Once again, it’s January 21st – hello, January 21st – which means that it’s Tetrapod Zoology’s birthday, or blogoversary or whathaveyou.
Caption: a montage of TetZoo-themed things relevant to 2019, read on…
TetZoo started life in 2006 and we saw last year how it became a teenager on its 2019 birthday. Today, TetZoo has hit the big 1-4. 14 years old. In keeping with tradition, let’s now look at the year’s TetZooniverous adventures, the caveat as always being that you should stop reading now if this sounds like it’s going to be too introspective. Because it will be. One final warning: this article is realllly long, I could have split into four or five different parts (but I didn’t want to).
Caption: we’ll start here. It depicts Joschua Knüppe, was taken at TetZooCon 2019, and was modified by Armin Reindl. I’ve lost track of who took the original, sorry.
From my own idiosyncratic perspective, TetZoo is – approximately speaking – as active as ever. I still manage to publish a few articles a month and report and discuss things relevant to my interests and thoughts, the site’s visibility and content continues to win me paying employment, its articles remain a (hopefully) valuable source of information on various arcane zoological topics, and – even in the age of Twitter and Instagram (I’m findable on both as @TetZoo) – it has a healthy community of regulars who help keep the site alive with discussion and comments.
Caption: TetZoo Towers, the scene of our story’s Act 1. Yikes, it was a mess at the time this photo was taken… Image: Darren Naish.
January 2019 started with me returning from a consultancy job in China – I work on occasion for Don Lessem’s DinoDon company – which I feel I’ve written about already. I visited Dinosaur Isle at Sandown (one of several trips made there during the year) for on-going work on Wealden theropod dinosaurs with Neil Gostling, Chris Barker and colleagues.
Caption: life-sized dinosaur models at Dinosaur Isle, Sandown. At left, one of Andrew Cocks’s Eotyrannus models (with cannon-fodder ornithischian in mouth). At right, the famous Dorling Kindersley Caudipteryx, with Luis Rey colour scheme. It was in a weird, crooked pose until Luis recently corrected it. Images: Darren Naish.
I also visited the Pulhamite Garden at Holly Hill. Pulhamite gardens – named for their designers, the Pulham brothers – are landscaped Victorian features, designed to include replica waterfalls, grottos, caves and so on. John Conway and I recorded a few episodes of the podcast and released episode 70… which we’d actually recorded back in September 2018. Yeah, we’ve had to abandon any plans to record episodes of the podcast at all regularly, not through choice but because workload no longer allows. And when we do get to record an episode, there’s no longer time or opportunity to edit it. Plus John is very, very lazy.
Caption: a cave - not a natural one, but one made by people - in the Pulhamite garden at Holly Hill, Hampshire, UK. I love this stuff. Reminiscent of the Prehistoric Court at Crystal Palace, of course. Image: Darren Naish.
The TetZoo review of 2018 (I mean, the 13th birthday article) was published at the end of January, a bit later than planned. Episode 71 of the podcast was released in early February and episode 72 – a Loch Ness Monster special – later in the month. A TetZoo article reviewing some recently-ish published books was published, and my recollections of the Dinosaurs Past and Present exhibition of the late 1980s and early 90s was published too. A technical paper I contributed to – on a Late Cretaceous eggshell assemblage from Romania, incorporating the eggs of several reptile species – was published in Scientific Reports in February (Fernández et al. 2019), and I wrote about it here at TetZoo. Will and I went to the Isle of Wight Zoo at the end of February. I mean to write about it. Internet potoos were also covered at TetZoo in February.
Caption: OH MY GOD IT’S MELLER’S DUCK. Yes, they have them at the Isle of Wight Zoo. Image: Darren Naish.
Also during February, I spent time at the BBC’s Natural History Unit – something that would take up an increasing part of my time for the rest of the year (no, I can’t talk about it) – and made tiny, incremental progress on the Eotyrannus monograph (it’s finished, and has been for months, ‘all’ I’m doing is making the post-review changes). My article on OroBOT appeared in BBC Focus magazine (Naish 2019a; an online version is here).
Caption: OroBOT! A mobile, articulated robot replica of Orobates. From the BBC Focus magazine article here.
Caption: the arrival of frogs and frogspawn in the early part of the year is always a significant annual event, and generally occurs round about the second week of February. Two clumps of spawn were produced in 2019; many of the tadpoles made it to froglet stage and some over-wintered and are still in the pond right now (January 2020). The species here is the European common frog Rana temporaria. Images: Darren Naish.
Books. The events of 2019 meant that I wasn’t able to write any new books during the year, nor finish any of the ones I’ve started. A few things happened though. The Dorling Kindersley book that I co-wrote with Chris Barker – part of their ‘What’s Where on Earth’, fully titled What’s Where on Earth: Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Life (Barker & Naish 2019) – appeared in print in March. It’s been very warmly received in reviews. I did an interview on the book (and dinosaurs in general) for First News newspaper.
Caption: new books for 2019. A new edition of Dorling Kindersley’s Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Life appeared during the year: I helped with the update but have yet to see a copy. What’s Where on Earth: Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Life (Barker & Naish 2019) also appeared.
The Japanese edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved (Naish & Barrett 2018) arrived. This version of the book makes me appreciate Japanese respect for detail and intricacy: the cover features several of the cladograms I produced for the book, the boards of the cover are decorated with a beautiful image of a moa skeleton, and there are additional details like an Erlikosaurus on the book’s spine. I drew squamates for the Big Book, a huge project that’s still ticking away in the background (cough cough).
Caption: cover views of the new Japanese edition of Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved (Naish & Barrett 2018).
Moving to March, I worked on a TV series for Wall to Wall, commissioned by Netflix. I may or may not talk about it when it’s out. An article on alternative timeline dinosaur evolution – featuring interview comments and thoughts from me – appeared in the Italian Focus magazine (Camardo 2019).
Caption: opening spread of Giovanni Camardo’s 2019 article on alternative timeline dinosaur evolution. I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: James Kuether’s dinosaurs are everywhere these days.
The dinosaur models I worked on in China at the start of the year were delivered to their new home in New York’s Bronx Zoo and put on show. Articles published at TetZoo during this part of the year include those on the cautious climber hypothesis, and the first and second of my Nessie-themed book reviews. I attended a beach clean event in late March, and as usual picked up many kilos of discarded plastic crap otherwise contaminating the environment. I’ve been doing litter-picks at beaches for years now. Things haven’t improved but have steadily gotten worse. The end of much of the natural world is in sight.
Caption: imagine trying to clean a beach like this of its plastic pollution. It isn’t going to happen: no-one is ever going to remove all of this waste. Chessel Bay, Southampton, March 2019. Image: Darren Naish.
I went to another local zoo (Marwell) in mid-April, highlights of this trip being lemurs in a pile, a rhino gang, good views of Mountain zebra Equus zebra, Crocodile monitor Varanus salvadorii and Blesbok Damaliscus pygargus phillipsi.
Caption: Marwell Zoo has so many great animals. At left, Crocodile monitor Varanus salvadorii in the new tropical house. At right, Mountain zebra Equus zebra (note the dewlap). Images: Darren Naish.
TetZoo articles from this time included those on sleep behaviour in non-human animals, phyllostomid bats, cocks-of-the-rock, and my fondness for Usborne’s 1977 All About Monsters. My latest technical contribution to the cryptozoological literature appeared (Paxton & Naish 2019), this being an article in which Charles Paxton and I aimed to determine whether popular knowledge of Mesozoic marine reptiles might have influenced 19th and 20th century sea monster sightings. We concluded that they likely had, to a degree. This research was covered here at TetZoo; Mike McRae also wrote about it here at ScienceAlert. I spent time at one of my local patches, Telegraph Woods.
Caption: while at Portsmouth Comic Con in May, I got to see several of Roger Dicken’s movie models; here’s a sauropod, I think from The Land That Time Forgot. Images: Darren Naish.
May was busy. I visited the Royal Veterinary College for a secret project I can’t talk about and, outside of work, attended Portsmouth Comic Con and Exbury Gardens, went to the several famous geological sites of Durdle Dor and its surrounds on the Dorset coast (my parents spend part of the year there), and visited the new Dogstival fair – a massive, dog-themed event devoted to everything about dogs – in the New Forest.
Caption: some summertime shots of the New Forest, UK. It really is the most spectacular location and I love spending time there. Images: Darren Naish.
On the subject of dogs, late May was difficult… I and my family said goodbye to Willow on May 20th, an event which inspired me to write about Willow and her life. I made the mistake of thinking that I’d be able to launch back into work and carry on as if nothing had happened; I should have taken the rest of the month, at least, off work. Other articles appearing at TetZoo during May include those on the creatures of Star Wars, palaeoartistic depictions of Styracosaurus, birdwatching in China, and cases where animals have died after they’ve been hit by falling rocks or trees.
Caption: I visited Bob Nicholls of paleocreations.com during summer 2019. Wow, he has some cool stuff. One of the psittacosaurs is for sale… Images: Darren Naish.
Hunting Monsters and the tabloid press. In early June I attended, and spoke at, the Cheltenham Science Festival. My talk was the Hunting Monsters one, initially prepared to promote the book of the same name (Naish 2017) back when it was new. The talk is on the history of cryptozoological theorising, on the reliability or otherwise of people as reporters of information, and on how the supposed targets of cryptozoology – ‘cryptids’ – might be explained. I signed and sold a bunch of books and had a great time, but an interesting thing happened after my talk.
Caption: books and book signing at the 2019 Cheltenham Science Festival. Jules Howard books make a guest appearance. Images: Darren Naish.
Two journalists – one from The Sun, one from The Daily Mail – were in the audience, and both asked if I thought that the lack of compelling photographic data (especially in an age where huge numbers of people now carry cameras with them most of the time) was essentially the death-knell for the existence of monsters. While things are not necessarily as simple as all that (not all animals can be photographed given the brief duration of many encounters, camera-phone photos are not necessarily good enough to be convincing to those with critical faculties, and so on), I do think that the rarity if not absence of photographic data for most cryptids counts for something, and I hence agreed with this contention. Both journalists were interested, quizzed me further on this point during the book-signing event, and said that this point would be used as the ‘hook’ in the pieces they were going to write. Remember: this idea was raised, de novo, by them and wasn’t mentioned or alluded to in my talk.
Caption: quality, genius journalism from the rag known as The Sun, oh what fun.
How, then, did the journalists concerned deal with this information? Well, you can see for yourselves from the screengrabs used here: the whole thing was spun in the weirdest direction, the take being that I’d only just concluded that cryptids aren’t real, and that I’d hence admitted to wasting about 20 years of research (as if monster-hunting is all I’ve done across the better part of my adult life). Needless to say, this is a nonsense interpretation of everything I’ve done and published. I wrote a response (initially as a series of threaded tweets); you can read it here.
Things kicked off from here, by which I mean that there was substantial further media interest. I turned down most requests for interviews (I’m at that point in my career and experience where I no longer see any benefit in making unpaid appearances on radio or TV. The claim that media exposure helps you, or is useful, is bullshit in my line of work) but did – under duress – do a brief thing for Channel 5 news (you can watch it here, if you want). So I learnt a lot from this, the main thing being that I’d underappreciated how vile and disgustingly biased and manipulative British tabloid journalism mostly is. Newspapers like The Sun approach issues with a rancid anti-intellectual agenda, with a clear intention to inspire and promote disdain, hate and ill will and – while an article written to make me look like an idiot has no national or international relevance or importance and won’t be remembered by anyone excepting myself – the impact that these redtop rags have on important issues (like Europe’s refugee crisis and the infinitely bad Brexit shitstorm) can’t be understated. Everyone knows this already, of course; I merely wanted to state it in my own words.
Caption: at the 2019 Dinosaurs and Art event - hosted at Oxford University Museum of Natural History - David Button uses the mounted Iguanodon bernissartensis replica to make a point about iguanodontian anatomy and posture. Image: Darren Naish.
Whale Watching, Fortean Times, Monsters of the Deep, Anglesey. Also in June, I watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters and was sufficiently inspired to write about it. I attended Will Tattersdill’s Dinosaurs and Art event at the University of Oxford and enjoyed talks by David Button and Verity Burke. I visited Bob Nicholl’s studio in South Gloucestershire (see montage above) and got to see a great deal of amazing in-prep, embargoed work, what an honour. My reminiscences of Lyall Watson’s Whales of the World, some thoughts on books about woodpeckers and my thoughts on Mark Witton’s The Palaeoartist’s Handbook were published at TetZoo.
Caption: you need a really good camera to take good photos of distant whales, and I don’t have one. So what I’d sometimes do, as a temporary record of recording what we’d seen, was photograph other people’s camera screens. Here, you can see someone else’s photo of two Cuvier’s beaked whales. Image: Darren Naish.
During July I went on a whale-watching trip in the Bay of Biscay. This was a fantastic experience (bar the desperate rush to get to the ship on time, I only just made it) where we saw hundreds of dolphins, several Fin whales, Minke whales, Cuvier’s beaked whales, Harbour porpoises and so on and I fully intend to go again as soon as opportunity allows. I wrote about the trip here; thanks again to Alex Srdic for use of his photos.
Caption: a scene from the Pont Aven, July 2019. Our progress across the Bay of Biscay is charted, and we keep tally of the cetaceans (and other interesting animals) we see. Image: Darren Naish.
Topics covered at TetZoo included European cave art, British journalism’s misplaced and weird hatred of gulls (see above re the British tabloid press) and dunnocks, and I also published an article reviewing the FIRST YEAR of TetZoo at its home here at tetzoo.com. I drew lots of passerines and snakes for my textbook and TetZooCon tickets went on sale.
Caption: here’s something that’s kind of a big deal. I worked - as consultant - on the second edition of Don Lessem’s Ultimate Dinopedia book, published 2017. And - look - here it is, making a guest appearance in season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale (in an episode that I watched in July 2019). In the episode, Emily reads part of the section on Spinosaurus (but changes the wording slightly relative to what’s actually in the book).
A really interesting TetZoo-relevant article appeared in Fortean Times in July: namely, a whole article on Hunting Monsters (Naish 2017), published as part of their ‘building a Fortean library’ series. The article was penned by The Hierophant’s Apprentice (there’s a long backstory there which’ll mean something to followers of Forteanism) and emphasises the book’s value as a sceptical review of cryptozoological claims and ideas (The Hierophant’s Apprentice 2019).
Caption: Hunting Monsters is written about in Fortean Times 382, what an honour.
On to August. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned here my in-prep museum exhibition – Monsters of the Deep – which will open in March 2020 at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall. At the time of writing it’s near-finished and we’re about ready to go, but in August there was lots to do and I spent time in Falmouth, pulling things together. More on the exhibition below.
Caption: Red-billed choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax on Anglesey. As usual, my photos aren’t the best, but at least they show what I saw. Choughs are among the oddest of corvids. Images: Darren Naish.
I travelled from Falmouth to Wales, meeting en route with my family, for a brief holiday in Anglesey. We had a fantastic time and watched Common bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus and Grey seals Halichoerus grypus (both within just a few tens of metres of our residence), Red-billed choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax, a huge raft of Goosander Mergus merganser and a ton of seabirds.
Caption: a Goosander raft in the Menai Straits, Anglesey. Image: Darren Naish.
At Breakwater Country Park we visited the outdoor Charles Tunnicliffe gallery, which was a great thrill to me as he’s one of my favourite natural history artists, the works he contributed to (Ladybird Books and PG Tips teacards) being among my earliest influences. The Anglesey Sea Zoo was also great; I used the life-sized leatherback model in an effort to make a homage to the 1988 photos of the giant Harlech leatherback, a century-old specimen that stranded (after drowning in a fishing net) in Gwynedd, Wales, in September 1988 and is today on show at the National Museum, Cardiff. We also visited Ironbridge in Shropshire where I managed to pick up a (super cheap!) copy of J. A. Moy-Thomas’s 1939 book Palaeozoic Fishes.
Caption: my best efforts to mimic what happened in photos depicting the famous Harlech Beach leatherback. This model is on show at Anglesey’s Sea Zoo.
My article on British tabloid journalism’s approach to KILLER SEAGULLS appeared in BBC Science Focus magazine (Naish 2019b) and a reprinted article on the rise of dinosaurs in the Triassic also saw print (Naish 2019c). TetZoo articles of August included those promoting TetZooCon 2019, my review of Angus Dinsdale’s Loch Ness Monster book on his father (Tim Dinsdale), and a report on whale watching in the Bay of Biscay.
Caption: I took so many photos on Anglesey that I have too many to share, but here’s one more. Green spaces are of vital importance to our well-being, we must do everything to preserve them. The humans are Emma, Will and Toni. Image: Darren Naish.
King of the Sex Lakes. While out shopping I discovered that Brian Ford’s wretched book Too Big to Walk had succeeding in winning a second edition. Here’s the explanation for the ‘dInOsAuRs NeEdED sEx LaKeS’ story – wherein it was, apparently seriously, proposed that dinosaurs needed lakes for the purposes of mating, and that a drying up of said lakes in the Late Cretaceous caused dinosaur extinction – which hit the newswires earlier in the year (in May): it was evidently released to drum up interest in Ford’s alt-universe dinosaur project. Ford is a science writer who seems to regard himself as the ultimate expert on everything and, prior to his efforts to reform our understanding of dinosaurs (he thinks that all non-bird dinosaurs were aquatic), might be best known for his takes on spontaneous human combustion and alternative energy weapons.
Caption: a now iconic image. Nothing says science like a full run of Encyclopedia Brittanica.
I’ve already written too much about him (Naish 2012, plus this 2015 article at TetZoo), and at least some of you will know that I gave a talk at his own book launch (held at Conway Hall during May 2018). I did my best in that talk to counter his writings on dinosaurs and out them as the steaming pile they are. Anyway, said second edition of Too Big to Walk includes various updates relative to the first edition, the most interesting of which are those pertaining to the events of Conway Hall. Ford’s take on what happened is dishonest and inaccurate and I did my best to more accurately report events in a series of threaded tweets which you can read here.
Caption: Mr Ford talks about Riley Black on a cruise liner (from this 2015 TetZoo article). This is an old photo that comes from TetZoo ver 3: I try not to link directly to the SciAm host of ver 3 but to the wayback machine versions of the respective articles, firstly because SciAm have removed most of the images; secondly because they’ve paywalled them too. Image: Darren Naish.
Too Big to Walk, incidentally, currently scores 2.5 on Amazon and the only positive reviews appear to have been written by Mr Ford’s friends and allies. This is despite the fact that Ford (and/or his publishers) successfully lobbied to get several fair – but harshly negative – reviews written by qualified palaeontologists removed for ‘being biased’. As I’ve said before, I don’t want to write or talk about Brian Ford and his aquatic dinosaur nonsense again – what a waste of my time and effort – but I’ll continue to do so if I have to.
Caption: the ‘sex lakes’ idea was mocked hilariously throughout the year. I am nothing to do with these images, widely shared online.
It is especially amusing to see Mr Ford lie about the way his claims have been received within the palaeontological community. He’s claimed (on one of his facebook groups) that young palaeontologists “love” his work, that his stuff is only being resisted by the ‘old guard’ – who are busy squatting on their piles of accrued palaeo-dollars at the tops of their ivory towers – and that scientists far and wide are accepting his writings with open arms. When challenged, he can’t name any such scientist, however. I asked on Twitter if anyone out there really “loves” his stuff. The responses were pretty amusing, in that the main “love” for Ford’s view of dinosaurs comes from its potential as meme-worthy nonsense that’s fun to mock.
On that note, early 2020 saw the release of Lemme Splash!, a game in which your aim is to get two amorous, love-struck sauropods to the sex lakes. An excellent review, with some exposition, is provided here at Dino Dad Reviews. “Brian Ford, this is your legacy”.
Conference World. September and October are conference season, and September kicked off with PopPalaeo (properly: Popularising Palaeontology), hosted at King’s College, London, and arranged by Chris Manias. The entire meeting was devoted to palaeontological representation via media, and my own talk was on Dinosaurs in the Wild. It’s online here. Ilja Nieuwland brought along one of the recently discovered replicas of the original Hydrarchos skulls and there was a public engagement event involving an art exhibition and some public talks.
Caption: a Dinosaurs in the Wild Tyrannosaurus model observes events at PopPalaeo 2019. Image: Darren Naish.
The season’s second conference was the 67th SVPCA, this year held at Ryde, Isle of Wight. Because I only had clearance to go at the very last minute, I didn’t have time to throw a talk together. But I really wish I had, since my continuing (and seemingly never finished) research on Wealden theropods would have been absolutely relevant given the biases of the audience. The meeting was made memorable by my locking our entire party out of our shared accommodation, what fun.
Caption: some scenes from the 67th SVPCA, Isle of Wight. At left, a 3D-printed Neovenator skeleton. At right, a table-load of John Sibbick originals. Yes, ORIGINALS. Images: Darren Naish.
The big TetZoo-relevant event of the year is TetZooCon of course, and September is the month where things really have to be sorted out (John’s hectic schedule demands that we leave everything to the last minute). And thus it was that we discovered that The Venue – our, err, venue – had double-booked the room we needed, their suggested solution being that we hold the event at one venue on the first day but at a second venue on the second. Needless to say, this was unworkable and another solution would be needed. We got things resolved eventually, but what a mess. Even after five years of running these events we have yet to find a venue which is (a) affordable and (b) actually interested and reliable when it comes to organisation and communication.
Back at TetZoo, I published my review of Phil Senter’s Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs? as well as parts 1 and 2 in the extreme cetaceans series. Episode 74 of the podcast was released.
Caption: it turns out that Brisbane is absolutely full of these amazing animals. I photographed every individual I saw. They were Australian water dragons Intellagama lesueurii. Image: Darren Naish.
During early October, my wife Toni and I flew to Scotland for the wedding of our friends Jeff and Femke (I’m fundamentally opposed to the concept of short-haul flights but… ugh… if you need to get to Scotland from southern England, flying is massively cheaper than going by train, ffs). I was only back a few days before I attended conference number three: the 79th Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, this year hosted in Brisbane, Australia. This was my very first trip to Australasia. I saw loads of great animals (my article on the birds I saw – published in mid November – is here), hung out with friends old and new, and obtained books and animal figures that aren’t ordinarily available back home in the UK. I attended the meeting for the talks and posters on Cretaceous dinosaurs, pterosaurs and marine reptiles but it was made especially memorable by the many excellent presentations on Cenozoic marsupials, lizards, crocodylians and birds. A dinosaur-themed presentation that inspired a lot of discussion was Kayleigh Wiersma and Martin Sander’s on the claimed presence of beak-like tissues in sauropods; I was one of the several palaeontologists interviewed by John Pickrell for his Science article on the proposal.
Caption: scenes from the excellent Queensland Museum, Brisbane. At left, the famous Perentie Varanus giganteus specimen that died while swallowing an echidna (there’s an old TetZoo article about it here). At right, a real live wombat! Images: Darren Naish.
Finally on the conferences, conference number four – TetZooCon 2019 – happened on the weekend of 19th and 20th October. It was the biggest and best TetZooCon so far and included a dinosaur palaeobiology session and roundtable, a natural history film-making panel and section of talks, Mike Dickison’s Wikipedia workshop, several book signings, a dedicated palaeoart event and exhibition, and a proper merchandise area. The TetZoo write-up is here. Other reviews of the meeting can be found here at LITC (and here’s part 2), here at Luis Rey’s blog, here at Talita Bateman’s blog, here at Steve Allain’s herpetological blog, and here at Albert Chen’s Raptormanics.
Caption: at left: Lauren, Laura, Sam and Kannan at London’s Zoo Reptile House. At right: your humble author with a giant penguin. Always with the giant penguins. This one might be a little too giant. Images: Darren Naish.
A bunch of us went on a post-TetZooCon fieldtrip to ZSL London Zoo on the Monday after the convention. We saw nearly all of the animals. At the time of writing, John and I are in the earliest stages of discussion about TetZooCon 2020. We still don’t have the finances resolved from last year, so I can’t yet be sure that it’ll definitely be happening. But it probably will.
Caption: at left: Dr Cox/BiPolarCosplay as SkekSo, Skeksis Emperor. At right: Naish and Reddish, together at last.
I got to see the first episode of the new BBC natural history series Seven Worlds, One Planet in the cinema and attended London ComicCon with the kids. Highlights included meeting Reddish from Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Spawn and Violator, a Skeksis, a wookiee and a Hoth wampa. An entire episode of the Natural History Channel Podcast devoted to TetZooCon 2019 was released in November 2019 and can be found here. At TetZoo, my review of Robert France’s book on the New England Sea Serpent was published.
Caption: some Naishes (Will at left) with a Wampa; junior Hoth rebel at far right.
The freshly renamed pterosaur Targaryendraco was published at the end of November; I work on pterosaurs sometimes (I certainly have enough unfinished manuscripts on them kicking around) and was quoted in this Nat Geo article by John Pickrell. I actually told John a bunch of stuff that (for obvious and understandable reasons) didn’t make it into the final article, namely that Targaryendraco was being worked on by a second team who – arguably – could be said to have ‘academic priority’ on this project, and that the systematics and taxonomy of ‘ornithocheiroid-type’ pterosaurs has been slowed and stalled for decades by the efforts (or otherwise) of a certain pterosaur worker who shall remain nameless. FINAL EVIDENCE that the Phylonyms: A Companion to the PhyloCode volume will appear in 2020 – only a few decades too late – was received in November. I have one contribution in said volume. I should have three but – funny story – two of them were rejected after having been accepted, substantially revised in a loooong running series of exchanges, and listed as ‘in press’.
Caption: my time in Bristol means that I’ve made numerous visits to the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, which has a ton of excellent stuff. Here’s a dodo model, and an Archaeopteryx. Images: Darren Naish.
I went on a Climate Strike march in Bristol… I still can’t decide whether these events are a total waste of time or not: when it comes to the action that’s so urgently required, we’re still being dismally and catastrophically failed by the so-called leaders of our various countries.
Caption: a Climate Strike march in Bristol, November 2019. We want our governments to instigate change. They mostly want to carry on as normal, because who cares about the future. Image: Darren Naish.
A series of TetZoo articles on ‘alternative timeline dinosaurs’ appeared (part 1, part 2, part 3), which was good (and not entirely coincidental) timing since a BBC World Service radio show on the very same subject was released in November, and featured myself in addition to Memo Kösemen, Anjali Goswami, Elsa Panciroli and Nicola Clayton. I got to see one of my favourite bands – Metronomy – live at Bristol’s O2 Academy. And, with the family, I visited Birdworld in Surrey, home to one of the UK’s most exciting bird collections.
Caption: an ‘alternative timeline smart dinosaurs’ montage, featuring various creatures written about in the TetZoo series. Images: Jim Limwood, CC BY 2.0 (original here), Norman (1991), John Sibbick/Norman (1985), Darren Naish, C. M. Kösemen, John McLoughlin, Matt Collins, Mette Aumala.
Caption: a selection of birds on show at Birdworld, Surrey. They have a lot of great stuff. Images: Darren Naish.
A spider story. While out one December evening at a busy restaurant, I saw a large dark spider on the floor, and – as you do – went to pick it up so that I could relocate it in a place of safety. Unlike any other spider I’ve previously handled, it immediately bit me hard, latching its giant fangs into my left thumb and leaving two small bleeding holes in my skin. I’d been envenomated, and the wound hurt for the next few hours. The pain was about similar to that of a bee sting. The spider was Segestria florentina (the Tube web or Mouse spider), a species I know well but have never previously been bitten by. Segestria, incidentally, isn’t native to the UK but is now so widespread that it’s an established part of our fauna. I captured the spider in a small bucket and released it outside. Remember that animals which bite you are (ordinarily) terrified and in fear of their lives, not ‘angry’ as is so often stated.
Caption: Flame the dragon, on this occasion being most upset about the look of the sky. Image: Darren Naish.
It was also in December that we went live on the advertising for the Monsters of the Deep exhibition which I mentioned earlier. This has been a big part of my life for the last few years and rest assured that I’ll be writing about it once the exhibition is officially open. It’s mostly about European sea monster lore and covers medieval ideas about the creatures of the sea, mermaids, kraken, the scientific exploration of the oceans and cryptozoology. There isn’t currently much online content about the exhibition but, right now, you can get a basic idea of what’s going on here.
Caption: Monsters of the Deep teaser - more info is available here, and watch the National Maritime Museum, Falmouth Twitter account too.
Pressures of time mean that nothing has been published at TetZoo this month – as in, January – bar this article and the one on the Loveland Frog, the latter written as a tie-in to our ongoing efforts to get Cryptozoologicon Volume 2 finished (the ‘our’ referring to me, John Conway and C. M. Kösemen). And that, just about, brings us up to date…
In keeping with tradition, it’s at this point that I list the TetZoo articles of the year by category, analyse said coverage with taxonomic bias in mind (how fair, or unfair, have I been to the various tetrapod groups?), and then self-flagellate given that the bias usually reveals massive skew to charismatic megafauna. Here we go…
Miscellaneous Musings
Mammals
Non-avialan dinosaurs
Recollections of Dinosaurs Past and Present, the 1980s Exhibition
Philip J. Senter’s Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs?, the TetZoo Review
Birds
Cryptozoology
Books on the Loch Ness Monster 1: Ronald Binns’s The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded
Books on the Loch Ness Monster 2: Gareth Williams’s A Monstrous Commotion
SpecBio
Why Are Things Like This. Ok, there’s a bit to unpack here. Long-time readers will know that my aim at TetZoo is to achieve some sort of taxonomic balance whereby I write fairly and equally about the major tetrapod groups. Somehow I stupidly expect that this will magically just happen, which I know is ridiculously flawed and dumb, but there it is. Have I ever achieved said balance? There was a time when I felt I was getting close to achieving it but… no, no I haven’t. And as we can see from TetZoo’s subject coverage across 2019, I’m further away from it than ever, utterly failing across the year to cover amphibians, stem-mammals, squamates and so many other groups. This failure is mostly down to two things, and those things are things that make the ‘fair coverage’ failure somewhat ironic, and hopefully understandable. Forgivable, if you will.
Caption: for levity, some toys. Images: Darren Naish.
First thing: now that TetZoo is hosted at its very own site, I feel freer, more able to write about whatever relevant topic I like, however sensational or semi-serious. And I won’t lie: writing about the Loveland frog, alternative timeline dinosaurs or the Loch Ness Monster is easier for me than is writing about obscure skinks of New Guinea or turtle phylogeny. Those more technical, scientific topics – while worthy and of great interest to me – require so much more research and checking of the literature, and thus time. Time is the great constraint on everything I do. Oh, and money, but I’m not here to complain about that.
Caption: which of these two articles do you think brought in more visitors: the one about bigfoot’s dick, or the one about mystery skinks from Tonga? The answer may depress you, but may also be very predictable.
Second thing: tetzoo.com is still a relatively new site where I’m trying to build an audience. Both ScienceBlogs and SciAm – the two previous hosting sites for TetZoo – came with captive audiences of many thousands of readers, any number of whom would hop over to TetZoo when the interesting title of a TetZoo article appeared in a sidebar. This new hosting site doesn’t have that ‘captive audience’: I’m relying either on people who come here on a regular basis because they’ve been rewarded in the past (hello), or those who find the site while googling ‘what do we know about bigfoot’s genitals’, or whatever (hello to you too, please visit again). Ergo, part of my thinking has been that I should concentrate on some of the rather more sensational things I write about: experience and data shows that they do bring in more readers. If you doubt that, here’s a visitor graph showing what happens when I write about ‘humanoid dinosaurs of an alternative timeline’. People are fickle, and I’m trying to take advantage of that.
Caption: this is what happens when I blog about speculative zoology… I mean the peak at far right. So don’t judge me.
In fairness to myself, I should also add that my assorted dealings, projects and paying gigs over 2019 mostly revolved around cryptozoology, dinosaurs, speculative biology and sensational, weird animals, and not the more academic side of herpetology or vertebrate palaeontology. So there’s also some genuine justification for the biases in coverage we’re seeing here.
Caption: Andrew Dutt produced this masterpiece. It reflects John Conway’s great love of movies like Pacific Rim and the unstoppable force that is the Category V kaiju Petersquama. Image: Andrew Dutt, used with permission.
And that about wraps things up. This article is huge: about five times longer than a typical TetZoo article, and I did toy with the idea of splitting it up. I opted not to because I prefer to avoid dragging the birthday thing out; I’d rather move on to other things. Despite an ever-increasing workload and a continuing decrease in the time available to me for blogging (I’m writing this while sat on a train: I’ve just seen a group of Roe deer in a frozen field), my aim is to continue to publish new content as and when I can throughout 2020 and beyond. I thank you for visiting and reading TetZoo and hope that you’ll continue to do so. And happy 14th birthday, little blog.
Caption: another personally relevant thing I haven’t discussed here at all: 2019’s maturation of pond 2. It and its surrounds proved a total wildlife haven. I dearly hope this small green area persists after we move away…
For previous Tet Zoo birthday articles, see...
It is with some dismay that I announce Tet Zoo's first hemi-decade
Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 1: 2015 in Review
Tetrapod Zoology 10th Birthday Extravaganza, Part II: the Rest of 2015 Reviewed
Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 3: Tet Zoo's Tetrapod Treatment in 2015
The Much Belated Final Part of the Tetrapod Zoology 12th Birthday Event
Tetrapod Zoology Is A Teenager Now, January 2019
Refs - -
Camardo, G. 2019. Se non si fossero estinti, avremmo vinto noi o loro? Focus 317, 51-55.
Naish, D. 2012. Palaeontology bites back… Laboratory News May 2012, 31-32.
Naish, D. 2017. Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths. Arcturus, London.
Naish, D. 2019a. The walk of prehistoric life. BBC Science Focus 334, 52-55, 58-59 (online version here).
Naish, D. 2019b. Seagulls: are they getting more aggressive? BBC Science Focus 340, 38-39.
Naish, D. 2019c. How dinosaurs conquered the world. BBC Science Focus Magazine Collection 13, 42-47.
The Hierophant’s Apprentice. 2019. Building a Fortean library No 47. There ain’t so such animal. Fortean Times 382, 56-57.
