Among the most fascinating of Mesozoic theropods are the alvarezsaurids, a mostly small-bodied group of maniraptoran coelurosaurs characterized by modified, ‘pick-like’ forelimbs, a lightly built, shallow lower jaw, tiny, simple teeth and elongate, slender hindlimbs…
Every now and again – speaking here as someone who’s published some number of articles, books and technical papers – I find it worthwhile to look back at the things I’ve published in the past. For whatever reason, I’m doing that a fair amount right now, and right now I want to talk about a peculiar short paper I published in 2000…
What, you want more new theropod dinosaurs from the English Lower Cretaceous? Today sees the publication of our group’s ongoing analysis of theropod diversity within the Wealden Supergroup of southern England, and the results are pretty neat if I say so myself…
Chameleons* are among the most distinctive and charismatic of lizards, and a long list of anatomical features make them very unusual...
I like iguanian lizards…. who doesn’t? But among this enormous group are a great many lineages and species that you hardly ever hear anything about…
Late in the afternoon of Friday November 8th, my paper ‘The response to and rejection of Brian Ford’s Too Big to Walk, a 21st century effort to reinstate the aquatic dinosaur hypothesis’ saw digital publication in Historical Biology (Naish 2024)…
Regular readers of this blog might be aware of my book Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths, initially published as an ebook in 2016 (Naish 2016) and appearing in hardcopy in 2017 (Naish 2017)…
I’m a big fan of the fact that hypotheses and discoveries are sometimes built piecemeal…
If you read the previous article – recapping the events of TetZooCon 2024 – you’ll know that things went well. But what was that cryptic mention toward the end of a tour?
Once again, it was recently that part of the year where a good number of science enthusiasts, natural historians, wildlife artists, scientists, researchers and interested members of the public gather in London for what we call TetZooCon: the annual Tetrapod Zoology Convention…
Once again it’s time to continue with my slow-burn zoo review series. I’ve just returned from a trip to Tokyo, you see, and while there I visited two zoos. Today we look at the first of them: Ueno Zoological Gardens (usually just called Ueno Zoo), located in Ueno Park in Taito City, central Toyko…
It's time once again to look at squamates…
As remarkable as it might sound, we’re presently in the midst of a ‘modern werewolf’ craze…
You’ll recall that my aim for 2024 is to rescue and revamp a good deal of old squamate-themed material from the Tet Zoo archives….
Ever keen to cover more of squamate diversity – Squamata = snakes and lizards – we here look at a really interesting group of mostly Mexican lizards. They’ve led us on a merry chase with respect to their diversity, taxonomy, phylogeny and historical biogeography…
It’s time to start preparing for TetZooCon – our annual Tetrapod Zoology Convention – and oh boy is a lot of stuff happening this year…
It’s time once more to visit the amazing world of squamates, and again we’re looking at snakes. Today: the extremely obscure Small-eyed or Ikaheka snake of New Guinea and some of the surrounding islands. What’s the deal with this unusual animal?
Within recent days, the world has learnt of the passing of American writer, author, artist and natural historian Richard Ellis (1938-2024), best known for his many works on marine animals and their environment...
It’s time once again to look at a very interesting bunch of snakes…
An updated look at a very special group of remarkable burrowing snakes…
