewart, Nick Lyon, Zoe Cousins and Amber Eames again. I asked Paul questions about my favourite TetZoo-relevant TV series – 1992’s The Velvet Claw – before talking to him about his work on birds-of-paradise and bowerbirds (the newest of which is featured in the brand-new Netflix show Dancing With the Birds) and the iguanas vs snakes segment from Galapagos. Nick and I mostly discussed Dynasties (Nick was director and producer of the wild dogs episode), Zoe and I spoke about her films on pigeons, squirrels, wildcats and Australia, and Amber and I spoke about swans.

Caption: Amber Eames talks about Swans: Mystery of the Missing at TetZooCon 2019. Image: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

Everyone was then involved in some general questions about natural history film-making and things were then opened things up to the floor. We watched Jedi chipmunks, the opening sequence of episode 1 of The Velvet Claw, and some raw background footage from the field, provided by Nick. It was a brilliant event if I say so myself.

Caption: participants in the Natural History film-making discussion event. Left to right: Nick Lyon, Paul Stewart, Zoe Cousins, Amber Eames, Darren Naish. Image: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

Dinosaur and Pterosaur Palaeobiology. Sunday morning opened with a block of talks on dinosaur and pterosaur palaeobiology (Mike Dickison also ran a workshop on Wikipedia as a parallel session). Chris Barker looked at palaeopathologies in fossil theropods and wondered if the ever-present threat of predation might have a psychological and even physical impact on prey species (yes, there’s science behind this somewhat radical idea). He was followed by Dave Hone, who looked at the terminology we use when talking about dinosaur behaviour and ontogeny, the main takehome being that things aren’t as specific as they should be and that more precision is needed.

Caption: Jordan Bestwick spoke about his PhD work, soon to appear in print. Image: Darren Naish.

Rebecca Lakin was next, and discussed her research on reproductive strategies in dinosaurs and other archosaurs, and the session finished with Jordan Bestwick, who discussed his work on how tooth morphology and microwear can be informative with respect to diet and lifestyle. Jordan’s results are exciting and shed much light on pterosaur feeding ecology. The more intriguing and novel of the results can’t be shared yet and we look forward to this work being published soon.

Caption: Rebecca Lakin at TetZooCon 2019, another excellent talk. Image: Darren Naish.

Of Eagles, The Missing Lynx, and Life After Walking With Dinosaurs. My personal highlight of the entire meeting was Lauren McGough’s ‘When Eagles Go Bad!’. That title is a homage to the very first TetZooCon article, published way back in 2006. An experienced falconer since her teenage years, Lauren has flown Golden eagles Aquila chrysaetos in Mongolia, and used this knowledge to learn about eagle-primate interactions in Africa and rehabilitate injured Crowned eagles Stephanoaetus coronatus in South Africa. Her descriptions of eagle behaviour, predatory power, anatomy and ferocity were phenomenal and I can’t stop thinking about them. It’s a great honour to have any speaker at TetZooCon, but hosting Lauren at the event feels like an especially great honour since her research and adventures have been so integral to much of what I’ve written about and thought about since instigating this whole TetZoo thing more than a decade ago. To top it all, Lauren herself is something of a TetZoo fan; what a thrill.

Caption: Lauren McGough, eagle expert and all-round superstar. Image: Darren Naish.

Following Lauren was palaeomammalogist and ancient DNA researcher Ross Barnett. Ross’s work spans an enormous number of animals living and extinct, but I think it’s fair to say that he’s best known for his studies of lions and sabretooths.  His talk at TetZooCon was a broad-bush take on Britain’s lost mammal fauna as reviewed in his new book The Missing Lynx (Barnett 2019). He spoke about hyenas, cave bears, beavers, lynxes and rewilding and the potential for future change and reintroduction. Ross’s talk was followed by a signing event and very successful it was too.

Caption: the crowning achievement of Ross Barnett’s career, surely: having his research written about in The Daily Mash. Such accolade. Image: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

The final talk of the day was by Tim Haines and discussed the ups and downs of ‘digital dinosaur’ projects, namely Walking With Dinosaurs, Sea Monsters, Walking With Beasts and so on. It was titled ’20 Years Since Walking With Dinosaurs’, and the timing was pretty uncanny since October 2020 is almost exactly twenty years since Walking With Dinosaurs first aired. Regular readers might know that I’ve had a long-term involvement in Tim’s projects, initially because my PhD supervisor (Dave Martill) was one of WWD’s consultants. This relationship led to Dave and I’s co-authoring of Walking With Dinosaurs: The Evidence (Martill & Naish 2000), and ultimately to my stint at Impossible Pictures and more recently to my involvement in Dinosaurs In The Wild. It was obvious from our audience’s reaction that Tim had a pretty substantial fanbase at TetZooCon and that his talk was both well-received and much anticipated.

Caption: Tim Haines - with assistant - talks digital dinosaur projects at TetZooCon 2019. Image: Georgia Witton-Maclean.

The Denouement. Talks out of the way, we ended with the famous/infamous quiz, this year won by Richard Hing. Albert Chen and Kelvin Britton were joint runners-up. Prizes included a fantastic array of top-notch animal models provided by our friends and supporters at Everything Dinosaur, not least of which was the brand-new Rebor Komodo dragon, as well as various books, art prints, some leftovers from Dinosaurs in the Wild and a mystery gift in an envelope which was definitely not a dead rat.

And that was that. We had a conference meal later on the Sunday evening, went drinking afterwards, and a bunch of us went on a Monday fieldtrip to ZSL London Zoo, all of which was great.

Caption: a selection of great animals seen at ZSL London Zoo on our post-TetZooCon field trip (clockwise from top left: Dumeril’s salamander, Galapagos giant tortoise, Splendid sunbird, Pygmy hippo). Images: Darren Naish.

Despite a few hiccups, TetZooCon 2019 ran smoothly overall and seems to have been enjoyed by everyone who attended. We had a good contingent of friends from the continent and even several North Americans: thank you all so much for coming! And I’m pleased that things worked out despite our venue – The Venue – double-booking the room and messing us around at the last minute. As ever, we really do need a different venue, but we haven’t yet succeeded in getting one that gives us what we need and is affordable.

Caption: he is the One and Only John Conway. Allegedly.

It only leaves me to say huge and heartfelt thanks to everyone who assisted or attended or helped: to John, Jenny, Will, Tilly and Arty for help, to Kate and Alice for chairing sessions, to Georgia for photography, to Everything Dinosaur, Sheila, Dinosaurs in the Wild, Johan, Mark and others for donating gifts for the quiz, to all our amazing speakers and presenters, to everyone who staffed stalls and sold things, and to all our attendees. As per usual, we aim for next year to be bigger and better!

Several reviews of TetZooCon 2019 have already appeared online…

• TETZOOCON 2019 – DAY 1 at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs

• TetZoo.Con 2019… a throwback to better times looking into​ the future at Luis V. Rey Updates Blog

• TetZooCon 2019 at Talita Bateman’s blog

• #SciFri: TetZooCon 2019 at Steve’s Herpetological Blog

 For previous TetZoo articles on TetZooCon meetings, see…

• The events of TetZooCon 2014, July 2014

• TetZooCon 2015 Is On, July 2015

• The Events of TetZooCon 2015, November 2015

• Coming Soon: TetZooCon 2016, September 2016

• The Day After TetZooCon, October 2016

• The Fourth TetZooCon, September 2017

• The TetZooCon of 2017, October 2017

• Reasons to Attend TetZooCon 2018, September 2018

• TetZooCon 2018: Best TetZooCon So Far, October 2018

• Announcing TetZooCon 2019 – the Biggest Yet, August 2019

• Final Call For TetZooCon 2019, October 2019

 Refs - -

Ashby, J. 2017. Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects. History Press, Cheltenham.

Barnett, R. 2019. The Missing Lynx: the Past and Future of Britain’s Lost Mammals. Bloomsbury, London.

Martill, D. M. & Naish, D. 2000. Walking With Dinosaurs: The Evidence. BBC Worldwide, London.

Robbins, J. R., Park, T. & Coombs, E. J. 2019. Supernumerary teeth observed in a live True’s beaked whale in the Bay of Biscay. PeerJ 7:e7809.

Trueman, C. N., Jackson, A. L., Chadwick, K. S., Coombs, E. J., Feyrer, L. J., Magozzi, S., Sabin, R. C. & Cooper, N. 2019. Combining simulation modeling and stable isotope analyses to reconstruct the last known movements of one of Nature’s giants. PeerJ 7:e7912.

Final Call For TetZooCon 2019

It’s time to remind you once more that TetZooCon 2019 – the sixth Tetrapod Zoology Convention – is happening on the 19th and 20th October, and this is essentially your last chance to book a place*, should you wish to come along….

Caption: scenes from TetZooCon 2018, our biggest and best meeting so far. The 2019 meeting is shaping up to be bigger and better. To those not attending, watch #TetZooCon for live coverage. Image: JCTArtStudio/Jed Taylor.

TetZooCon 2019 is, as per the last two years, happening at The Venue, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London, a difference for this year being that we’re on a different floor from previous meetings and have more rooms in addition to the main hall.

* We don’t send out paper tickets; your name is added to a list.

If you’re seriously interested in prehistoric animals and their evolution, biology and behaviour, in palaeoart and in artistic depictions of animals in general, in the anatomy, ecology, behaviour and biology of such animals as swans, eagles, whales and amphibians, in human-wildlife interactions, in conservation biology, and in natural history film-making, you really should come along. Our talks and on-stage events this year are on a diverse range of tetrapod-themed subjects, but there’s a block on natural history film-making – featuring a range of very talented people from the BBC’s famous Natural History Unit – and another on the palaeobiology of extinct dinosaurs.

Caption: I went over to Instagram and…. here’s proof that things are really coming along with respect to merchandise for TetZooCon 2019. These are Rebecca Groom’s palaeoplushies. In previous years, they’ve all sold out within the first few hours of the meeting! Images: Rebecca Groom/palaeoplushies.

Caption: Jed Taylor is going to knock it out of the park this year, his stuff looks incredible. Here’s a shot of some of his merchandise. Image: JCTArtStudio/Jed Taylor.

As per usual, there’s a special palaeoart event led by John Conway (and running in parallel to part of the main event, sorry about that). This includes several talks by palaeoartists, the main theme of this year’s talks being the 3D construction of models. And – breaking news – it now looks like we’re hosting a big, dedicated palaeoart exhibition as well, featuring art by some of the UK’s leading palaeoartists. It should be hosted in its own special room.

Caption: this year is the 20th anniversary of the screening of Walking With Dinosaurs, so it’s especially fitting that Tim Haines - at far right in this image, with your humble blog-author - will be speaking at TetZooCon.

Merchandise, stalls, book signings and palaeoart wares are also a standard part of TetZooCon. Book signings this year include those devoted to Dave Hone’s The Tyrannosaur Chronicles, Jack Ashby’s Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects, Joschua Knüppe’s Palaeostream book, Luis Rey’s Extreme Dinosaurs Part 2: the Projects and Ross Barnett’s The Missing Lynx. Dougal Dixon’s After Man will also be on sale, and I’m pleased to say that Dougal himself will be in attendance on the Saturday.

Caption: Luis Rey’s brand-new book will be on sale at TetZooCon 2019. Image: (c) Luis Rey/Darren Naish.

TetZooCon ends with a quiz and a post-conference meal.

So that’s that, we look forward to seeing you in London in late October. For the first time, attendees can choose to buy a booking for one day only; there isn’t one flat fee for the whole event. The booking site includes more information, a list of speakers, and a draft timetable. If you’re on Twitter and/or Instagram, follow events at #TetZooCon. See you there!

For previous articles on TetZooCon meetings, see…

• The events of TetZooCon 2014, July 2014

• TetZooCon 2015 Is On, July 2015

• The Events of TetZooCon 2015, November 2015

• Coming Soon: TetZooCon 2016, September 2016

• The Day After TetZooCon, October 2016

• The Fourth TetZooCon, September 2017

• The TetZooCon of 2017, October 2017

• Reasons to Attend TetZooCon 2018, September 2018

• TetZooCon 2018: Best TetZooCon So Far, October 2018

• Announcing TetZooCon 2019 – the Biggest Yet, August 2019

Extreme Cetaceans, Part 2

Recall the recent article about ‘extreme cetaceans’? Well, here’s the second one in the series.

Spectacled porpoise. Porpoises – the seven* species of the delphinoid family Phocoenidae – are small, short-beaked cetaceans that mostly live fairly cryptic lives in shallow coastal seas (this description applies to the living species: some fossil porpoises were comparatively large and long-beaked). The species that typifies the group – the Harbour porpoise Phocoena phocoena – is greyish (except for its white belly), has a low, triangular dorsal fin and is not especially charismatic.

* I’ve followed recent taxonomic decisions and am recognising two species within Neophocaena (N. phocaenoides and N. asiaeorientalis).

Caption: Phocoena phocoena, the archtypical member of Phocoenidae. Image: Erik Christensen, CC BY-SA 3.0 (original here).

But other porpoises are rather different, and here we’re going to look at a far more flamboyant species, namely the Spectacled porpoise P. dioptrica of the cool and cold waters of the sub-Antarctic and Antarctic seas. This is a very poorly known species, and one of the things said about it most often is that just about nothing is known about it. It’s a 20th century discovery, its scientific debut occurring in 1912.

This species is remarkably pigmented relative to other Phocoena porpoises, being black dorsally, white ventrally, and with dark circles around its eyes. There have actually been a bunch of competing ideas on its exact appearance over the years, authors and artists disagreeing with respect to where the boundary between its dark and white areas are, what colour its flippers and tail flukes are, and so on. It’s distinct enough from the other Phocoena species that some authors have preferred to keep it in its own genus (Australophocoena), but this isn’t fashionable at the moment due to molecular data on its phylogenetic position. The suggestion has even been made that its pattern and colouring give it the ability to mimic killer whales and thus avoid predation. Cool idea, buuuut…. unlikely given that porpoises are so distinct from killer whales in size and surely in vocalisations and in the echolocatory signature that predatory cetaceans use when evaluating potential prey.

Caption: Spectacled porpoises photographed in the wild, in the Southern Ocean, in 2001. A male is at back, an adult female is closest to us, and a calf is in the middle. Image: Sekiguchi et al. (2006).

The Spectacled porpoise isn’t just remarkable for its pigmentation, however, but also for its shape, and in particular for its dorsal fin. This is ‘normal’ in some individuals, but disproportionally large – strangely so – in some individuals where it looks like an out-sized rounded flag projecting upwards and backwards at a size about twice or three times that you might predict. Like the keels, humps and unusual dorsal fins of some spinner dolphins (see the previous article in this series), this is a sexually dimorphic feature that’s especially exaggerated in mature males. Its presence is therefore presumably a sociosexual indicator of age and sexual status. Another odd thing about the dorsal fin (albeit one not unique to this species within porpoises as a whole) is that there are tiny tubercles along the leading edge (Evans et al. 2001), albeit seemingly not in all individuals. Dorsal fin tubercles are actually known for all porpoises – they’re weird and interesting and I’ll try to remember to come back to them in another article.

Caption: male, female and juvenile Spectacled porpoise, as illustrated by Uko Gorter for Natalie et al. (2018). The remarkable size of the male’s dorsal fin is obvious. Image: (c) Uko Gorter/Natalie et al. (2018).

This giant dorsal fin isn’t a newly discovered feature – it was reported and illustrated as far back as 1916 (Bruch 1916) – but it hasn’t ben commented upon as often as it might, especially given that it’s one of the most pronounced expressions of sexual dimorphism in cetaceans. Indeed, as Ellis (1983) noted, “only the killer whale manifests such a difference in the dorsal fin” (p. 198); sexual dimorphism of the dorsal fin is known in other porpoises, but isn’t as extreme as it is here (Torre et al. 2014). Apart from the fact that it’s obvious, and looks fairly absurd in the older males that have it, we don’t know much about this fin or its function. Maybe it’s ‘just’ a visual signal of sex, maturity and (perhaps) health and condition. Maybe – recall the comments in the previous article about dorsal fins functioning as thermal windows – it also plays an important physiological role. Whatever it does, it makes this an ‘extreme’ cetacean; an animal that looks surprising, weird and flamboyant.

Caption: I’m going to build a montage of the extreme cetaceans discussed in this series. This image will become more cluttered over time. Image: Darren Naish.

Finally — there’s a adoption scheme for the Spectacled porpoise. Adopt one yourself and aid in the conservation of this poorly known species.

More in this series soon. Here’s some of the stuff on cetaceans that exists in the archives (as always, much of the material at TetZoo versions 2 and 3 has been ruined by the removal of images, though remember that much or all of this is archived at Wayback Machine)…

• A 6 ton model, and a baby that puts on 90 kg a day: rorquals part I, October 2006

• From cigar to elongated, bloated tadpole: rorquals part II, October 2006

• Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III, October 2006

• On identifying a dolphin skull, July 2008 (all images now missing)

• Seriously frickin' weird cetacean skulls: Kogia, shark-mouthed horror, July 2008 (all images now missing)

• Scaphokogia!, July 2008 (all images now missing)

• Cetacean Heresies: How the Chromatic Truthometer Busts the Monochromatic Paradigm, April 2015 (but now lacking all images)

• Remembering Lyall Watson’s Whales of the World, June 2019 

• Whale Watching in the Bay of Biscay, August 2019

• Extreme Cetaceans, Part 1, September 2019

If you enjoyed this article and want to see me do more, more often, please consider supporting me at patreon. The more funding I receive, the more time I’m able to devote to producing material for TetZoo and the more productive I can be on those long-overdue book projects. Thanks!

Refs - -

Bruch, C. 1916. El macho de Phocaena dioptrica Lah. Physis, 2461-2462.

Ellis, R. 1983. Dolphins and Porpoises. Robert Hale, London.

Evans, K., Kemper, C. & Hill, M. 2001. First records of the Spectacled porpoise Phocoena dioptrica in continental Australian waters. Marine Mammal Science 17, 161-170.

Natalie, R., Goodall, P. & Brownell, R. L. 2018. Spectacled Porpoise. In Würsig, B., Thewissen, J B. M. & Kovacs, K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, Academic Press, pp. 912-916.

Sekiguchi, K., Olavarría, C., Morse, L., Olson, P., Ensor, P., Matsuoka, K., Pitman, R., Findlay, K. & Gorter, U. 2006. The spectacled porpoise (Phocoena dioptrica) in Antarctic waters. Journal of Cetacean Research and Management 8, 265-271.

Torre, J., Vidal, O. & Brownell, R. L. 2014. Sexual dimorphism and developmental patterns in the external morphology of the vaquita, Phocoena sinus. Marine Mammal Science 30, 1285-1296.

Extreme Cetaceans, Part 1

It was while going through my read all the books on the whales of the world phase of the early 1990s, I remember, that I first read of the dolphins – members of the highly streamlined, long-beaked, oceanic dolphin group no less – that have such weird features as deep keels, humps on the back and tailstock, and non-streamlined, forward-canted dorsal fins. Yes, we all know that whales are streamlined, torpedo-shaped animals with sensibly shaped appendages, but they’re not all like this. Quite a few species are weird, possessing anatomical specialisations and peculiarities that are counter-intuitive and little discussed, and most likely related to an unusual ecology, physiological regime, feeding strategy or social or sexual life.

Caption: a nice, normal looking group of Spinner dolphins. The obvious dark cape and paler side regions make these look like Hawaiian spinners but they were apparently photographed in the Red Sea. Image: Alexander Vasenin, CC BY-SA 3.0, wikipedia (original here).

In this short series of articles – yeah, this is Part 1 – I want to talk about just a few such animals, and I hope you’ll be as surprised by their anatomy and specialisations as I was when I first learnt about them.

Extreme spinners. Everybody knows that dolphins are streamlined, and the oceanic long-beaked dolphins (those conventionally united in the genus Stenella) are streamlined the most. The Spinner S. longirostris – a species that occurs throughout the tropical and subtropical marine waters of the world – is one such animal, its very long beak, torpedo-shaped body and tailstock and well-proportioned fins all appearing like textbook adaptations for swift movement in the pelagic environment. Yet for all this, some spinner dolphins – some specific individuals belonging to some specific populations – are very odd indeed.

Caption: one of the very best depictions of an ‘extreme’ male Eastern spinner is this one, from Shirahai & Jarrett’s 2006 Whales, Dolphins and Seals. Image: (c) Brett Jarrett.

These animals have arching dorsal humps and massive, bulbous ventral convexities on the tailstock which give them a peculiarly asymmetrical, lumpy appearance, the dorsal fin is not recurved and falcate, but has a straight or even concave anterior margin such that it might even lean forwards, and the tail flukes turn upwards at their outer edges. The exaggerated lump on the lower surface of the tailstock has a name: it’s the post-anal hump. This structure isn’t unique to the Spinner but is also present in other delphinids, like the Delphinus species. It appears to be sexually dimorphic and is especially prominent in mature males (Ngqulana et al. 2017). Perrin & Mesnick (2003) argued that these features - which are variable in spinner populations and most strongly developed in the so-called Eastern and Whitebelly spinners - are linked to testis size and to a polygynous mating system where males need to be highly distinct from their many female consorts, and built to display against, and fight with, other males. In other words, the most ‘extreme’ spinners are the most polygynous.

Caption: adult males differ in appearance across spinner populations, and it seems that the most ‘extreme’ males are those from the most polygynous populations. This diagram (from Perrin & Mesnick 2003) shows - from top to bottom - male Hawaiian, Eastern and ‘whitebelly’ spinners. Image: Perrin & Mesnick (2003).

How and why might this remarkable feature have originated? Spinners and other cetaceans adopt a sinuous, vaguely S-shaped profile when displaying to one another (this has now been seen in diverse cetaceans, mysticetes as well as odontocetes; Helweg et al. 1992, Horback et al. 2010), and one suggestion is that the post-anal hump and a matching convexity on the dorsal surface of the tailstock might serve to accentuate the curves of the S and thereby function in exaggerating this signal. One idea about the S-shaped pose is that it functions in shark mimicry (Norris et al. 1985; some sharks also adopt an S-shaped profile and use it to signal aggressive intentions), but the fact that it’s as widespread in cetaceans as it is – and similar poses are seen in other aquatic vertebrates – indicates that any similarities with non-cetaceans are convergent.

Caption: S-shaped postures, depicted (sometimes schematically) in cetaceans of very different sizes and proportions, from Horback et al. (2010). (A) Spinner dolphin, (B) Beluga, (C) Humpback whale. Evolve dorsal and ventral convexities on the body and tailstock, and you can exaggerate the intensity of this signal. Image: Horback et al. (2010).

Anyway… the features discussed here appear intuitively odd because they’re just about the opposite of what you’d predict to be present in a fast-swimming, pelagic predator which has otherwise evolved to be ultra-streamlined. But there you are.

Caption: humpback dolphins are not especially well known, and even less well known is that they’re kept in captivity in a few places and have been trained to do tricks. This individual was photographed in captivity in Singapore. Image: Tolomea, CC BY 2.0, wikipedia (original here).

The humpback dolphins. Everyone’s heard of the Humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae, but less well known is that there are dolphins with humps too, perhaps four species of them if you follow some studies of molecular variation within the group (the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin Sousa chinensis, Australian humpback dolphin S. sahulensis, Atlantic humpback dolphin S. teuszii and Indian Ocean humpback dolphin S. plumbea). Superficially, Sousa dolphins look something like bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops), and like them they’re coastal animals that prey on diverse fishes and cephalopods. Unlike the Tursiops dolphins, the Sousa species have a long raised section – sitting dorsal to the neural spines and musculature of the back – that extends along the middle part of the dorsal surface. The dorsal fin sits on top of this hump.

Caption: comparatively few people know that there are dolphins with humps, but check it out. These are Tom Ritchie’s illustrations of Sousa dolphins, representing adult males identified by Watson (1981) as S. chinensis (above) and S. teuszii (below). Images: Watson 1981.

The function of this hump – if it has one – is not well studied and authors have mostly avoided mentioning the possibility that it might have one. Does it function as a visual or acoustic signal of maturity? Does it have some role in buoyancy, hydrodynamics or streamlining? Is it a fat store? The dorsal fins of at least some cetaceans appear to function as so-called thermal windows: as heat-dumping structures, the large and extensive blood vessels of which carry cooled blood to the body interior (Meagher et al. 2002). In males, this cool blood helps lower the temperature of the deeply internal testes (Pabst et al. 1995), which might otherwise be prone to overheating. The humps of humpbacked dolphins, like the dorsal fins, appear to be richly innervated with blood vessels which again transport cooled blood from the animal’s exterior surface to deep within its body (Plön et al. 2018).

Caption: (A) vasculature in the dorsal fin and hump of a humpback dolphin compared with (B) dorsal fin vasculature in a Tursiops dolphin. The blood vessels in Tursiops are proportionally larger, but there’s a great number of them in the humpback dolphin, thanks to the hump. Image: Plön et al. 2018.

Could the hump therefore be a thermoregulatory specialisation for this mostly tropical group? Further research is needed, but this could be consistent with the fact that the hump is proportionally largest in adult males, and perhaps proportionally largest in those populations that inhabit the most tropical parts of Sousa’s entire range. A hydrodynamic role for the hump remains plausible but has yet to be investigated (Plön et al. 2018).

And that’s where we’ll end things for now. More in this series soon. I’ll publish a lot more on whales here in the future, but here’s some of the stuff that exists in the archives (as always, much of the material at TetZoo versions 2 and 3 has been ruined by the removal of images)…

• A 6 ton model, and a baby that puts on 90 kg a day: rorquals part I, October 2006

• From cigar to elongated, bloated tadpole: rorquals part II, October 2006

• Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III, October 2006

• On identifying a dolphin skull, July 2008 (all images now missing)

• Seriously frickin' weird cetacean skulls: Kogia, shark-mouthed horror, July 2008 (all images now missing)

• Scaphokogia!, July 2008 (all images now missing)

• Cetacean Heresies: How the Chromatic Truthometer Busts the Monochromatic Paradigm, April 2015 (but now lacking all images)

• Remembering Lyall Watson’s Whales of the World, June 2019 

• Whale Watching in the Bay of Biscay, August 2019

If you enjoyed this article and want to see me do more, more often, please consider supporting me at patreon. The more funding I receive, the more time I’m able to devote to producing material for TetZoo and the more productive I can be on those long-overdue book projects. Thanks!

Refs - -

Helweg, D. A., Bauer, G. B. & Herman, L. M. 1992. Observations of an S-shaped posture in humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). Aquatic Mammals 18.3, 74-78.

Horback, K. M., Friedman, W. R. & Johnson, C. M. 2010. The occurrence and context of S-posture display by captive belugas (Delphinapterus leucas). International Journal of Comparative Psychology 23, 689-700.

Meagher, E. M., McLellan, W. A., Westgate, A. J., Wells, R. S., Frierson, D. Jr. & Pabst, D. A.. 2002. The relationship between heat flow and vasculature in the dorsal fin of wild bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus. Journal of Experimental Biology 205, 3475-3486.

Pabst, D. A., Rommel, S. A., McLellan, W. A., Williams, T. M. & Rowles, T. K. 1995. Thermoregulation of the intra-abdominal testes of the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) during exercise. Journal of Experimental Biology 198, 221-226.

Norris, K. S., Wursig, B., Wells, R. S., Wursig, M., Brownlee, S. M., Johnson, C. & Solow, J. 1985. Behavior of the Hawaiian spinner dolphin, Stenella longirostris. National Marine Fisheries Service Administrative Report LJ-85-06C.

Ngqulana, S. G., Hofmeyr, G. J. G. & Plön, S. 2017. Sexual dimorphism in long-beaked common dolphins (Delphinus capensis) from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Journal of Mammalogy 98, 1389-1399.

Perrin, W. F. & Mesnick, S. L. 2003. Sexual ecology of the Spinner dolphin, Stenella longirostris: geographic variation in mating system. Marine Mammal Science 19, 462-483.

Plön, S., Frainer, G., Wedderburn-Maxwell, A., Cliff, G. & Huggenberger, S. 2018. Dorsal fin and hump vascular anatomy in the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin (Sousa plumbea) and the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus). Marine Mammal Science 35, 684-695.

Shirihai, H. & Jarrett, B. 2006. Whales, Dolphin and Seals: a Field Guide to the Marine Mammals of the World. A & C Black, London.

Watson, L. 1981. Whales of the World. Hutchinson, London.

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

Many of us interested in the more arcane side of natural history will be aware of that body of literature that seeks to explain the biology, behaviour and history of living things within the words of a complex, multi-authored work known as The Bible. I refer of course to the creationist literature; to that number of books and articles whose authors contend that animals known from fossils simply must accord with the stories and descriptions of the Bible, and whose authors furthermore contend that the Earth and its inhabitants must have come into being within the last few thousand years.

Caption: a smouldering Parasaurolophus: the cover art for the book, by Leandra Walters. Image: (c) Leandra Walters/Senter (2019).

Creationist authors – the most familiar include Ken Ham, Kent Hovind and Duane Gish – have argued that non-bird dinosaurs and other fossil animals were inhabitants of the Garden of Eden, that predatory species like Tyrannosaurus rex ate water melons and sugarcane before The Fall, that humans and animals like Tyrannosaurus lived alongside one another during the early days of the Earth’s creation, that evolution cannot have happened, except when it did as species emerged from their different ancestral kind (or baramins), and that animals like Tanystropheus, tyrannosaurs and pterosaurs were seen and written about by people, and are responsible for the mythological creatures mentioned or described in the Bible and other ancient texts. Leviathan and Behemoth of The Bible, Grendel of the medieval epic Beowolf, the fire-breathing dragons of the Middle Ages and so on must – creationist authors contend – be descriptions of human encounters with giant reptiles otherwise known as fossils. And, yes: you read that right… creationist authors have argued, apparently seriously, that fire-breathing dragons must be descriptions of encounters with animals like dinosaurs and pterosaurs. So… they… breathed fire, then.

Caption: the Bible specifically states that the first few books of the Old Testament are not meant to be taken literally. Despite this, a number of Young Earth creationists promote a view of the ancient world where people lived alongside allosaurs and pterosaurs and so on. If you’ve seen a version of this page mentioning lemonade and homosexuality, it’s a spoof (the original text does not include that section of text). Image: (c) Ken Ham, Dinosaurs of Eden.

Over the past several years, Fayetteville State University biologist and palaeontologist Philip J. Senter has published a great many technical scientific articles evaluating the various claims and models of creationist authors; some of his articles are short-form versions of the text included in this new book (cf Senter 2017). His approach is to accept their proposals as valid scientific hypotheses, and not to knock, mock or discount them out of hand from the start. Remember that point; we’ll be coming back to it. This approach means that creationist claims can be considered tested in the empirical sense. It should also be noted that Senter is an Orthodox Christian with qualifications in theology, so his sympathetic and scientifically ‘honest’ approach to creationist claims should not and cannot reasonably be taken as any sort of attack on the Christian faith that the relevant creationists are part of. The fact that Senter is himself religious mean that he can make the argument (should he wish to) that the bad calls and bs put out by creationists is not just ‘bad science’ but ‘bad religion’, too. I’ve heard the same argument from other scientists who maintain an active religious life.

Caption: the book reviewed here is not the first time Senter has written about the ‘fire-breathing dinosaurs’ idea. Image: (c) Skeptical Inquirer.

For completion, and for those who don’t know, I should add that Senter is also an experienced and prolific author of studies devoted to more conventional palaeontological fare: descriptions of new dinosaur species, analyses of phylogenetic patterns, interpretations of functional morphology, and so on. The technical papers of his that I’ve found most useful and interesting include Senter et al. (2004) and Senter (2007) on dinosaur phylogeny, Senter (2006, 2009) on palaeobiology, and Senter (2005), Senter & Robins (2005), Senter & Parrish (2005) and Bonnan & Senter (2007) on dinosaur functional morphology.

Caption: the handsome cover of Senter (2019).

The early chapters of this book evaluate and discuss the creationist contention in general and the relatively young history of the entire movement. The impact of John Whitcomb and Henry Morris’s 1961 book The Genesis Flood is obvious, as is the fact that their arguments fail evaluation (Senter 2019). Nevertheless, their influence was such that – from the early 1970s onwards – a number of like-minded individuals were promoting Whitcomb and Morris’s vision, and were in particular arguing that ancient and medieval writings and works of art make explicit reference to dinosaurs and other long-extinct animals. Senter (2019) uses the term apnotheriopia (meaning ‘dead beast vision’) to describe the tendency of creationist author to interpret monsters in literature and art as long-extinct reptiles.

If apnotheriopia is one of your guiding principles, it ‘follows’ that the fire-breathing dragons canonical to Eurocentric, Christian mythology should be interpreted as dinosaurs or similar reptiles, and that such creatures were dragonesque fire-breathers. So integral has the whole fire-breathing thing been to these authors that they’ve proposed fire-breathing for dinosaurs of several sorts (most frequently hadrosaurs) as well as for pterosaurs and the giant Cretaceous crocodyliform Sarcosuchus (Senter 2019). You might know of one or two cases in which this idea has been mooted. Senter’s book shows that numerous authors have engaged with this vision and written about it. The sheer quantity of this literature is daunting – I was going to say ‘impressive’ but this absolutely seems like the wrong word – and Senter has clearly gone to some considerable trouble to obtain it. He must own a pretty hefty personal library of creationist volumes, and I’m reminded of a statement he makes in one of his papers, wherein he notes that collecting and reading creationist literature on dinosaurs and other extinct animals is one of his “guilty pleasures”.

Caption: some creationist authors have argued that certain dinosaurs could have functioned just like the living bombadier beetles AND SPEWED FIRE!!!!1! One minor issue: bombadier beetles don’t spew fire, they eject hot liquid. Image: Patrick Coin, CC BY-SA 2.5 (original here).

Indeed, the bulk of this book – the long section that runs from chapters 5 through 15 – is a chapter by chapter analysis of the different fire-breathing claims made by creationist authors. These people have, I’ve been surprised to learn, come up with six different mechanisms for fire production in extinct archosaurs. Senter (2019) goes through each in turn, in appropriate detail. In some cases, the proposed mechanisms are total non-starters (no, dear creationists, pterosaurs couldn’t house flammable gases inside their head crests) and can be brushed aside quite swiftly. But in other cases, Senter (2019) has to go down the rabbit-hole of gas chemistry, anatomy and biochemistry, and the history of burns and gaseous explosions in human medicine. All fascinating and well-argued stuff, and full of amazing nuggets of information.

Caption: Parasaurolophus - beloved posterchild of the fire-breathing dinosaurs movement - flames an anachronistic Ceratosaurus, a familiar image from the creationist literature. I believe that this is from one of Ken Ham’s books.

The conclusion, overwhelmingly, is that creationists have been spouting ill-informed (or uninformed) nonsense in coming up with their various fire-breathing fantasies. The proposals concerned are inconsistent with biology, chemistry and physics, and cannot have been present in animals governed by the rules that apply to the living things of planet Earth.

Caption: it’s well known that the crests of lambeosaurine hadrosaurs were hollow, and contained connected internal tubes and chambers. Were these used in the production of fire? No. Image: Sullivan & Williamson (1999).

The book’s final two chapters are connected to the fire-breathing creationist movement, but tackle rather different topics: the origin of dragons as a whole, and the true identity of the biblical Behemoth (Leviathan is covered too), often said by creationists to be a description of a sauropod or similar dinosaur. These two chapters are among the most interesting and valuable in the book.

Caption: why have creationists been so big on the ‘dragons were fire-breathing dinosaurs’ thing? I think it’s partly an effort to attract children to their cult. It isn’t coincidental that most illustrations of fire-breathing dinosaurs appear in books written for children, like this one by Duane Gish.

Even today, the notion that dragons must surely have been based on giant reptiles or reptile-like animals still unknown to science is not unpopular, and is occasionally promoted in the cryptozoological and conspiracy literature. But it’s wrong: the whole idea of dragons as we mostly imagine them (winged, fire-breathing, horned monsters, clad in armour-like scales and equipped with massive limbs and talons) is a mistake, and one that emerged, incrementally, from more mundane origins.

Senter (2019) shows, via statements made in antiquarian literature and by cross-referencing their use of terms, that the term dragon was used – unambiguously, consistently and repeatedly – for snakes, especially for large kinds like pythons. Yes, dragons were snakes. But how does this explain the limbs, wings, fire-breathing and other embellishments? These were added over time, mostly by medieval European authors who were no longer familiar with giant snakes and had heard rumours that dragons could fly (Senter puts this unfamiliarity down to the rise of Christianity and the closing of pagan temples). Feathered wings were added during the 8th century, which then became membranous wings thanks to inventive artists. By the 13th century, dragons were being depicted as quadrupeds (Senter 2019). What about the fire-breathing thing? If dragons were snakes, then some dragons were venomous, and capable of creating a burning sensation in human tissue. Embellish and augment this idea sufficiently, and the concept of fire-breathing winged mega-snakes has emerged. Chinese dragons, by the way, have an entirely independent origin and were mostly based on mammals; Senter (2019) even says that they shouldn’t be called dragons.

Caption: in this most famous depiction of Leviathan - that by Gustave Doré, dating to 1865 - Leviathan is depicted as a monstrous winged serpent of the seas. Image: public domain (original here).

Finally, Senter (2019) also shows – I think convincingly – that the creationist interpretations of both Leviathan and Behemoth of the book of Job are entirely erroneous, but so are the interpretations favoured by the majority of sceptical and ‘mainstream’ authors. I don’t want to steal all of Senter’s thunder, but… Leviathan and Behemoth were both gargantuan mythical serpents, and those authors who have interpreted these creatures as dinosaurs, crocodiles, or big mammals have misunderstood key descriptive phrases, or have been led astray by mistranslations or misinterpretations of the original Hebrew (Senter 2019).

Caption: Senter (2019) uses cartoons like this one to emphasise that Behemoth never was a dinosaur, elephant or hippopotamus, but “a demonic entity that the ancient Hebrews envisioned as a serpent” (Senter 2019, p. 142). The caption to this illustration is “Will be real Behemoth please stand up?”. Image: Senter (2019).

This book is not that lengthy. There are 201 pages, but 45 of them are occupied by a very voluminous bibliography. Plus the book is hardback (or, this edition is, anyway), so appears bulkier than it would do with soft covers. It’s well illustrated and includes numerous colour photos, diagrams of many sorts, and colour cartoons explaining and depicting Senter’s responses to creationist proposals and arguments. There are two things about the images that I dislike. Firstly, some of the colour photos chosen to depict given extinct taxa are quite anachronistic: things would be improved, I feel, if more contemporary reconstructions took their place. Secondly, the colouring used for many of the cartoons is less than great. I mean, the cartoons themselves – which I assume Senter penned himself (he’s a pretty good and competent artist) – are great, but it looks like they’ve been coloured-in with colouring pencils.

Caption: need to feature a depiction of an extinct animal? I, personally, would prefer it if a more up-to-date and aesthetically pleasing image were used in place of this one. Senter (2019) uses several images of models similar to this one when discussing extinct taxa. Image: I’ve been unable to find a source for this picture; it comes from that bottomless pit of hell called pinterest.

So far I’ve been kind to this book. I enjoyed reading it and think it’s a worthy addition to the literature. But I’m afraid that, by the time I’d finished reading it, I’d taken quite a disliking to it, for three reasons.

The first thing I dislike is the way in which creationist claims and proposals are framed. I’m not exactly a fan of creationism, creationist arguments or creationists themselves and I certainly agree with Senter (2019) that the authors who’ve pushed creationist agendas have been scientifically clueless, and/or have sought to wilfully promote anti-scientific gas-lighting. Senter (2019) even finishes the book with a prayer, praising creationist authors for their dogged promotion and energy but wishing and praying that they might make the world a better place by re-directing their energies to something good or constructive. Fair enough.

I do think, however, that Senter (2019) overdoes it in framing creationists and their ideas as ‘silly’ and ‘ridiculous’; Senter (2019) does this throughout the whole of the book such that its entire approach is “let’s all laugh at those whacky creationists” (the subtitle, I’ll remind you, is The Hilarious History of Creationist Pseudoscience at its Silliest). In my opinion (I’d be interested to know if others agree), the book would have worked better if Senter’s approach throughout was neutral and without the mocking. I’ve mocked creationists myself, for sure (Naish 2017), but I’m not about to write an academic book on the subject of their writings. Indeed, given that I’m familiar with Senter’s  many papers where he tests creationist claims (all are written in scholarly fashion and use language and phrasing typical for peer-reviewed science), I was surprised to see him follow this path, and I had the impression throughout that it was done in an effort to make the text lighter, more fun, and more appealing. I understand the need for that but I’m saying that – surely – there must have been another way.

Caption: Senter (2019) compares creationist decisions to those made by a character called ‘Silly Chef’ (the muppet-like individual in the middle) who features in a series of cartoons that appear throughout the book. Image: Senter (2019).

Finally on this point, it might be doubtful that the creationists and would-be creationists who are the focus of Senter’s (2019) discussion will ever read this book (it’s abundantly clear that they don’t, or haven’t, read any of the other literature criticising or demolishing their arguments; if they have, they do a good job of making it appear that they haven’t). But by framing the entire book as a “let’s all laugh at those whacky creationists” exercise, the people who might benefit most by reading it will (I assume) be thoroughly put off. Admittedly, this is a moot point anyway in view of my third negative point, but hang on, we’ll get to that in a minute.

The second thing I dislike concerns Senter’s use of humour. This book is well written, and well edited too (I didn’t spot a single typo). But the prose is ruined by Senter’s repeated, very weird forays into simile and metaphor. They are, I’m sorry to say, not just bad, but among the worst examples of writing I can recall. Not only did I not ever find his quips funny, I mostly found them tortuous and daft and I winced every time the text introduced yet another one. I feel bad for saying this and apologise for seeming like a miserable bastard. I disliked this stuff so much that I feel the book would be much improved if all of it was stripped out. And if you’re thinking that – surely – the relevant sections of text can’t be all that bad. Well, here’s one example…

“The misunderstandings and mistranslations necessary to force such an interpretation are almost as bad as those that would be required to infer that the story of David killing Goliath is about a vampire grapefruit preparing a pleasant pile of purple petunias as a fluffy pillow for the happily napping saber-toothed tiger that it keeps as a pet and is convinced for no apparent reason that it is a gigantic German bunny with adorable tiny little ears that wiggle ever so preciously when you gently blow into them” (Senter 2019, p. 144).

There are many other examples of this sort of thing. They ruin the book.

Finally, the third thing I dislike is that great bane of book-buyers from impoverished backgrounds: the price. This book is absurdly expensive; ridiculously so. It’s £69.99 in the UK, $119.95 in the USA (though Amazon is currently selling it at a mere $71.89). As per usual, I appreciate that publishers have to sell books at a given price to cover production costs and to compensate for a sometimes distressingly low number of sales, but I still don’t understand why a slim volume has to cost as much as this one does. Given the price, I fully expected this to be some thick, extremely heavy textbook of perhaps 700 pages or so. But no, it’s a small book of no greater size, production value, academic quality or paper thickness than a great many books half its price or less. I’m extremely pleased to have obtained a review copy but that’s the only way I could ever have obtained it. There is no way I would have purchased it. If a paperback version appears and is reasonably and affordably priced, I apologise for this complaint and may even come back to this review and remove this entire paragraph, but let’s see.

Caption: Senter (2019) is not a big book. Here’s a copy with my hand for scale. Image: Darren Naish.

Caption: I was expecting a much, much larger book. Image: Darren Naish.

I apologise for ending on such a downer.

Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs is certainly a unique book, and – as someone familiar with Senter’s writings on the creationist literature – it does have a magnum opus, end-of-the-road feel about it. As I’ve stated in this review, it’s well-written, has very high production values, and is of significant interest to those who follow the esoteric literature on Mesozoic archosaurs, and on the history of religiously motivated pseudoscience. But it has issues.

Senter, P. J. 2019. Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs? The Hilarious History of Creationist Pseudoscience at Its Silliest. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle Upon Tyne. pp. 201. ISBN 978-1-5275-3042-3. Hardback, refs, index. Here at amazon, here at amazon.co.uk, here from the publishers.

A few other reviews of Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs? are online. I deliberately didn’t read them until completing my own review. Having now read them, I see that they make similar points to my own…

• Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs?: A book review, by Jonathan Kane at Panda’s Thumb

• Don’t give Jurassic World ideas — ‘Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs? The Hilarious History of Creationist Pseudoscience at Its Silliest’ book review, by Justin Mullis at AiPT! Science

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 :)

Refs - -

Bonnan, M.F. & Senter, P. 2007. Were the basal sauropodomorph dinosaurs Plateosaurus and Massospondylus habitual quadrupeds. Special Papers in Palaeontology 77, 139-155.

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

Senter, P. 2005. Function in the stunted forelimbs of Mononykus olecranus (Theropoda), a dinosaurian anteater. Paleobiology 31, 373-381.

Senter, P. 2006. Necks for sex: sexual selection as an explanation for sauropod dinosaur neck elongation. Journal of Zoology 271, 45-53.

Senter, P. 2007. A new look at the phylogeny of Coelurosauria (Dinosauria: Theropoda). Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 5, 429-463.

Senter, P. 2009. Voices of the past: a review of Paleozoic and Mesozoic animal sounds. Historical Biology 20, 255-287.

Senter, P. 2017. Fire-breathing dinosaurs? Physics, fossils and functional morphology versus pseudoscience. Skeptical Inquirer 41 (4), 26-33.

Senter, P. J. 2019. Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs? The Hilarious History of Creationist Pseudoscience at Its Silliest. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Senter, P., Barsbold, R., Brtii, B. B. & Burnham, D. A. 2004. Systematics and evolution of Dromaeosauridae (Dinosauria, Theropoda). Bulletin of the Gunma Museum of Natural History 8, 1-20.

Senter, P. & Parrish, J. M. 2005. Functional analysis of the hands of the theropod dinosaur Chirostenotes pergracilis: evidence for an unusual palaeoecological role. PaleoBios 25, 9-19.

Senter, P. & Robins, J. H. 2005. Range of motion in the forelimb of the theropod dinosaur Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, and implications for predatory behaviour. Journal of Zoology 266, 307-318.

Sullivan, R. M. & Williamson, T. E. 1999. A new skull of Parasaurolophus (Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae) from the Kirtland Formation of New Mexico and a revision of the genus. New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science Bulletin 15, 1-52.

Whale Watching in the Bay of Biscay

Back in July 2019, myself and a bunch of friends stepped aboard the Pont-Aven for several days of sea-watching in the Bay of Biscay. We were to travel from Plymouth (UK) to Santander (Spain), the event being organised by ORCA, a charity that monitors whales and uses the data for conservation purposes (they’re here on Twitter). ORCA uses cruise liners, ferries and other vehicles as whale-watching platforms. Nigel Marven was a special guest on our trip and it was great to catch up with him.

Caption: our vessel of choice - the Pont-Aven - at port in Santander, Spain. I cannot tell you how much trouble I went to to get to this ship before departure time. I very nearly didn’t make it. Image: Darren Naish.

Caption: the man, the legend; Nigel Marven.

The purpose, of course, was to see whales. The weather was outstandingly good (meaning that I got burnt), but so was the whale watching: I’m pleased to say that we saw literally hundreds of animals of seven or eight species, as you can see from the photos below. My own photos are not great since my camera isn’t exactly the best for fast-moving, far-away animals like whales, so those you see here were mostly taken by my trusty pal Alex Srdic (who’s here on Instagram and here on Twitter). Thanks, Alex.

Caption: several cetaceans have extremely complex markings allowing them to be identified to species and even population. Individuals can be recognised on the basis of their markings too. Image: Alex Srdic.

The Bay of Biscay is a world-famous whale-watching hotspot, famous in particular for Cuvier’s beaked whales Ziphius cavirostris and Sperm whale Physeter macrocephalus. Dolphins of several species are a frequent sight too, as are rorquals of a few species, Harbour porpoise Phocoena phocoena and pilot whales. A very lucky whale-watcher might get to see Blue whale Balaenoptera musculus, Killer whale Orcinus orca or True’s beaked whale Mesoplodon mirus. In fact, something like 30 species have been recorded in the region. This is phenomenal and mean that it’s theoretically possible for several species of some of the most elusive whale groups – like beaked whales and globicephaline dolphins – to be seen within days or weeks of each other.

Caption: in good weather, the blow of a big whale (like a Fin whale - as here - or a Sperm whale) is visible from great distance, and in the case of these two species can be diagnostic. Image: Alex Srdic.

Caption: a dynamic leap by a Striped dolphin. Dolphins of some species appear to be attracted to ships and even to deliberately show off when they get close to them. Image: Alex Srdic.

Why is the Bay of Biscay so good for whales? It’s mostly because the topography is complex, combining large, shallow shelf regions, steep sections of shelf edge – sometimes with impressive slopes and deep, enormous rocky canyons twice as big as the Grand Canyon – and a deep abyssal plain section (Carwardine 2016). Depth varies from 1.7 to over 4.7 km. This variation – combined with the overall productivity of the region and its position relative to the Atlantic and English Channel – means that there’s the chance to see continental shelf species (like porpoises), those that use deep canyons and other shelf-edge habitats (like beaked whales) and true oceanic deep-divers that forage in the deepest waters (like sperm whales).

Caption: back and dorsal fin of a Fin whale, remnants of the blow still hanging in the air. Image: Alex Srdic.

As it happens, we were extraordinarily lucky. Fin whales B. physalus are regular animals of the area, and we had amazing, relatively close views of them (by ‘close’, I mean perhaps 30 m from the ship, not alongside the vessel). Fin whales – the second largest extant animal after the Blue – have a blow that’s visible on the horizon and is about 8 m tall. The blow hangs in the air for a surprising time. One of the most remarkable things about the Fin whale is its asymmetrical pigmentation: the right side of the face is marked with a large pale area, as is the right side’s baleen. There are some old TetZoo articles on what this might mean and how it might function – see the links below.

Caption: excellent view of the splashguard - the conical structure surrounding and ahead of the blowholes - and paired blowholes of a surfacing Fin whale. Despite its name, the dorsal fin of the Fin whale is smaller and blunter than that of some other rorquals. Image: Alex Srdic.

Two coastal species were seen early on in our trip: Harbour porpoise and Common bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus, though I don’t have good photos of either. The majority of dolphins seen on our trip (as is typical for Biscay whale watching) were Short-beaked common dolphin Delphinus delphis, which were sometimes seen in groups of more than ten. Their distinctive hourglass markings are always visible when they leap – which they often do, sometimes while immediately adjacent to a ship – and we also got to see calves on one or two occasions.

Caption: here’s the whole-body view of the common dolphin shown in detail above. This individual only has one stripe extending from the beak to the flipper, with a large pale area separating the eye and flipper. Different configurations are present in different populations. Image: Alex Srdic.

Caption: as the light begins to fade during the later part of the day, a group of Short-beaked common dolphin carve through a surging wave. Note the calf close to the adult at upper right. Image: Alex Srdic.

We also had excellent views of Striped dolphin Stenella coeruleoalba. They behaved in characteristic acrobatic fashion, leaping high out of the water, making impressive splashes and jumping in the ship’s wake. They typically make a lot more disturbance at the water’s surface than do common dolphins, creating great bursts of spray and rooster-tail patterns when they leap and surge. Striped dolphins are near-globally distributed. They’ve been the source of discussion lately since it’s recently been shown that the Clymene dolphin S. clymene is a naturally occurring hybrid between this species and the Spinner S. longirostris (Amaral et al. 2014).

Caption: we had many excellent views of high-leaping Striped dolphin. Note how much spray and splashing is associated with the leaping of this species. Image: Alex Srdic.

Finally as goes dolphins, we also saw pilot whales, identified on the basis of their black colouration and strongly backswept dorsal fins. These were most likely Long-finned pilots Globicephala melas (it’s more typical of temperate and cold waters than the Short-finned G. macrorhynchus) but we didn’t see any of the key features that allow the two species to be distinguished, and none of our photos are good enough to warrant sharing. A mysterious whale was seen among the pilot whales. It seemed to be very dark and with a short, blunt-tipped, parallel-sided but only weakly curved dorsal fin; I don’t think that its head was seen but I had the impression that it was a shallower-bodied animal than the pilot whales. Several different views were offered on its identity with the most likely (on the basis of dorsal fin shape) being that it was perhaps a False killer whale Pseudorca crassidens. That’s not tremendously likely but not impossible.

The whale most famously associated with the Bay of Biscay is Cuvier’s beaked whale, seen so frequently in the area that it’s regarded as the premier location for sightings of this species, worldwide. I don’t know if you’re guaranteed a sighting of a Cuvier’s while there, but – whatever – we were lucky, since we saw nearly 20 of them, ranging from smooth, clean-bodied youngsters to heavily scarred males.

Caption: Cuvier’s beaked whale, seen relatively close to the ship. Image: Alex Srdic.

Caption: heavily scarred Cuvier’s beaked whale, seen at distance and only briefly. We didn’t see any other individuals with scarring as impressive as this. Image: Alex Srdic.

Some individuals have markedly pale heads sharply demarcated from the rest of the body, others do not. On occasion, one or two individuals were close enough to the ship that I was able to get a half-decent shot with my mobile phone. Each sighting was a huge thrill. While we were oh so lucky as goes Cuvier’s, we didn’t see sperm whale, alas. We also saw Northern minke B. acutorostrata on perhaps two occasions, though again I don’t have any good photos.

Caption: another plus… amazing sunsets, and sunrises too. Image: Darren Naish.

Finally, we didn’t just see whales. The same route is also great for seabirds, and we also saw such fishes as tunas and sunfishes. As much as I’d like to start talking about the birds, I’m out of time. Anyway – the trip was excellent: rewarding, fun, and educational. I’ll definitely be doing it again. You should consider supporting ORCA and their work as well.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see me do more, more often, please consider supporting me at patreon. The more funding I receive, the more time I’m able to devote to producing material for TetZoo and the more productive I can be on those long-overdue book projects. Thanks!

Cetaceans have been covered at length on TetZoo before - mostly at ver 2 and ver 3 - but these articles are now all but useless since all of their images have been removed (and/or they’re paywalled, thanks SciAm). Over time, I aim to build up a large number of cetacean-themed articles here at ver 4.

• A 6 ton model, and a baby that puts on 90 kg a day: rorquals part I, October 2006

• From cigar to elongated, bloated tadpole: rorquals part II, October 2006

• Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III, October 2006

• On identifying a dolphin skull, July 2008 (all images now missing)

• Seriously frickin' weird cetacean skulls: Kogia, shark-mouthed horror, July 2008 (all images now missing)

• Scaphokogia!, July 2008 (all images now missing)

• Cetacean Heresies: How the Chromatic Truthometer Busts the Monochromatic Paradigm, April 2015 (but now lacking all images)

• Remembering Lyall Watson’s Whales of the World, June 2019 

Refs - -

Amaral, A. R., Lovewell, G., Coelho, M. M., Amato, G. & Rosenbaum, H. C. 2014. Hybrid speciation in a marine mammal: the Clymene dolphin (Stenella clymene). PLoS ONE 9 (1): e83645.

Carwardine, M. 2016. Mark Carwardine’s Guide to Whale Watching in Britain and Europe. Bloomsbury, London.

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

The story of the Loch Ness Monster is not a zoological one, no matter how desperately those who support the alleged existence of the monster wish it were. It is, instead, the story of people. Of people who tricked others into thinking that they saw or believed in a monster, of people who really thought they had seen a monster, and of people who wrote about, and theorised about, the thoughts, beliefs and adventures of others who’d thought or claimed they’d seen a monster.

Caption: Tim Dinsdale with his own reconstruction of the Loch Ness Monster (a clay model, held in place on a painted wooden board). I presume this photo was taken on the set of the BBC Panorama studio. Image: (c) Tim Dinsdale.

One of the most important characters as goes popularisation of the monster and promotion of its ostensible reality remains aeronautical engineer Tim Dinsdale (1924-1987). Over the three decades in which he was involved in the Loch Ness Monster story, he wrote four Nessie-themed books (Dinsdale 1961, 1966, 1973, 1975; not counting later editions), produced the text for a map (Dinsdale 1977), procured what remains the most famous piece of Nessie-based camera footage, and was deeply and closely involved in several campaigns and schemes to have the Loch Ness Monster formally recognised as a genuine animal species deserving legal protection.

Caption: covers of Dinsdale’s Loch Ness books - though not depicting all editions. Image: Darren Naish.

Those familiar with Dinsdale’s writings will already know the basics as goes his involvement in the Nessie saga. However, a lengthy work dedicated to his life and adventures was always needed, and I’m pleased to say that this gap in the literature was filled in 2013 by Angus Dinsdale’s The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness (A. Dinsdale 2013). This second Dinsdale is Tim Dinsdale’s son, who has written an affectionate but never overly sentimental review of his father’s life.

Caption: cover of A. Dinsdale’s 2013 book The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness.

My review here is the third and final part of the connected series on recently published books about the Loch Ness Monster (the other parts are here and here), though rest assured that it certainly won’t be the last thing I say on the subject since there are several other recently published works that warrant review as well (Ronald Binn’s 2019 The Decline of the Loch Ness Monster will likely be next). I appreciate that it might seem a bit odd to review a book published more than six years ago, but better late than never.

Caption: Dinsdale’s 1977 map is meant to be about Loch Ness in general. It is, of course, quite heavy on monster promotion (Dinsdale 1977). Image: Darren Naish.

The Man Who Filmed Nessie begins with several biographical chapters on Tim Dinsdale’s family background and early adult life. It is partly autobiographical, discussing the Dinsdale adventure as seen through the eyes of his son, but also includes long quoted sections from Dinsdale’s writings. In the text that follows, any mention of or reference to ‘Dinsdale’ should be assumed to refer to Tim Dinsdale, not Angus.

The story of how Dinsdale became seduced by the allure of the Loch Ness Monster is familiar to those who’ve read his books (Dinsdale 1961, 1975) and those written about him (e.g., Witchell 1975, Binns 1983, 2017, Campbell 1986, Williams 2015). For a level-headed person with a ‘practical’ background as an engineer, it’s remarkable how quickly Dinsdale became essentially convinced by the monster’s reality. This revelation wasn’t achieved after a personal encounter with the beast, nor after he’d spoken to some number of sincere witnesses. No: he read a single article in a popular magazine (Everybody’s magazine), titled ‘The Day I Saw the Loch Ness Monster’ (A. Dinsdale 2013, p. 42).

Caption: Dinsdale’s identikit rendition of what the Loch Ness Monster must look like, reconstructed by taking averages from the various eyewitness encounters he’d read. Image: Dinsdale (1960).

Inspired and excited, he decided that he had to go to Scotland to see the beast for himself, so off he went. Aaaand… immediately saw Nessie! Yes, on the very first day of his arrival at Loch Ness (16th April 1960), Dinsdale thought that he’d seen Nessie. It turned out to be a floating tree trunk (A. Dinsdale 2013, p. 51). On 21st April 1960 (the fourth day of his scheduled expedition at the loch) – shortly after spending time with water bailiff and Nessie oracle Alex Campbell – he again saw, and this time filmed, Nessie: “a churning ring of rough water, centring about what appeared to be two long black shadows, or shapes, rising and falling in the water!” (A. Dinsdale 2013, p. 62). And on the final and sixth day of his expedition (23rd April 1960) he again saw and filmed Nessie, this time procuring the famous Foyers Bay footage, featuring a humped object – Dinsdale likened it to the “back of an African buffalo” – moving across the loch. After obtaining control footage of a boat (albeit at a different time of day, in different lighting conditions, and with a white-hulled boat obviously different from the mahogany ‘monster’), Dinsdale immediately messaged the British Museum, his reasoning being that the leading zoological institution of the country should hear about it first. After having the film developed, he waited, honestly expecting an excited cadre of professional biologists to beat a path to his door. After about seven weeks of silence, he gave up waiting and went to the press, his ultimately successful plan being to have the footage screened on the flagship BBC news programme Panorama.

Caption: a screengrab from the approximately 1 minute long Dinsdale film of April 1960. The dark object was thought by Dinsdale to be the mahogany brown, ‘peaked’ back of a massive aquatic animal. Image: (c) Tim Dinsdale.

He brought along a clay monster model he had made, the fact that it had been kitted out with three humps now appearing inconsistent with the monster shown in the footage. Alex Campbell also featured on the same TV show. To Dinsdale’s eyes, the Panorama experience was not merely crucial as goes the promotion of his case, but valuable in the scientific sense since the “increase in definition and contrast” made to the film by the TV people improved its clarity and shed additional information on the appearance of the Loch Ness animal.

Caption: a key character in the Loch Ness saga is water bailiff and journalist Alex Campbell. While at Fort Augustus, I got to see his waterside home, Inverawe. It’s the building at far right here. Dinsdale spent time with Campbell immediately before seeing and filming his ‘monster’ of April 1960. Image: Darren Naish.

Our view of Dinsdale’s film today is that it isn’t impressive and almost certainly doesn’t depict a monster. There were surely viewers at the time who must have been equally unimpressed and Dinsdale’s view that the scientists and specialists who viewed the film in secrecy displayed nothing but apathy (A. Dinsdale 2013, p. 73) is, of course, a biased take since he simply expected them to agree with his interpretation. The object he filmed was no giant unknown aquatic animal, but a boat (Binns 1983, Campbell 1986, Harmsworth 2010, Naish 2017; and see Dick Raynor’s page on the footage here).

Caption: Loch Ness is often a beautiful and serene body of water, but I can’t help feeling that it must seem remote and lonely at times of the year. This photo was taken in the Spring of 2016. Image: Darren Naish.

Prior to reading this book, my feelings about Tim Dinsdale were tempered by the fact that I thought him odd for abandoning his family for long stretches while engaging in the esoteric pursuit of an alleged mystery beast in a part of the country far from home. Furthermore, my idiosyncrasies mean that I’m automatically jealous or resentful of anyone who gets to engage in an expensive hobby at what appears to be infinite leisure.

Caption: few people seriously interested in the Loch Ness Monster can claim to have spent as much time on, or close to, the waters of the loch as Dinsdale did. But many people familiar with Dinsdale’s writings have sought to follow his footsteps, at least in part. Image: Darren Naish.

It turns out that none of these things are true. Dinsdale’s monster-hunting came at great personal expense and involved some degree of hardship. Furthermore, he deliberately included his family in his monster-hunting expeditions. I particularly liked Angus’s description of the childhood tradition in which he would procure the largest available carrot from the supermarket; this was to accompany his father on an expedition, the plan being that it would be fed to Nessie once she and Angus’s dad had made friends (A. Dinsdale 2013, p. 86). Whatever Dinsdale’s legacy, the lives of his children were surely enriched by their regular trips to Scotland and their involvement in something as unusual as the pursuit of the Loch Ness Monster, though I have to admit that my personal circumstances while reading this book – I was working in China and missing my family – probably influenced my sentimental feelings on this issue.

Caption: you’ve probably read that the water of Loch Ness is tea-coloured. This is what it looks like when the bottom is less than 1 m away. Get to a depth of 10 m, and there’s essentially no light and nothing but darkness - at least, as far as the human eye is concerned. Image: Darren Naish.

While monster hunting, Dinsdale occasionally checked the shoreline. He was aware of the land sightings of Nessie and kept in mind the possibility that he might see the beast on land himself. I should mention here that refractory Nessie fan and blogger Roland Watson has recently published an entire book on the subject of land sightings, titled When Monsters Come Ashore. It’s written in extremely large font and in the bombastic and childish style characteristic of True Believers and is surely not a fair continuation of the level-headed and restrained, respectful tone of Dinsdale’s writings. In other words, poor Tim would not be happy with the state of Nessie promotion occurring among those few who might consider themselves his modern disciples.

One of the most interesting sections of the Nessie story concerns the arrival of the Americans and the use of assorted high-end bits of mechanical and photographic kit. While it might have seemed that Dinsdale and other British Nessie-hunters could have been gradually edged out of the quest, Robert Rines and his colleagues were on good terms with Dinsdale and even helped win him a lecture tour of the US, and ultimately to appear on big-hitting TV shows like The David Frost Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (A. Dinsdale 2013).

Caption: a Loch Ness scene, fortuitously featuring a waterbird (in this case, a Mute swan Cygnus olor) and a boat. Both objects have undoubtedly contributed in no small part to the phenomenon known as the Loch Ness Monster. Image: Darren Naish.

Indeed, Dinsdale’s fame reached its peak during the early and mid 1970s, as did the quest for Nessie in general. The mounting excitement that something was surely there and due to be confirmed – a belief fuelled by all that fancy American technology – inspired the idea that Nessie-like animals might lurk in other, nearby bodies of water. The book recounts Dinsdale’s expedition to Loch Morar, a place very different from Loch Ness but also said to have its own monster, called Morag. The main point of interest here to monster nerds is that the Dinsdales happen to meet a Mrs Parks, sister to one of two men who claimed a close Morag encounter.

Caption: Dinsdale was never explicit about the zoological identity he favoured for the Loch Ness Monster, but he clearly favoured the idea that it was a living plesiosaur, albeit one that had undergone a fair amount of change since the end of the Cretaceous. The legend of the late-surviving plesiosaur - reflected in this model, made for a TV show and photographed at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in 2005 - owes something to Dinsdale’s writing. Image: Darren Naish.

The story – recounted in several monster books – is famous because the two men (Duncan McDonell and William Simpson) apparently had to use an oar to fend Morag away from their boat, and so vigorous was the interaction that the oar snapped. The story usually ends there. Another Nessie-themed book, however, explains how the individuals concerned had been poaching deer and were trying to discard an unwanted skin which, despite being filled with stones, refused to sink. Eventually it had to be whacked with an oar, and here we find what is claimed to be the actual explanation for the oar-breaking event (Harmsworth 2010, p. 218).

Caption: the ‘two people in a lake come so close to a monster that they have to hit it with an oar’ trope has been taken seriously enough to inspire this re-enactment, this time involving the Lake Storsjö monster of Sweden. The man with the oar is Ragner Björks. Image: Bord & Bord (1980).

In places, Dinsdale’s story arc is a melancholy one. He wrote of his realisation, years after his initial forays in boats on Loch Ness, that he had become an experienced and confident boatman, his long, quiet stretches involving grey water, and rain. He never was to experience anything again as thrilling as his 1960 filming of the ‘monster’s hump’, nor did this footage receive the accolade he hoped it would. The decline and demise of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau during the early 1970s marked “the end of an era” (A. Dinsdale 2013, p. 200), and even the 1975 scientific symposium – the high water mark of Nessie’s scientific respectability, convened to discuss the sonar traces and photos obtained by Rines and his colleagues – was regarded as a disappointment (A. Dinsdale 2013, p. 217). As scientific interest in Nessie waned during the 1980s, Dinsdale complained in 1987 that scepticism had taken over, that “Nessie in the 80s has, if anything, been going backwards” (Williams 2015, p. 202). A planned sequel to 1975’s Project Water Horse, intriguingly titled Loch Ness and the Water Unicorn, and said in the 1982 edition of Loch Ness Monster to be partly written, never appeared in print (Binns 2019).

Caption: scientific interest in Nessie might have waned during the 1980s, but this was the decade that gave us this fantastic book cover. You might doubt that encounters as close and thrilling as this ever occurred. It belongs to the sixth edition of this book, published in 1982.

Some authors, especially those championing the Loch Ness Monster’s existence, have framed Tim Dinsdale as the most brilliant, wise and relevant authority on the Loch Ness Monster (pro-Nessie author Henry Bauer is an example). It’s easy to be convinced from Dinsdale’s writings, and his son’s, that he was indeed sincere, honest, and trying as best he might to stir scientific and mainstream interest in something that he regarded as unquestionably real. And his underlying methodology was scientific. But he seemed never to grasp why the official response was one of apparent disinterest and apathy. It wasn’t down to “stubbornness … indifference … [and] arrogance” (A. Dinsdale 2013, p. 232), but to the fact that the evidence just wasn’t good enough, and that there never was a good reason to believe in a monster. That Dinsdale became almost fixated on the monster’s existence after reading a single popular magazine article does not – I have to say it, forgive me – seem consistent with someone who might be deemed wise, level-headed and of the most sceptical, rational approach.

Caption: the Peter O’Connor photo of 1960 - this is a low-res, cropped version - has appeared several times at TetZoo over the years and is almost certainly a hoax, most likely an overturned kayak and a model head and neck (Naish 2017). Dinsdale included it in early editions of his book Loch Ness Monster but it - and any accompanying prose devoted by Mr O’Connor - is absent from the fourth edition and those that appeared afterwards. Image (c) Peter O’Connor.

On that note, and while it again shames me to say it, I’m impressed – if that’s the right word – by Dinsdale’s naivety when we look at specific parts of his Loch Ness experience. Take his interaction with Tony Shiels, the self-proclaimed Wizard of the Western World. In 1977 Shiels claimed to capture on film the most remarkable colour photos of Nessie ever taken, an object affectionately known today as the Loch Ness Muppet. Any familiarity with Shiels and his adventures quickly reveals that he has, and seemingly always has had, a tongue-in-cheek, jovial take on monsters and how they might be seen. They’re not really meant to be undiscovered animals lurking in remote places, but interactive pieces of quasi-surreal art akin to open-air theatre, the ensuing cultural response in literature and news being as much a part of the event, if not more, as the claimed sighting and photo. While I undoubtedly write with the benefit of hindsight (and, dare I say it, some quantity of insider information), Dinsdale was seemingly unable to perceive this. And thus the muppet photo appears – as a legit image of the Loch Ness animal – on the cover of the fourth edition of Dinsdale’s The Loch Ness Monster, a decision that speaks volumes.

Caption: the infamous 1977 Shiels muppet photo. Exactly what it depicts (a plasticine model superimposed on a scene showing water? A floating model posed in the loch?) remains uncertain. Image: (c) Tony Shiels.

The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness is an essential read for those seriously interested in the history of monster searching and the people who engage in it. The book has very high production values and impressive design and editorial standards, and includes an excellent colour plate section. I enjoyed reading it and think that Angus Dinsdale has produced a book that his late father would have been proud of, and moved by. Many interesting people have contributed to the lore of the Loch Ness Monster, and Dinsdale was without doubt one of the most important and influential. I leave you to judge whether this was time wasted, or a life enriched and made remarkable.

Dinsdale, A. 2013. The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness. Hancock House, Surrey, BC Canada. pp. 256. ISBN 978-0-88839-727-0. Softback, refs, index. Here at amazon. Here at amazon.co.uk.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see me do more, more often, please consider supporting me at patreon. The more funding I receive, the more time I’m able to devote to producing material for TetZoo and the more productive I can be on those long-overdue book projects. Thanks!

Nessie and related issues have been covered on TetZoo a fair bit before, though many of the older images now lack ALL of the many images they originally included…

• The Loch Ness monster seen on land, October 2009 (now missing all images due to hosting issues)

• Dear Telegraph: no, I did not say that about the Loch Ness monster, July 2011 (now missing all images due to hosting issues)

• Photos of the Loch Ness Monster, revisited, July 2013 (now stripped of all images, so completely useless)

• Is Cryptozoology Good or Bad for Science? (review of Loxton & Prothero 2013), September 2014 (now stripped of all images)

• My New Book Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths, February 2016

• Books on the Loch Ness Monster 1: Ronald Binns’s The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded, March 2019

• Books on the Loch Ness Monster 2: Gareth Williams’s A Monstrous Commotion, March 2019

Refs - -

Binns, R. 1983. The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Open Books, London.

Binns, R. 2017. The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded. Zoilus Press.

Binns, R. 2019. Decline and Fall of the Loch Ness Monster. Zoilus Press.

Bord, J. & Bord, C. 1980. Alien Animals. Granada, London.

Campbell, S. 1986. The Loch Ness Monster: the Evidence. The Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, UK.

Dinsdale, A. 2013. The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness. Hancock House, Surrey, BC Canada.

Dinsdale, T. 1961. Loch Ness Monster. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Dinsdale, T. 1966. The Leviathans. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Dinsdale, T. 1973. The Story of the Loch Ness Monster. Target, London.

Dinsdale, T. 1975. Project Water Horse: the True Story of the Monster Quest at Loch Ness. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Dinsdale, T. 1977. The Facts About Loch Ness and the Monster. John Barthlomew & Sons, Edinburgh.

Harmsworth, T. 2010. Loch Ness, Nessie and Me. Harmsworth.net, Drumnadrochit.

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

Williams, G. 2015. A Monstrous Commotion: the Mysteries of Loch Ness. Orion Books, London.

Witchell, N. 1975. The Loch Ness Story. Penguins Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.

Announcing TetZooCon 2019 – the Biggest Yet

At last, tickets for TetZooCon 2019 are on sale. And you’re advised to buy one, and thus book a place, as soon as possible, since they’re selling pretty fast. This is the sixth TetZooCon, and we’re now in bigger, badder, faster, harder mode with two whole days of TetZoo-related stuff.

This year’s banner includes just some of the birds I’ve drawn for my in-prep textbook… but let’s not talk about that today.

As per the last two years, we’re once again at The Venue at Malet Street in central London on a weekend (Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th October). Things kick off at 10am both days. We have numerous talks but the schedule has been arranged this year such that – hopefully – there’s time for Q&A sessions, and also more time for roundtable events and other discussions, since they worked well at the 2018 meeting.

Beautiful Megaloceros model made by Agata Stachowiak. You might recognise the colour scheme if you’re a regular TetZoo reader. Image: (c) Agata Stachowiak, used with permission.

Palaeoart. Once again we’re running a dedicated palaeoart event which involves short talks (this time mostly revolving around the theme of making things in 3D: Rebecca Groom, Agata Stachowiak, Jed Taylor; Joschua Knüppe is speaking too), a discussion (led by Beth Windle) and a workshop. The palaeoart event runs in parallel to one of the main sessions: not ideal, but we can’t otherwise fit everything in. You have to pay separately for the palaeoart event if you intend to come along (I mean, in addition to the main entry fee). There will also be – we hope; none of this is confirmed and finalised yet – two palaeoart-themed exhibitions. Also, both Luis Rey and Mark Witton will be selling and signing palaeoart-themed books. I believe that Luis’s new book will be out in time, fingers crossed! Hey, that’s a lot of palaeoart-themed stuff.

Just two of our several palaeoart presenters for TetZooCon 2019, both - coincidentally - holding dromaeosaurids. Jed Taylor (of JCTArtStudio) at left; Rebecca Groom (of palaeoplushies) at right. Images: (c) JCTaylor, Rebecca Groom, used with permission.

Dinosaurs and other extinct archosaurs. One major theme this year is Mesozoic dinosaurs and kin, because why not. We have a block of talks on dinosaur palaeobiology (Rebecca Lakin on parental care, Chris Barker on pathologies in theropods, Dave Hone on social behaviour), as well as Jordan Bestwick on his work on inferring diet from tooth microwear analysis, recently published in Scientific Reports. There’s also a roundtable discussion on extinct archosaur palaeobiology as a whole. Dave Hone will be selling and signing his The Tyrannosaur Chronicles as part of this event.

Dr David Hone will be speaking at TetZooCon 2019, and signing his book The Tyrannosaur Chronicles. Image: (c) David Hone, used with permission.

Natural History Film-Making. A second theme involves film-making. I don’t so much mean the nuts and bolts of how one actually goes about ‘making’ a film, but the entire experience, the backstories to the people involved, and their various projects and adventures. Amber Eames will be talking about her award-winning film Swans: Mystery of the Missing, and we’ll be joined in an on-stage discussion by Paul Stewart (who’s filmed a vast number of mammals, birds and other animals worldwide, including a huge number of things featured in the BBC Attenborough documentaries), Nick Lyon (best known for the BBC Dynasties episode on African wild dogs), and Zoe Cousins (who’s worked on documentaries about the Tapanuli orangutan, urban wildlife and more). We’re hoping to show film segments and montages as part of this event.

Amber Eames will be talking about her film devoted to the plight of migratory Bewick’s swans. Images: (c) Amber Eames, used with permission.

Wildlife film-maker, producer, author and qualified zoologist Dr Paul Stewart (in the middle; here with Sir David Attenborough and other team members) will be at TetZooCon 2019. Image: (c) Paul Stewart, used with permission.

Other talks, other events. And there’s tons more as well. TetZooCon 2019 also includes Ellen Coombs on whales, Amy Schwartz on her work on roadkill, Lauren McGough on eagles and adventures in falconry, Tim Haines on ‘20 years of popular digital palaeontology’, Ross Barnett on The Missing Lynx (another book signing), Jack Ashby on Unnatural History Museums (another book signing)…. and more! There will also be stalls and merchandise, we end with a quiz (with great prizes), and there’s a conference meal and a drinks reception too.

One of our many star speakers for 2019: the amazing Lauren McGough. Image: (c) Lauren McGough, used with permission.

As per last year, it’s likely that we’ll be sold out by the early weeks of October, so don’t leave things too late if you’re planning to come along. We’ve also changed the ticket sales so that you can pay for attendance on just one day. And that’ll do for now. Go here to book (and see more information), and see you there in October!

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.

Hacks Vs Wildlife: the Eternal Vilification of Gulls

Every summer, here in the UK, it’s the same. “CRAZED KILLER SEAGULL ATTACKED MY BABY”, “PSYCHO SEAGULL’S REIGN OF TERROR”, “EXPERT SAYS PUPPIES AND KIDS COULD BE NEXT”. It’s almost as if hack journalists, writing for shitty tabloids like The Mail, The Sun and The Star, have nothing smart to write about so fall back on scaremongering and the vilification of wildlife. Hack journalists are pretty good at this, stirring up waves of anti-gull feelings among a public that already dislikes any animal trying its damnedest to survive and persist in a land dominated by humans and their intolerance of wild places and other species (see #HacksVsWildlife on Twitter for a constant stream of this sort of thing).

Caption: it’s summertime in the UK, and this can only mean one thing….

Right now, the story of Gizmo the chihuahua – apparently snatched by a gull in Paignton, Devon – is doing the rounds. Gizmo is, or was, a very small dog, so the idea that he/she might have been grabbed by a big gull is not out of hand. I’m inclined to think that the event did happen, in which case Gizmo’s owners have my sympathy. Lesson for the future: don’t leave tiny dogs unguarded, outside, in an area where there are big gulls. As others have pointed out, big white-headed gulls like the Great black-backed Larus marinus can swallow prey the size of juvenile rabbits, and a big gull can likely fly while carrying an object about similar in size to a very small chihuahua (cf Young 1987).

Caption: alas, poor Gizmo. Screengrabs of headlines from some of the UK’s most noble gutter rags.

As cynical as it sounds though, this strikes me as an example of bad pet management more than a case of ‘out of control’ wildlife. I have a pet lizard and guinea-pig who are often taken outside in an area where there are gulls and corvids of several species, and I simply wouldn’t leave them alone and unguarded. What about those parts of the world where there are such things as coyotes, bobcats, eagles and other opportunistic predators? Who is to ‘blame’ when, say, a pet cat is taken by a coyote? Is it really because the coyote is in the ‘wrong’ place?

Caption: white-headed gulls (those gull species remaining in the genus Larus) are good-looking birds, in cases with wingspans that exceed 1.3 m. This is a Herring gull (photographed in Cornwall, England) with an unusually shaped head. Image: Darren Naish.

Are gulls big, formidable and potentially dangerous to small animals and even people? Yes, of course they are. They’re predatory and opportunistic, and often territorial and liable to be aggressive when guarding their nests and chicks. But the idea – promoted continually by hack journalists – that there’s some kind of GULL PLAGUE that we should rid ourselves of is just wrong, and bad.

Caption: Herring gulls consume leftovers at a restaurant in Tintagel, Cornwall. Image: Darren Naish.

Gulls Are In Decline. First of all, let’s look at the idea that these birds are super-abundant, as hack journalists and gull-haters would like you to think. As has now been pointed out many times (here at TetZoo and elsewhere), the species concerned are not just in decline, they’ve declined so much within recent decades that they’re now a cause for conservation concern. In the UK, the Herring gull L. argentatus – the species that hacks and haters mostly focus on – is a Red List species, its population now being at its lowest since recording began in 1969/70, and having declined by about 50% since the early 1990s (Madden et al. 2010, Joint Nature Conservation Committee 2014). The next most familiar species – the Lesser black-backed gull L. fuscus – has undergone a worrying population crash during this century. Similar trends are present in white-headed gulls elsewhere; the North American Herring/Smithsonian gull L. smithsonianus has declined by almost 80% since the 1960s.

Caption: a fine Lesser black-backed gull at a train station. Note the yellow legs, the small extent of the white spotting on the black tips to the primaries, and fairly dark mantle. Image: Darren Naish.

In view of this, it seems wrong to call for these birds to be sterilised (as some politicians have, apparently seriously, suggested), or for them to be lethally controlled or extirpated entirely. I may well be speaking from a position of privilege (I undoubtedly am, in fact, given that I live in a land where there are no big dangerous animals at all), but I want to live in a world where we’re alongside other species, not hell-bent on crushing them under heel into extinction. Urban gulls are an occasional menace for sure, but these aren’t animals that we should vilify or try to expunge. They need help; we should promote tolerance, not destruction.

Caption: a Bristolian Herring gull eating a feral pigeon, again at a train station. Did the gull kill the pigeon, or was the pigeon a victim of a train collision? I don’t know, but either is possible. Image: Darren Naish.

I should also add that urban gulls are important ecosystem service providers, eating waste, carrion and undesirable material (I won’t start listing it, but – oh, ok – it includes vomit and dog scat) left in the built environment by human action. They’re also important seed dispersers, playing this role in areas where other fruit-eating birds (yes, gulls eat fruit) are rare or absent (Iason et al. 1986, Magnusson & Magnusson 2000, Sekercioglu 2006).

Caption: a large group of white-headed gulls compete for food scraps in Lisbon, Portugal. Image: Darren Naish.

Why are people fixated on the idea that we have a ‘gull plague’, or that there are somehow ‘too many’ gulls? I think that a few factors may be at play. One is that gulls are both big and comparatively long-lived, meaning both that they’re way more obvious than small birds, most of which are ignored by the majority of people, and also seen repeatedly in the same areas. A single gull, hanging out on the same area of railway platform or beach promenade for perhaps more than 30 years (a Herring gull ringed in 1965 was still alive in 1997, and older individuals are now on record too), creates the impression of abundance.

There’s A Human Problem, Not A ‘Gull Problem’. Why are gulls so ubiquitous and – to hark back to the hack journalist take – problematic and pestilent? Is it because they’ve devised a clever plan to usurp humans and kill us all by pecking at the face? No, it’s because we’ve created ideal places for them to live, forage and breed thanks to our epic production of useable and edible waste, and our production of (mostly) predator-free, friendly places ideal for resting, feeding and breeding. We’ve also made life harder for them at coasts and seas thanks to development, pollution and industrial fishing. In short, the urban gull ‘problem’ is a direct product of the human problem.

Caption: there’s some degree of uncertainty as goes how reliable urban Herring gull counts are, but the overall trend over recent decades is certainly one of overall population decline. This graph is from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee Herring gull page. The dotted lines show 95% confidence limits. Image: JNCC (original here).

At the risk of repeating myself… yes, big gulls can be less than ideal neighbours. Yes, they’ll steal your chips or sandwiches if you’re dumb enough to hold those things aloft and be unaware of big animals watching you from nearby. Yes, they’ll potentially swoop at you or whack or bite you if you go close to their nests or chicks. Yes, they may even – very, very rarely – do such things as see small dogs and other pets as prey items. Yes, they shit. And, yes, they can be noisy and do their raucous calling at inconvenient times of the day or night.

Caption: white-headed gulls are slow to mature and have different plumage phases depending on age. It’s therefore typical to see birds of several different year stages at any one place where gulls hang out. This 1st winter Herring gull was photographed at Orton, Devon. Image: Darren Naish.

But I seriously question the idea that these often magnificent, slow-growing, long-lived and behaviourally fascinating birds are anything like the ‘problem’ that hack journalists would have us believe. I want to live in a world where there are other animals besides more humans and our domesticates, and the whole idea that gulls are a ‘problem’ is, frankly, tired bullshit that we should be done with.

Articles like this are possible because of the support I receive at patreon. Please consider supporting my research and writing if you don’t already, thank you so much.

Gulls and other charadriiform birds have been covered a few times on TetZoo before… though here’s your usual reminder that some of these articles are now paywalled, or have had their images removed.

• The godwit’s many bills, January 2007

• Why the Lion Grew Its Mane, a book review, November 2008

• To the Sahara in quest of dinosaurs (living and extinct), December 2008

• Mysterious channels of Alca torda, January 2009

• Kleptoparasitism at Westbury Manor, January 2009

• Mobile phones, medals, a doll's legs, an entire army... is there anything a gull won't swallow?, December 2009

• The incredible bill of the oystercatcher, July 2010

• Your Awesome Neighbourhood Herring Gull (And Its Many Cousins), September 2015

• Avocets in Flight and Phylogeny, October 2018

Refs - -

Iason, G.R., Duck, C. D. & Clutton-Brock, T. H. 1986. Grazing and reproductive success of red deer – the effect of local enrichment by gull colonies. Journal of Animal Ecology 55, 507-515.

Madden, B. & Newton, S. F. 2010. Herring gull (Larus argentatus). In Lloyd, C., Tasker, M. L. & Partridge, K. (eds) The Status of Seabirds in Britain and Ireland. T & AD Poyser, London, pp. 242-261.

Magnusson, B. & Magnusson, S. H. 2000. Vegetation on Surtsey, Iceland, during 1990–1998 under the influence of breeding gulls. Surtsey Research 11, 9-20.

Sekercioglu, C. H. 2006. Increasing awareness of avian ecological function. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 21, 464-471.

Young, H. G. 1987. Herring gull preying on rabbits. British Birds 80, 630.

Five Famous Palaeolithic Rock Art Enigmas

I’m fascinated by ancient rock art and have written about it a few times here at TetZoo…

… in part because it often gives us a great deal of useful information on the life appearance of extinct Pleistocene animals. My article on the life appearance of the Woolly rhino is here, the one on Pleistocene horses is here, and the one on Megaloceros is here. As per usual, at least some of these articles have been ruined by hosting issues (if you’re patient, they’ll eventually appear in one of the Tetrapod Zoology books – which are a thing, I promise).

Today I want to talk about a few examples of Palaeolithic art that have caused controversy and uncertainty as goes what they depict. I’ve been unashamedly hokey and sensational with regard to which I’ve chosen, and have deliberately picked cases where especially odd things have been said about them, often in decidedly grey literature. This doesn’t mean that I endorse said odd things, but they’re certainly relevant and inspirational to my interests. Furthermore, they aren’t so much ‘enigmas’ as ‘ambiguous cases open to interpretation’.

I should also emphasise that I’m concentrating here on European rock art. Australian, African, Asian and North American rock art also has its fair share of intriguing images that have been the topic of contention.

Caption: the famous Lascaux ‘unicorn’ or ‘licorne’. Pretty weird that an animal with two horns ever became a ‘unicorn’, but whatevs. Credit: New Cryptozoology Tarmola Wiki (original here).

1. The Unicorn of Lascaux. Among the most famous of enigmatic rock art animal depictions is the bovid-like, horned quadruped from the ‘Hall of the Bulls’ at Lascaux, Dordogne, France, sometimes called the licorne. It’s 1.65 metres long and combines a dark, rectangular muzzle and shoulder hump with a sway back, rotund belly (leading some to suggest that it might be pregnant), short tail and dark legs. Large dark reddish blotches with pale centres cover its sides. Its most memorable feature is its two long, parallel, straight horns, which project forwards and upwards from its forehead in a manner that doesn’t really match any known animal. The fact that there are clearly two horns means that ‘unicorn’ is a total misnomer, but I guess we’re stuck with it.

Caption: the ‘unicorn’ (at far left) in the Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux Cave. Image: N. Aujoulat © MCC-CNP, from Martin-Sanchez et al. (2015).

The animal is standing at the far left of a frieze that features horses, aurochs and deer – among the best examples of their kind, in fact. The realism of the two aurochs in the same frieze is intriguing, since this somehow adds credence to the ‘unicorn’: surely it must be a realistic depiction of something real as well? Needless to say, it doesn’t match anything known to science. Is this a representation of a species otherwise unknown, it is a ‘bad’ depiction of a known species, or is it a fictional, symbolic or representational animal of some sort? Well, people have suggested a bunch of ideas.

Caption: could the ‘unicorn’ be a Chiru? I dunno, it doesn’t seem like a good match. Image: Philip Sclater, public domain (original here).

A few informal suggestions have drawn attention to the supposed cat-like form of this animal (err, not sure I see that myself… what would this mean – that it’s a bovid-mimicking horned cat? Bwahahaaaha), or the possibility that it might depict people wearing a skin as a hunting disguise (nice idea, but no way to be at all confident about it) (Eberhart 2002). The best known idea – “best known” because it was mentioned in Björn Kurtén’s Pleistocene Mammals of Europe – is probably Dorothea Bate’s that it depicts a Chiru Panthalops hodgsoni (Kurtén 1968). While there’s a really vague superficial resemblance, the spotted body and forward-canted horns of the ‘unicorn’ aren’t at all Chiru-like. The suggestion that it might be saiga is out there too, but this suffers from the same problems: the horns are the wrong shape, what’s with the spotting, and why are the key features of saiga (most notably the distinctive snout) missing?

Caption: Björn Kurtén’s Pleistocene Mammals of Europe features this composite, showing the ‘unicorn’ next to a Chiru, the idea being that they look quite similar. But I think the picture is a bit of a cheat since Chiru horns point upwards and backwards, not forwards. Image: Kurtén (1968).

2. The Sorcerer of Trois Frères. I can’t not talk about the famous ‘deer man’ of Trois Frères, Ariège, France, even though it almost certainly isn’t a depiction of a non-human (reminder: TetZoo isn’t just about non-human tetrapods). This image is 75 cm long, and is most typically imagined as an illustration (it combines both engraving and paint) of a bipedal male humanoid, standing with partly folded, short forelimbs, and with a low shoulder hump, short neck, small-eyed, bearded face, erect, deer-like ears and stout branched antlers. A curving tail and dangling male genitals are supposed to be visible as well, and prominent dark stripes run the length of the body and hindlimbs. Could this be a god-like creature believed in as a protector or object of worship? Or does it show that the artist was part of a group who believed in human-non-human transmogrification or transmutation? Is it a therianthrope (a mashup of human and non-human body parts of the sort illustrated elsewhere in the ancient world)? Or is it a semi-abstract take on a non-human bipedal creature of some sort… something unknown to science!!

Caption: a redrawing of Breuil’s interpretation of the ‘Sorcerer’, from Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams’s 1998 book The Shamans of Prehistory. As discussed in the text, this may be too generous relative to the original. Image: Clottes & Lewis-Williams (1996).

At the time of writing I’ve recently watched the 2017 movie The Ritual, and - while watching it - I couldn’t help but wonder if the creature in that movie – I’ll say no more because spoilers, but it’s called the Jōtunn – was in some way inspired by the Trois Frères sorcerer. But it wasn’t.

Caption: a scene from The Ritual, a great movie I really liked. Image: Netflix/Collider (taken from here).

Anyway, we owe this view of the figure to Abbé Henri Breuil (1877-1961), priest, archaeologist and master of French cave art. Breuil did a lot of good work and came up with many influential ideas on why, when and how cave art was produced (most famously in Breuil (1952)), but he wasn’t ashamed to speculate way beyond the confines of the data and at least some of his thoughts on the art involve a lot of interpretation that’s difficult to be at all confident about. Indeed, photos of the image show that a substantial amount of imagination is required to turn the fuzzy, partly indistinct humanoid figure visible today into the antlered novelty that Breuil depicted, and it simply isn’t possible to be confident that his take on the image is valid. Some people say that this is because photos typically don’t capture the subtleties of the images (which are often formed of cracks and lumps on the rock and hence don’t transfer well to flash photography), and others that the image may have faded or degraded since Breuil drew his take on it during the 1920s.

Caption: a post-Breuil photograph of the image. As you can see, it doesn’t definitely show the many details he thought it did. But were they present originally and later lost, or not captured in photos? Image: strangehistory.net (from here).

Whatever’s going on, there’s clearly something unusual in the original art. We’re seeing an interesting image of some kind.

3. The Lion Statuette of Isturitz. Big cats are depicted in several European caves and are most usually images of cave lions (and a whole article could be written on what that cave art tells us about life appearance and behaviour in Pleistocene European lions). A few depictions, however, show other cat species (like leopards). The Isturitz cave in Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France, yields some of Europe’s most interesting Palaeolithic art, and among this is a 16 cm long statuette of a big cat, seemingly shown with a short tail, rectangular face, prominent chin, and sparse array of spots across its upper surface. Conventionally identified as a lion, it was argued by Vratislav Mazak (1970) to instead be a depiction of the sabretooth Homotherium. This would be pretty radical for several reasons: not only would it be the only known human-made image of a sabretooth on record (though read on), it would also require that Homotherium persisted in Europe much later than anyone had previously thought (to 30,000 years ago, rather than to 300,000 years ago). The statuette is lost today (sigh), but there is at least one photo of it.

Caption: a drawing of the Isturitz statuette, borrowed from Michel Raynal’s now defunct webpage (a newer drawing of the image has since been produced by Mauricio Antón; see Antón et al. 2009). Lion or scimitar-toothed cat?

Mazak’s idea was accepted by several other authors, most notably Michel Rousseau (1971a, b), who argued that several other European Palaeolithic illustrations could depict Homotherium as well. The idea was made better known thanks to the coverage it received from Shuker (1989) and Guthrie (2005). And in 2000 it received what looked like support from the discovery of a geologically young Homotherium fossil (a lower jaw from the North Sea), dated to c 28,000 years ago (Reumer et al. 2003). So far, so good – maybe the Isturitz statuette gives us an unparalleled insight into the life appearance of an iconic sabretooth.

But… no. In a detailed re-examination of the case, Mauricio Antón and colleagues argued that it isn’t a depiction of Homotherium at all, but a Cave lion Panthera leo spelaea (Antón et al. 2009). They argued (following rigorous and detailed anatomical assessment of the life appearance of Homotherium) that the statuette lacks the longish neck, level (rather than convex) dorsal outline to the head, protruding canine tips, and sloping back that would be evident if this really was a depiction of Homotherium. I find these arguments pretty compelling and think that the statuette is a lion after all. Probably.

Caption: Antón et al. (2009) argued that Homotherium (A, B) would differ noticeably from Cave lion (C, D) in proportions. The homothere has taller shoulders, a longer neck, a flatter head, and a more sloping back than a pantherine like a lion. Image: Antón et al. 2009.

Long-time readers might recall this as something I covered way back at TetZoo ver 1. That article (with about half of all the other TetZoo ver 1 articles) is included in my 2010 book Tetrapod Zoology Book One (Naish 2010). Book Two will be published this year or in 2020, incidentally.

4. The Beast-Women of Isturitz. Isturitz is also the discovery site of an engraved piece of bone that features a bison on one side, and two humanoids on the other. The humanoids are depicted in side view, as if swimming past the viewer, and they appear to be women. But they’re very unusual women.

Caption: one of several photos showing the famous Isturitz ‘bison and two women’ engraved bone shard. This is a replica on display at Musée d'Archeologie Nationale et Domaine, St-Germain-en-Laye. Image: Don Hitchcock, from donsmaps.com.

For one thing, while they’re certainly human-like, they aren’t as human-like as regular humans. The one breast we see is shown hanging from the armpit region, rather than at the front of the chest, the profile of the face is not especially human-like and features an unusual protruding nose, and the body is unusually massive and stocky, exceeding the proportions of a human with substantial body fat. Additionally, the figures have collars or binding around their necks and wrists, and one of them has a barbed harpoon symbol on its thigh – the exact same symbol elsewhere shown on prey animals, like the bison on the other side of the engraving.

Caption: drawings of the same piece, this time showing both the bison side and the ‘two women’ side. Image: this version appeared in Heuvelmans & Porchnev, but is taken here from donsmaps.com.

The most likely explanation is that these are stylized or badly drawn figures, and that we’d be silly to over-interpret them and think that they’re meant to be anatomically accurate in all their details. Perhaps the harpoon symbols show the images represent one or more particularly unpopular members of the tribe (maybe this is even a deliberate parody or cartoon), or perhaps this is a sort of Palaeolithic ‘most wanted’ poster (Bahn & Vertut 1997) and maybe the collars and wrist bindings are just ornaments or jewellery.

I can’t resist mentioning, however, the far more out-there idea that these aren’t depictions of Homo sapiens, but of another hominin species, and one that differs from ours in being more massive, different in head and nose shape, and in being regarded by us as an enemy or prey species, or even a beast of burden. The idea has been seriously proposed in the cryptozoology literature wherein it’s argued that ancient humans knew, and sometimes depicted in art, a more bestial, snub-nosed hominin that was perhaps part of H. neanderthalensis (Loofs-Wissowa 1994, Raynal 2001, Heuvelmans 2016). Regular readers will recall me covering this very niche take on prehistoric hominins in my 2016 review of Bernard Heuvelmans’s book Neanderthal: the Strange Saga of the Minnesota Iceman. I don’t think it’s a valid take on these illustrations, but… come on, it’s such a fun idea.

Caption: Heuvelmans and a few other authors argued that Neanderthals were bestial creatures with an enlarged upturned nose. I covered this whole take on Neanderthals in my review of Heuvelmans (2016), here. Image: Heuvelmans 2016.

5. Great auk… or Long-Necked Sea Monster? Finally, birds are not especially abundant in ancient rock art, but nevertheless such species as owls, swans, geese, duck and herons were all depicted on occasion. Among the most interesting of ancient birds in rock art are those at Cosquer Cave in Marseille, France, an amazing cave – discovered in 1985 and only announced in 1991 – with a submerged undersea entrance. The birds here are big-bodied, short-legged, and with flipper-like wings and a small head, and the most popular identification is that they’re Great auk Pinguinus impennis*. That would be a big deal since it would be the first rock art of that species; it would also be consistent with fossil evidence showing that this species occurred in the Mediterranean during prehistoric times.

* An error meant that these birds were initially announced as ‘penguins’. As many as you will know, the term penguin was originally applied to the Great auk, and only later applied to the sphenisciforms of the south.

Caption: the Cosquer Cave ‘penguins’. I don’t know who to credit this image to but will add info when I get it.

However, the Cosquer Cave illustrations don’t look much like Great auks at all – this suggestion could be completely wrong, or it could be that they’re schematic or abstract depictions of this species. Indeed, some experts think that providing a specific identification like this is going too far and that it might be better to just identify them as generic seabirds (Bahn & Vertut 1997).

Caption: is the Cosquer Cave animal really a depiction of a Great auk? Hmm, maybe… but the similarity isn’t actually convincing. Images: auk by Darren Naish; Cosquer Cave animal from Mysterious Universe (here).

An even more exotic suggestion is that the massive body, stumpy tail, flippers and small head of these animals makes them look like…. the long-necked sea monster – a sort of enormous seal with a long neck and a humped back – endorsed by some cryptozoologists (most famously Bernard Heuvelmans, who proposed the name Megalotaria longicollis for this creature).

Caption: one of the most familiar depictions of Megalotaria is this painting from Janet and Colin Bord’s article on sea monsters from the partwork series The Unexplained (and latterly included in the book Creatures From Elsewhere). Not sure who the artist was. Image: (c) Orbis Publishing.

Yes, the idea that these might be depictions of a sea monster are out there in the cryptozoology literature, specifically in a 1994 article by François de Sarre*. Given that this idea requires Megalotaria to be real (something I don’t endorse, regretfully: see Woodley et al. 2008), I don’t think that this is an especially good idea, though I do agree that there’s a superficial similarity.

Caption: so - is that Cosquer Cave animal a depiction of the long-necked mega-seal Megalotaria? Err, wouldn’t Megalotaria have to actually exist first? Images: Megalotaria (c), Stefano Maugeri (from here); Cosquer Cave animal from Mysterious Universe (here).

In the end, the idea that these images can be precisely identified to a species is probably erroneous, as it is in many similar cases. People must surely have drawn things badly, or in abstract fashion, or perhaps with only partial or second-hand knowledge of the animal concerned. And sometimes they might have made things up, or mashed things together.

* I’ve misplaced my copy of this article and can’t provide the full citation. But an online version is here, and an article inspired by de Sarre’s is here.

And that’s a good point to end on. Prehistoric rock art – produced over tens of thousands of years, by all manner of different groups of people with all kinds of influences, motivations, beliefs, experiences, artistic techniques, materials and technologies – no more performs the same function as human-made images do in the modern world. Some depictions were meant to be true to life, and to be educational, practical or naturalistic; others were abstract, symbolic, whimsical or even satirical; and surely others were practise pieces, or the work of individuals less skilled than others. We must not, I think, assume that everything can be identified to a known animal species with certainty or confidence.

My technical research and my writing here at the blog continues with your kind support via patreon. Many thanks to those who assist my projects. Please consider assisting if you can. The more independence I achieve, the more time I can spend producing the content you enjoy.

 For previous TetZoo articles on ancient rock art and related issues, see…

• The late survival of Homotherium confirmed, and the Piltdown cats, March 2006

• Tet Zoo picture of the day # 3 (Elasmotherium), May 2007

• The remarkable life appearance of the Woolly rhino, November 2013

• Spots, Stripes and Spreading Hooves in the Horses of the Ice Age, February 2015

•  The Life Appearance of the Giant Deer Megaloceros, September 2018

Refs - -

Antón, M, Salesa, M. J., Turner, A., Galobart, Á. & Pastor, J. F. 2009. Soft tissue reconstruction of Homotherium latidens (Mammalia, Carnivora, Felidae). Implications for the possibility of representations in Palaeolithic art. Geobios 42, 541-551.

Bahn, P. G. & Vertut, J. 1997. Journey Through the Ice Age. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.

Breuil, H. 1952. Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art. Hacker Art Books.

Clottes, J. & Lewis-Williams, D. 1998. The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves. Ariel, Barcelona.

Eberhart, G. M. 2002. Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology (two volumes). ABC Clio, Santa Barbara.

Guthrie, R. D. 2005. The Nature of Paleolithic Art. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

Heuvelmans, B. 2016. Neanderthal: the Strange Saga of the Minnesota Iceman. Anomalist Books, San Antonio, Tx.

Kurtén, B. 1968. Pleistocene Mammals of Europe. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.

Loofs-Wissowa, H. 1994. The penis rectus as a marker in human palaeontology? Human Evolution 9, 343-356.

Martin-Sanchez, P. M., Miller, A. Z. & Saiz-Jimenez, C. 2015. Lascaux Cave: an example of fragile ecological balance in subterranean environments. In Engel, A. S. (ed) Microbial Life of Cave Systems, De Gruyter, pp. 279–302.

Mazak, V. 1970. On a supposed prehistoric representation of the Pleistocene scimitar cat, Homotherium Farbrini, 1890 (Mammalia; Machairodontinae). Zeitschrift fur Saugertierkunde 35, 359-362.

Naish, D. 2010. Tetrapod Zoology Book One. CFZ Press, Bideford.

Raynal, M. 2001. Jordi Magraner’s field research on the bar-manu: evidence for the authenticity of Heuvelmans’ Homo pongoides. In Heinselman, C. (ed) Hominology Special Number 1. Craig Heinselman (Francestown, New Hampshire), unpaginated.

Reumer, J. W. F., Rook, L., Van Der Borg, K., Post, K., Mol, D. & De Vos, J. 2003. Late Pleistocene survival of the saber-toothed cat Homotherium in northwestern Europe. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 23, 260-262.

Rousseau, M. 1971a. Un félin à canine-poignard dans l’art paléolithique? Archéologia 40, 81-82.

Rousseau, M. 1971b. Un machairodonte dans l’art aurignacien? Mammalia 35, 648-657.

Shuker, K. P. N. 1989. Mystery Cats of the World. Robert Hale, London.

Woodley, M. A., Naish, D. & Shanahan, H. P. 2008. How many extant pinniped species remain to be described? Historical Biology 20, 225-235.

Tell Me Something Interesting About Dunnocks

Never forget that animals familiar to you – the sort you see and hear every day, or every other day – may be exotic and exciting creatures to various of your fellow humans. And it’s for this reason that I’ve sometimes chosen to write about familiar, commonplace species I see every day, since I know that other people won’t be familiar with the animals concerned, nor even (in cases) be aware of their existence. Today I want to discuss a passerine bird I’ve long planned to write about: a cryptic, mostly brown species known generally and most commonly as the Dunnock Prunella modularis but increasingly as the Hedge accentor.

Caption: I’ve never found Dunnocks especially easy to photograph… but, then, I could say that about most of the birds I’ve tried to photograph. This one is living up to one of its vernacular names and standing on top of a (recently trimmed) hedge. Image: Darren Naish.

Actually, the ‘old’ name for this species here in the UK is ‘Hedge sparrow’. This name has mostly had its day. It’s naïve and quaint as well as wrong – we’ve mostly given up on the idea that ‘sparrow’ means ‘generic small brown bird’ – and it’s dying out because you look far smarter and more knowledgeable about birds if you know what an accentor is. Accentors are unique to northern Africa and Eurasia (excepting their introduction to New Zealand); all extant 13 species are included within the genus Prunella, though an argument has sometimes been made that Laiscopus should be recognised too (for the large, mountain-dwelling Alpine accentor P. collaris and Altai accentor P. himalayana). They’re mostly birds of mountainous places and temperate woodland, the Dunnock also occurring in suburban gardens and parks. Where do accentors belong within the passerine radiation? They’re part of Passeroidea and – ironically – very close to sparrows proper, but are outside the big passeroid clade that includes finches and New World nine-primaried oscines, termed Emberizoidea (Selvatti et al. 2015). Yes, they have a fossil record, but it only extends back to the Pliocene…. so far.

Caption: substantially simplified cladogram of passeroid passerines, showing some of the main lineages. Accentors are close to true sparrows, wagtails and pipits and kin but are part of a paraphyletic assemblage of mostly thin-billed lineages (based on the phylogeny of Selvatti et al. (2015)). This cladogram uses images produced for my STILL in-prep textbook on the vertebrate fossil record, on which go here. Image: Darren Naish.

Dunnocks are mostly insectivorous but also eat worms and seeds, and mostly forage at ground level among leaf litter. Like so many birds that occur in western Europe, the Dunnock also occurs in part of northern Africa and in such parts of western Asia as the Caucasus and Iran. Some populations – those of the UK and elsewhere in western Europe, among others – are essentially sedentary while those of Scandinavia and western Russia migrate to the Mediterranean fringes and Asia Minor during the winter. Several subspecies have been named. These differ mostly in how dark they are, the form of Ireland, western Scotland and the adjacent islands (P. m. hebridium) being darkest, that of England and eastern Scotland (P. m. occidentalis) being palest.

Caption: dunnocks are often seen in undergrowth, and thus in poor light. This photo (from 2006) shows one of the birds that used to live in my garden. Image: Darren Naish.

Flexible sexual systems. These days one of the things that most people interested in birds know about the Dunnock is that it’s notoriously flexible in breeding strategy. Some populations are monogamous (one male defends a territory inhabited by a single female), others are polygynous (where one male territory overlaps that of a few females, all of which mate with him and are defended by him from other males), and yet others are polygynandrous (where two males work together to defend the same territory, that territory containing several females, all of whom mate with the two males).

Females are often polyandrous and mate with the several males who share the same territory (these males have a dominance hierarchy of their own, but since they all mate with the same female even the ‘top’ male doesn’t necessarily father the greatest number of offspring). Seemingly because males know (or suspect) that the female in question has been mating with other males, females engage in a striking precopulatory display where she droops her wings, raises and vibrates her tail, and exposes her cloaca… which the male pecks, causing her to eject the contents (Davies 1983). The male will then guard the female to (in theory) ensure that she doesn’t mate with another male again.

Caption: I’ve seen a Dunnock do something that looked like soliciting on one occasion and have a bunch of poor photos of it, here are two of them. Image: Darren Naish.

Despite the familiarity of the Dunnock as a European garden bird, this weird and memorable behaviour wasn’t documented until 1933 in the book Evolution of Habit in Birds (this reporting an observation actually made in 1902), and even then by someone considered an outsider to technical ornithological research, namely Edmund Selous (Birkhead et al. 2014). The realisation that the precopulatory display and cloacal pecking was linked to sperm competition (Davies 1983), that extra-pair copulations were commonplace in ‘monogamous’ species, and that scientists might be able to test parentage of the resulting chicks via DNA analysis (Burke et al. 1989) didn’t arrive until the 1980s, and the Dunnock studies concerned occurred at about the same time as similar studies were documenting post-copulatory sexual selection and extra-pair copulations in birds and other animals.

Caption: David Quinn’s excellent illustration, showing the female’s precopulatory display. Image: (c) David Quinn. This drawing has appeared in Davies (1992) and Birkhead et al. (2014).

Some of you might remember seeing cloacal pecking in Dunnock featuring on TV for the first time in the 1998 BBC series The Life of Birds.

Female-female competition. In polygynous Dunnock populations, females compete for male attention and vie for territory with other females, at least some (and not the majority) of these competing females using complex songs to help attract ‘their’ male when he’s spending time with other females (Langmore & Davies 1997). They might sing as many as 60 times over the space of two days, and bouts of intense female-female competition can cause the male to move “to and fro in response to their trills, sometimes as often as every 10 or 20 seconds” (Langmore & Davies 1997, p. 887). In male passerines, elevated testosterone levels are linked to an increase in singing more. Could the same thing operate in females? Langmore et al. (2002) found that aggression among competing polygynous and polygynandrous females caused a rise in their testosterone levels, with this rise being linked to female calling and singing.

Use of complex, competitive singing by females is not unique to the Dunnock but was first documented in another accentor, the habitually polygynandrous Alpine accentor (Langmore et al. 1996). It’s increasingly well known that female-female competition is present and even important in animals (it’s key to the work I and colleagues have published on mutual sexual selection), but the case studies where it’s well documented aren’t all that familiar among biologists at large. Accentors, it turns out, are among the best of case studies.

Caption: the face a of a Dunnock. There are some similarities here with wagtails and pipits, and with sparrows and finches and their kin. Image: Darren Naish.

Having mentioned variation in female vocalisations, it’s worth noting that male Dunnocks are variable too, their singing changing (‘switching’, to use ornithological parlance) to an increased rate when they’re searching for fertile females. Rapid song switching appears to be liked by females, who are more likely to solicit matings when they hear a male produce multiple song types (Langmore 1997).

Caption: dunnocks encountered in the UK. The most striking plumage feature of this bird - the prominent streaking on its mantle and flanks - is not obvious in all views. Image: Darren Naish.

So many copulations. Perhaps unsurprisingly in view of all this, Dunnocks are sexually active little animals with a high reproductive output, by which I mean that they can mate over 100 times in a day, each copulation taking less than a second. A thousand copulation events might have occurred over the span of time in which a single egg clutch was produced, the high number of solicitations by females seemingly being more to do with securing male interest in provisioning the clutch than in winning successful fertilisation (Davies et al. 1996). In polygynandrous populations, it therefore makes sense – as a male – to turn down at least some female solicitations,  and to help less at the nest than males do in monogamous and other populations.

The possibilities open to these birds are diverse, and all have different knock-on effects as goes which sex has the ‘upper hand’ and what these strategies could mean in evolutionary terms. I haven’t covered half of the complexity here anyway – you could literally write a whole book on this stuff, and in fact Nick Davies did exactly this, back in 1992 (Davies 1992).

Caption: Nick Davies’s 1992 book is the classic work on these birds. Hey, there’s that illustration by David Quinn again.

That’s where we’ll end for now. This is yet another of those TetZoo articles that’s been planned and in a partially written state for years. Big thanks to Matt Wedel for helping to collect the relevant literature – something he did back in 2006! Yes, a lot of slow-burn stuff here at TetZoo.

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 previous TetZoo articles on passerines, see…

• Great tits: still murderous, rapacious, flesh-rending predators!, February 2013

• For The Love of Crows, October 2015

• Thoughts on the Passerine Tree, 2016, October 2016

• A Battle Among Blue Tits, February 2018

• Birdwatching in Suburban China, May 2019

Refs - -

Birkhead, T., Wimpenny, J. & Montgomerie, B. 2014. Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Burke, T., Davies, N. B., Bruford, M. W. & Hatchwell, B. J. 1989. Parental care and mating behaviour of polyandrous dunnocks Prunella modularis related to paternity by DNA fingerprinting. Nature 338, 249-251.

Davies, N. B. 1983. Polyandry, cloaca-pecking and sperm competition in dunnocks. Nature 302, 334-336.

Davies, N. B. 1992. Dunnock Behaviour and Social Evolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Davies, N. B., Hatchwell, B. J. & Langmore, N. E. 1996. Female control of copulations to maximize male help: a comparison of polygynandrous alpine accentors, Prunella collaris, and dunnocks, P. modularis. Animal Behaviour 51, 27-47.

Langmore, N. E. 1997. Song switching in monandrous and polyandrous dunnocks, Prunella modularis. Animal Behaviour 53, 757-766.

Langmore, N. E., Cockrem, J. F. & Candy, E. J. 2002. Competition for male reproductive investment elevates testosterone levels in female dunnocks, Prunella modularis. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London Series B 269, 2473-2478.

Langmore, N. E. & Davies, N. B. 1997. Female dunnocks use vocalizations to compete for males. Animal Behaviour 53, 881-890.

Langmore, N. E., Davies, N. B., Hatchwell, B. J. & Hartley, I. R. 1996. Female song attracts males in the alpine accentor Prunella collaris. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London Series B, 263, 141-146.

Selvatti, A. P., Gonzaga, L. P. & Russo, C. A. de M. 2015. A Paleogene origin for crown passerines and the diversification of the Oscines in the New World. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 88, 1-15.

Mark Witton’s The Palaeoartist’s Handbook

It’s probably – no, surely – true to say that palaeoart (aka paleoart) is more popular right now that it ever has been, a fact due in equal part to a vibrant, active community of people worldwide, to the instant, ubiquitous reach of the internet and the connectedness we feel via social media, to self-publishing and on-demand printing services, and to the excitement and discussion generated by what seems to be a never-ending stream of amazing fossil and anatomical discoveries relevant to ancient animals.

Caption: today, Mark Witton is well known for generating large-scale artworks like this one - depicting the sauropod Diplodocus, and produced to accompanying the NHM’s Dippy specimen as it tours the UK - in addition to work done to accompany press releases. Image: (c) Mark Witton.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Dr Mark P. Witton is, right now, one of the world’s best known and most visible of palaeoartists; his articles and artwork are abundant online, and his work appears in many contemporary published works on prehistoric life, and in various museum installations and other displays. Combine this with the fact that he’s published a long-sought holy grail of the palaeoart canon – a palaeoart handbook – and we surely have one of the most important and worthy palaeoart-themed volumes of all time. Right? Does it deliver?

I refer to 2018’s The Palaeoartist’s Handbook, a slick, extremely affordable softback of 224 pages and extremely high production values. In response to my question above: yes, this book does deliver, and functions extremely well as a ‘handbook’ for those interested in producing palaeoart. Buy it right now if you haven’t done so already. Even those not needing or interested in Dr Witton’s advice should obtain it if they’re interested in palaeoart, since it contains stacks of invaluable review and commentary, does a great job of stating where we are with respect to what we think we know about the appearance of ancient animals, and is really well designed and densely illustrated. It’s probably the most important volume yet published on palaeoart*, and that remains true even if you dislike or disagree with the author’s contentions.

* ‘Importance’ is subjective, but the volume vies – I predict – with 2012’s All Yesterdays and volumes I and II of Dinosaurs Past and Present.

Caption: there aren’t many ‘crucial’/’must have’ volumes on palaeoart, but the Dinosaurs Past and Present volumes are among them, volume II in particular because of Greg Paul’s article (Paul 1987). Images: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County/University of Washington Press.

A disclaimer I should mention upfront is that Mark and I are long-standing friends and colleagues. I lectured to Mark when he was an undergrad, we’ve been on fieldwork together, and we’ve published several works together on pterosaurs (Witton & Naish 2008, 2015, Dyke et al. 2014, Vremir et al. 2015, Naish & Witton 2017) and palaeoart (Witton et al. 2014). These things might, in theory, mean that I’m positively biased towards his work, but in reality I think they help make me more neutral, since our good relationship means that I can say negative things (where fair and appropriate) and not be worried about being offensive. But let’s see.

Witton (2018) is extremely well designed and very attractive. It’s glossy, full colour throughout, and absolutely packed full of diagrams, photos and art. The art is not just by Mark Witton but also features images by Raven Amos, Rebecca Groom, Johan Egerkrans, Bob Nicholls, John Conway, Emily Willoughby, Julius Csotonyi and Scott Hartman. Holy crap, it’s a virtual who’s who of Early 21st Century palaeoart.

Caption: Witton (2018) includes artwork by several artists, sometimes included to depict diverse styles, compositions and approaches. This is ‘Nemegt Sunrise’ by the amazing Raven Amos (website here), and depicts the oviraptorosaur Conchoraptor with a hermit crab. Image: (c) R. Amos.

What sort of book is this? A ‘palaeoart book’ can be one of several things. It could be a compendium of historical images (like Zoë Lescaze’s gigantic, deeply idiosyncratic but invaluable 2017 Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past), it could be a bunch of new, daring stuff that makes a point of some sort (cf All Yesterdays), it could be an artist’s porfoilio or a series of portfolios (like the Dinosaur Art volumes, or The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi), or it could be a technical volume that provides some theoretical or technical background to the field… I’m sure we’re all still waiting for ‘The Grand Handbook to Illustrating Prehistoric Life, a Rigorous How-To Guide’, hint hint.

Caption: the number of books devoted to palaeoart is growing. I think I’ve managed to keep up so far. Image: Darren Naish.

Witton (2018) is partly all of these things: the volume is fundamentally devoted to the techniques, practices and scientific processes and conventions behind the creation of palaeoart, and the case studies and targeted discussions mean that we effectively see much of Witton’s work showcased. But there’s more.

Witton (2018) begins with introductory sections on what palaeoart is and on its history. The historical chapter is quite complete and inclusive, and I’m a big fan of Witton’s take on the work of Cuvier, Hawkins at Crystal Palace and other early efforts. He’s also fair to the artists who produced work during what he terms ‘The Reformation’, some of whom (Greg Paul in particular) have had a major, lasting impact on how we imagine ancient life. The ‘palaeoart meme’ story that I’ve drawn attention to through my own research and the All Yesterdays movement bring a close to this section alongside comments on some of the amazing, exciting new developments being made in the world of soft tissues and palaeo-colour.

Caption: the Crystal Palace animals remain among the most accurate renditions of prehistoric life ever made (like all palaeoartistic reconstructions, they have to be seen as being of their time), and Mark Witton’s take on them is one I absolutely agree with. This photo of the Iguanodon pair was taken in September 2018. Image: Darren Naish.

The meat and potatoes. We then move on to the ‘meat and potatoes’ of the book: a group of chapters that discuss in great detail the process of creating palaeoart. Sections here cover how research is important and how a worker might go about doing it, how knowledge of phylogeny is integral to understanding an organism, and how artists should at least be aware of tropes and stereotypes. This book is fundamentally not a ‘rigorous how-to guide’ to all the prehistoric animals (every time I use this term I’m riffing on the title Greg Paul gave his seminal 1987 article on archosaur reconstruction), but this middle section of the book does include copious discussion of anatomy, the shapes of animals in 3D and cross-section, of musculature and posture, the importance of integument, fat and other external tissue, and so on. I should add that Chapter 9 (‘The Life Appearance of Some Fossil Animal Groups) is devoted to the probable life appearances of key tetrapod groups. Ha, take that fishes.

Caption: in many cases, the favoured, traditional look for a given prehistoric animal is not necessarily the one we might favour. Here’s an example: Mark has argued that a new look for the proboscidean Deinotherium - shown here - should be considered. Image: (c) Mark Witton/Witton (2018).

These central chapters are probably the most important part of the book and will be those used most by the largest number of people. There’s a ton of information and discussion, and Mark describes in detail how he’s arrived at the conclusions he has. Readers of Mark’s blog will be familiar with some of the arguments here and might also know that much of it has never been properly published (as in, in technical papers or articles). The book is therefore especially significant as a source of primary data, though I know that efforts are underway to get at least some of it into the primary literature.

Caption: extensive sections of Witton (2018) discuss osteological correlates for external texture and other features. In some cases - like ceratopsian dinosaurs - there are many such correlates. Image: (c) Mark Witton/Witton (2018).

How confident can we be that Mark is ‘right’ when it comes to his arguments about lips, cornified facial tissue, scalation or fuzziness on the body and so on? I think that a strong response would be that he has at least described, explained and illustrated his reasoning and it’s difficult to think that he’s ‘wrong’, two caveats being that there is – as Mark states quite clearly – still some considerable slop as goes determining the relative size of keratinous coverings (like the pads, scales and sheaths covering horns, claws and so on), and that the vagaries of taphonomy might still be cheating us out of valuable information on which archosaurs had filaments, fuzz or feathers. Yes, I still think that big tyrannosaurs could have been fuzzy and that we aren’t picking this up because the fossils concerned aren’t preserved in the ideal sedimentological regimes.

Speculation and the All Yesterdays Movement. The main message here is that while some speculation always has to be included in palaeoartistic reconstructions, there’s a lot of stuff that’s knowable, or potentially knowable, and informed by actual anatomical data. This is increasingly the case even for colour and pattern (caveat: we still only have data on some infinitesimally tiny percentage of extinct animals). The door is not open for any possibility, and artists who wish to be seen as doing work that’s scientifically credible have to take into account data derived from fossils as well as ‘rules’ (or guidelines) gleaned from living animals. However…

Caption: Conway et al.’s 2012 All Yesterdays has changed the way many people approach palaeoart… but is this for better, or for worse? Image: Conway et al. (2012).

A valid, controversial and timely point concerns just how much speculation is permissible in palaeoart. This is something I feel especially connected to given the impact of my 2012 book – co-authored with John Conway and C. M. Kosemen – All Yesterdays (Conway et al. 2012) and the subsequent ‘All Yesterdays Movement’, which is hated by some but loved by others. Mark’s take on what happened post-AY is that a lot of AY-inspired artwork has failed to appreciate the nuance of the original work, and that AY was (wrongly) taken by some as a green light to go nuts and do whatever, the results being misguided and likely wrong.

Caption: Mark has indulged in some speculation himself (here: shaggy-coated pachyrhinosaurs), and it’s down to opinion as to whether this is as extreme as anything depicted in All Yesterdays. Image: Mark Witton/Witton (2018).

Caption: it would be wrong to avoid bringing attention to Franco Tempesta’s woolly, cold-adapted pachyrhinosaur, very obviously inspired by Mark Witton’s, and appearing in the 2016 Usborne book Build Your Own DInosaurs Sticker Book. I was consultant, but I’m sure that that’s coincidental. Image: (c) Franco Tempesta/Usborne.

I agree… if we’re talking about artworks that aim to reflect possible realities. A nuance to the nuance of AY is that there exists a small contradiction in the aims of its creators. Yes, we argued that there are many potentially valid, scientifically defensible possibilities that hadn’t or haven’t been sufficiently explored in pre-AY palaeoart, but we did also promote the idea that people might explore other possibilities – even those weird or dumb or wrong – purely for the sake of artistic expression. That this view is canonical in the AYverse is demonstrated by the inclusion in the sequential All Your Yesterdays of retrosaurs that are absolutely contradicted by data but still fun from an artistic take. In other words, not all AY-inspired art is meant to be scientifically defensible. The takehome – post-AY – is that people need to say what they’re aiming to depict: a random fancy or a serious proposal?

Caption: not all AY-inspired art is meant to be scientifically responsible and potentially realistic, some of it is deliberately whimsical and fanciful. Exhibit A: the wonder that is Spinofaaras vulgaris, a creature that now has an internet life of its own. Image: (c) Chris Masna (original here).

Anyway, returning to the contents of Witton (2018), this main section wraps up with some thoughts on how landscapes are created, and how composition and mood can be formed. Discussing environments and landscapes involves science – geology, geomorphology and palaeoclimate, among other things – and this is Witton’s main strength, but I also found his take on composition, stylistic choices and other matters of artistic style compelling…. speaking as someone who lacks artistic training and expertise, that is. The volume ends with a chapter on the professional side of palaeoart.

Caption: feedback and criticism is crucial, but it can be difficult to know what to say to artists when you aren’t one yourself. In this section of the book, Mark provides advice, using his 2008 azhdarchid image as a piece that might benefit from constructive criticism. This piece accompanied the Witton & Naish (2008) PLoS paper on azhdarchids. Image: (c) Mark Witton/Witton (2018).

On the negative side of things… I find the editing sloppy in places and think that the prose could have been tightened here and there. There are also a few turns of phrase that I found awkward, weird or (sorry) terrible, top of the list being the reference to “palaeontologists with the mightiest beards” (p. 38). On technical aspects, I’m a bit confused by Mark’s use of ‘reptile’ in the old, paraphyletic sense (in a volume otherwise using modern phylogenetic nomenclature, wouldn’t it make sense to use Reptilia for the lizard + turtle + croc clade, and not to use it for a paraphyletic assemblage that excludes birds?). Panoplosaurus is wrongly called an ankylosaurid (p. 125), and isn’t Deinotherium a deinotheriid, not a deinotherid? These are minor, piffling, trivial things that I only state here because I have nowhere else to put them.

Caption: the book is just full of spectacular imagery like this, much of which hasn’t appeared in print before. This image depicts the azhdarchoid pterosaur Thalassodromeus. Image: (c) Mark Witton/Witton (2018).

All in all, The Palaeoartist’s Handbook is an excellent, beautifully produced, well crafted book which contains a wealth of information on the life appearance of extinct animals and how we might imagine them as living things, and it’s phenomenally good on the workings of palaeoart more generally. It should have broader appeal than to the palaeoart fraternity alone, and I think that anyone seriously interested in prehistoric animals or even in the history of art or the way people have imagined the past should obtain it too. For now, Witton (2018) is – mission fulfilled – THE palaeoartist’s handbook indeed.

Mark P. Witton. 2018. The Palaeoartist’s Handbook: Recreating Prehistoric Animals in Art. The Crowood Press, Marlborough (UK), 224 pp, softback, index, refs, ISBN 978-1-78500-461-2. Here on amazon. Here on amazon.co.uk.

For previous TetZoo articles on palaeoart and Wittoniana (the ver 2 and ver 3 ones have been ruined by removal of images), see…

• The Great Dinosaur Art Event of 2012, November 2012 (but all images now missing)

• All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals - the book and the launch event, December 2012 (but all images now missing)

• Artistic Depictions of Dinosaurs Have Undergone Two Revolutions, September 2014 (but all images now missing)

• The Dinosaurs of Crystal Palace: Among the Most Accurate Renditions of Prehistoric Life Ever Made, August 2016

• The Natural History Museum at South Kensington, November 2016

• Naish and Barrett's Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved, November 2016

• 25 Years after Jurassic Park, Part 1, June 2018

• 25 Years after Jurassic Park, Part 2, June 2018

• 25 Years after Jurassic Park, Part 3, June 2018

• Dinosaurs in the Wild: An Inside View, July 2018

• Recollections of Dinosaurs Past and Present, the 1980s Exhibition, February 2019

 Refs - -

Conway, J., Kosemen, C.M. and Naish, D. 2012. All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. Irregular Books.

Dyke, G. J., Vremir, M., Brusatte, S., Bever, G., Buffetaut, E., Chapman, S., Csiki-Sava, Z., Kellner, A. W. A., Martin, E., Naish, D., Norell, M., Ősi, A., Pinheiro, F. L., Prondvai, E., Rabi, M., Rodrigues, T., Steel, L., Tong, H., Vila Nova, B. C. & Witton, M. 2014. Thalassodromeus sebesensis – a new name for an old turtle. Comment on “Thalassodromeus sebesensis, an out of place and out of time Gondwanan tapejarid pterosaur”, Grellet-Tinner and Codrea. Gondwana Research 27, 1680-1682.

Naish, D. & Witton, M. P. 2017. Neck biomechanics indicate that giant Transylvanian azhdarchid pterosaurs were short-necked arch predators. PeerJ 5: e2908.

Paul, G. S. 1987. The science and art of restoring the life appearance of dinosaurs and their relatives - a rigorous how-to guide. In Czerkas, S. J. & Olson, E. C. (eds) Dinosaurs Past and Present Vol. II. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County/University of Washington Press (Seattle and London), pp. 4-49.

Vremir, M., Witton, M., Naish, D., Dyke, G., Brusatte, S. L., Norell, M. & Totoianu, R. 2015. A medium-sized robust-necked azhdarchid pterosaur (Pterodactyloidea: Azhdarchidae) from the Maastrichtian of Pui (Haţeg Basin, Transylvania, Romania). American Museum Novitates 3827, 1-16.

Witton, M. P. & Naish, D. 2008. A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology. PLoS ONE 3 (5): e2271. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002271

Witton, M. P. & Naish, D. 2015. Azhdarchid pterosaurs: water-trawling pelican mimics or “terrestrial stalkers”? Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 60, 651-660.

Witton, M. P., Naish, D. & Conway, J. 2014. State of the Palaeoart. Palaeontologia Electronica 17, Issue 3; 5E: 10p.

The World’s Best Books on Woodpeckers

I really like woodpeckers. This large, widespread group of around 240 living species includes the wrynecks, piculets and true or typical woodpeckers and includes species ranging from 7 to 60 cm in length. Woodpeckers are famous for their wood-excavating specialisations and ability to cling and climb on vertical substrates, but they’re diverse and not all species have these features. Here, I’ll resist the urge to talk about the birds that much and will instead provide brief comments on some of the best books written on these charismatic and fascinating animals.

Caption: this is one of the two woodpecker species I see on a regular basis: Green woodpecker Picus viridis (this photo from March 2016). All my photos are bad. Image: Darren Naish.

Winkler et al.’s Woodpeckers: A Guide to the Woodpeckers, Piculets and Wrynecks of the World. Winkler et al. (1995) is the woodpecker instalment in the famous Pica Press book series: these books feature an introductory section on the anatomy and systematics of the group concerned, a colour plate section (in this case, with art by David Nurney), and a species-by-species text section. The book is definitive and I’ve used it a lot. The text summarises knowledge on range, identification, habits, foot, breeding and more, and references are provided.

Like most people seriously interested in birds, I’ve amassed a decent collection of the Helm/Pica Press books in the same series, but I’m some way from owning all of them. Insert typical complaint about recently published bird books being prohibitively expensive.

Caption: the Helm/Pica Press bird books (oops, plus a few others) in the Tet Zoo Towers library. Image: Darren Naish.

Alexander Skutch’s Life of the Woodpecker. Skutch (1985) is a large (near ‘oversize’) hardback book, beautifully illustrated in colour throughout by the very good paintings of Dana Gardner. The book is separated into sections that cover the various aspects of woodpecker behaviour and ecology; there’s also a brief introduction to woodpeckers as a whole and a taxonomic list of recognised species at the back. Overall, the book is a good introduction to our knowledge of woodpeckers and everything about them, but it’s the artwork that makes it really worth getting.

Caption: at left, Fiery-billed aracari (Pteroglossus frantzii) vs Pale-billed woodpecker (Campephilus guatemalensis). At right, Imperial Campephilus imperialis. Just two of the many excellent illustrations by Dana Gardner included in Skutch (1985). Image: Dana Gardner/Skutch (1985).

Gerard Gorman’s Woodpeckers of the World. I absolutely love field guides, often for the art more for the utility, and in part because I love the convention of showing closely related species arranged together on the same plate. But despite those things, we still often need to see photographs of the animals we’re interested in. Gorman (2014) is a photographic guide to the world’s living woodpecker species, each being illustrated by at least a few photos (though read on). The text is good too: each species has a short section covering identification, range, variation and so on. The photos are excellent. It’s a must-have if you’re seriously interested in these birds.

Are all species illustrated by photos? What about the Ivory-billed woodpecker in the room… by which I mean: what about photos of the Ivory-billed Campephilus principalis and Imperial C. imperialis? No photos, only text.

Tim Gallagher’s Imperial Dreams. I reviewed this book at TetZoo back when it was new in 2013 (but good luck finding the article now; it’s been ruined by its hosters, like all stuff at ver 2 and ver 3). I’m not that great a fan of travelogue-type books on natural history, but I do really like Imperial Dreams. One of the world’s most spectacular woodpeckers is – or, was – the Imperial woodpecker of the Sierra Madre Occidental, a pine forest giant that seems to have dwindled to extinction somewhere between the late 1950s and … 1980s? 90s? No-one knows exactly when this bird went extinct, and its persistence was rumoured as recently as the 1990s.

Gallagher (2013) charts an effort to search for continuing traces for this species. A lot of information on the bird itself is included, but the human story relevant to the region is fascinating too. If you like woodpeckers, the book is well worth getting hold of. I should finish by adding that Gallagher also wrote The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, a volume I haven’t yet read.

Books on woodpeckers. There are others… Image: Darren Naish.

Woodpeckers have been covered several times on TetZoo, but - as usual (is this getting boring now?) - they’ve been ruined by removal of images at ver 2 (the ScienceBlogs years) and ver 3 (the SciAm years). Anyway…

• Woodpeckers: barbed tentacles and the avoidance of brain injury, August 2008

• Tet Zoo Bookshelf: van Grouw’s Unfeathered Bird, Bodio s Eternity of Eagles, Witton’s Pterosaurs, Van Duzer’s Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps!, June 2013

Refs - -

Gallagher, T. 2013. Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre. Atria Books, New York.

Gorman, G. 2014. Woodpeckers of the World: A Photographic Guide. Firefly Books, Buffalo.

Skutch, A. 1985. Life of the Woodpecker. Ibis Publishing Company, Santa Monica.

Winkler, H., Christie, D. A. & Nurney, D. 1995. Woodpeckers: A Guide to the Woodpeckers, Piculets and Wrynecks of the World. Pica Press, Mountfield, UK.