Four Years of Tetrapod Zoology ver 4

Yup, the blog has been here (as in: at TetZoo.com) for FOUR YEARS…

Caption: what’s happened here at TetZoo ver 4 over the past four years? A heck of a lot, that’s what. Eotyrannus skeletal reconstruction (at upper left) by Dan Folkes.

While checking some old material at the current incarnation of Tetrapod Zoology recently I happened to note that said current incarnation – remember, you’re looking a TetZoo ver 4 – came into being exactly four years ago. Yes, TetZoo ver 4 was born on July 31st 2018, so ver 4 is four years old today. All of which means that I have an excuse to post a brief look back at the previous four years of operation here, focusing on highlights and achievements. Let’s get to it…

As regular readers will know, ver 4 came into being because it became impossible to do what I want to do at my previous hoster (Scientific American). I received huge benefits from being part of the SciAm blogging collective but, alas, their very strict approach to image use and lack of interest in hosting a comments section made me a bad fit, and eventually I had no choice but to leave. Since I’ve done that, SciAm have partly paywalled the blog material they host, meaning that I often can’t see my own articles except via wayback machine.

Anyway, to business. A huge amount has happened while ver 4 has been active. I’ve mentioned some of that stuff in the article below (remember that there are the annual birthday articles, in which I review the events of the year that’s passed) but I’m mostly interested here in listing or mentioning the TetZoo articles I want to remind you of.

Caption: four years ago today…

Ver 4 started off with a ‘welcome’ article, but we were very soon into musings on the anatomy of bigfoot. The August 2018 article on the hypothetical domestication potential of Mesozoic dinosaurs is an article I’m quite fond of and often find myself referring to in these post-Jurassic World times (and, yeah, I tend not to mention that film franchise….). Another 2018 favourite of mine is the article reviewing the Dougal Dixon After Man event (for reasons I don’t understand, the images there load slower than usual). This article (and its associated comments) have had, so I understand, at least some role in determining what’s happening with the next edition of After Man. More news on that when the time is right.

Caption: at left, profile illustration of the controversial Kabomani tapir by G. Braga, from Cozzuol et al. (2013). At right, illustration of a Sungrebe in life, with (below) a diagrammatic depiction of the male’s under-wing pouch, as illustrated by Álvarez del Toro (1971).

Other personal 2018 highlights include the TetZoo review of the Kabomani tapir’s story and Pouches of the Sungrebe, an article in which I discussed and illustrated the under-wing pouches of the tropical American Sungrebe Heliornis fulica.

Caption: at left, the climbing version of Gerhard Heilmann’s Proavis reconstruction from the 1926 English edition of his book The Origin of Birds. In an earlier publication of 1916, Heilmann included numerous Cartesian transformations (like those shown at right) that explained how he extrapolated the form of Proavis that he did.

Moving now to the articles of 2019, I very much enjoyed putting together my longish article on the way ‘pro-avians’ have been portrayed and described. I was planning to do several follow-ups on the material covered in that article, buuuut that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it will eventually. The January article on reconstructing sauropod dinosaur life appearance has proved useful and I’m glad I published it: during part of 2019, I worked in China for Don Lessem where I assisted in the creation of life-sized dinosaur models (a fascinating issue I still haven’t written about at length). Having that information on sauropod life appearance together in an accessible location was useful.

Caption: an image from a workshop in Zigong, Sichuan (SW China). I worked here during early 2020. Image: Darren Naish.

Also relevant to dinosaur life appearance is my review of the Dinosaurs Past and Present exhibition of the late 1980s and early 90s. Yes, I’m old enough to have visited this, and I remember it well. Potoos As An Internet Phenomenon – published in February 2019 – is a fun article. In fact… oh wow, early 2019 includes numerous articles that I like and am pleased to have put online. We have contributions on the literature on the Loch Ness Monster, speculations on hominid evolution, sleep behaviour, American bat diversity and extreme cotingas…

Moving now to the other months of 2019, the article on my fondness of Usborne’s All About Monsters – published in 1977 and now only available at astronomical prices – might, I speculate, have played some role in the plans (current as of July 2022) to see this much-loved and wonderfully illustrated book republished anew in modern times. Other favourites of 2019 include my articles on famous Palaeolithic rock art enigmas, on the vilification of gulls by the British media, on European whale watching, and the three articles on ‘alternative timeline’ dinosaurs (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). October 2019 saw the sixth TetZooCon (covered here on the blog), the biggest and best up to that point and the first to host an art exhibition in addition to some discussion panels.

Caption: my time in Bristol requires that I had to visit the Clifton suspension bridge at sunrise, in order to photograph the often spectacular view. I took this photo during February 2019. Image: Darren Naish.

I spent much of 2019 working at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, and of course I’m now allowed to say that I was there because of my deep involvement in Prehistoric Planet. More on that a little later.

Caption: Bristol is home to a huge number of things and places relevant to natural history and the study of it. I leave it up to you to decide whether the White Bear pub falls within that list of things and places. At right: a whiteboard image that may or may not be relevant to the Apple TV+ series Prehistoric Planet.

And then 2020 happened. In many ways it was mostly a ‘quiet’ year with hardly any travelling, no attending meetings, and almost no hanging out with friends and colleagues. Much happened via online meetings and workshops though: TetZooCon didn’t happen but we did have a very successful TetZooMCon. 2020 was also the year in which my Monsters of the Deep exhibition opened at the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall. Of course, this was all delayed and ruined by covid, and we lost the summer glut of visitors we would normally have had.

Caption: images from Monsters of the Deep at the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall. At right, Tammy Horton investigates touch screens and sea monsters. Images: Darren Naish.

TetZoocryptomegathreads became a phenomenon in 2020. They proved popular and I’ve mentioned several times that my plan is to compile them for a book or have them form the basis of a TV series. They were devoted to the Patterson-Gimlin bigfoot film of 1967, the de Loys ape photo, the Lake Champlain Sandra Mansi photo, the Myakka skunk ape photos of 2000, the Peter O’Connor 1960 Loch Ness Monster photo, the Zuiyo-maru carcass, the Minnesota Iceman… and more. Some of this material has appeared at TetZoo the blog, but much of it hasn’t.

Caption: at left, one of several artistic depictions of the Myakka ape, based on the two photos from 2000. I regret I haven’t been able to find the artist’s name. At right, Bernard Robinson’s depiction of the Himalayan yeti from Usborne’s 1977 All About Monsters.

Caption: promo image for the Deserts episode of the Apple TV+ series Prehistoric Planet. It was an honour and a privilege to work on this series and be part of such an amazing, talented team.

2021 was nuts for me in terms of work – mostly because of Prehistoric Planet, but partly due to other things too – and a consequence is that productivity at the blog declined (for the record, I generally try to publish four articles a month, but this declines to three, two, one or none if circumstances require). The years-delayed appearance of the Kimmeridge Clay volume meant that I had reason to write about Jurassic ichthyosaurs (Naish & Moon 2021). Work on another Mesozoic marine reptile project (the book Ancient Sea Reptiles, due out early in 2023 from the Natural History Museum, London) also resulted in an article on Malawania, the Cretaceous Iraqi ichthyosaur I published with colleagues back in 2013 (Fischer et al. 2013).

The latter months of 2021 saw completion and publication of a few other studies that were years in the making, namely our Scientific Reports paper on the flight behaviour of juvenile pterosaurs (Naish et al. 2021), my Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences paper with Will Tattersdill on Dale Russell’s dinosauroid (Naish & Tattersdill 2021), and our initial Scientific Reports study of new Isle of Wight Wealden baryonychine spinosaurids (Barker et al. 2021). Articles on these studies, and on other things too, were published at TetZoo in the following articles…

The end of 2021 saw the publication of my new book from Princeton University Press: Dinopedia (Naish 2021). Thanks as always to those who’ve bought it and said nice things about it. Thoughts on the book and its contents were featured here at TetZoo.

Caption: Dinopedia appeared in late 2021 and is still selling well. The book includes some quantity of (rightful) revisionist history on issues that are often mis-framed in the popular literature (like the story of the discovery of Tendaguru, and of the Mantells and the discovery of Iguanodon, as hinted at here). I haven’t yet seen anyone pick this up and comment on it.

And so to 2022, the current year. Workload has demanded that productivity at TetZoo has declined even further, and it might be obvious that most of the articles published at TetZoo have been recycled things from previous years. That said, I can’t beat myself up too much given that so many things got done. Prehistoric Planet was screened in May and its completion and eventual broadcast is of course a huge personal achievement. I was, of course, part of a huge team and am not pretending to take sole credit for the project, ha ha. The final publication of the Eotyrannus monograph (Naish & Cau 2022) is also a major personal milestone. Blog highlights include…

And that’s where we’ll end things for now. I’m intending to attend several of the conferences this year, and you might know that we’re aiming this year to hold a physical TetZooCon once again (it’ll be held at Bush House, King’s College London, on the 3rd and 4th of December). A major new palaeoart book I’ve been compiling with Steve White – Mesozoic Art, published by Bloomsbury – is due to appear in October and will be accompanied by signing events. Much else relevant to the TetZooniverse is happening in the background.

Caption: something to very much look forward to…. White and Naish’s Mesozoic Art, due out October 2022. It can already be purchased here.

So there we go. Ver 4 is four years old today, and thanks as ever for your support, for visiting, and for leaving comments. The blog as a whole is 16 years old but sees its 17th birthday on January 21st. Here’s your regular reminder that you can help keep the lights on here (and provide assistance with my other projects) by supporting me at patreon. I will continue to publish new material here at TetZoo ver 4 as long as I’m able to make the time and as long as there’s visitor interest in what I publish. Until next time!

For previous TetZoo articles on birthdays and other landmarks, see…

Refs - -

Álvarez del Toro, M. 1971. On the biology of the American finfoot in southern Mexico. Living Bird 10, 79-88.

Barker, C. T., Hone, D. W. E., Naish, D., Cau, A., Lockwood, J. A. F., Forster, B., Clarkin, C. E., Schneider, P. & Gostling, N. J. 2021. New spinosaurs from the Wessex Formation (Early Cretaceous, UK) and the European origins of Spinosauridae. Scientific Reports 11: 19340.

Cozzuol , M. A., Clozato, C. L. , Holanda, E. C., Rodrigues, F. H. G., Nienow, S., de Thoisy, B., Redondo, R. A. F. & Santos, F. R. 2013. A new species of tapir from the Amazon. Journal of Mammalogy 94, 1331-1345.

Fischer, V., Appleby, R. M., Naish, D., Liston, J., Riding, J. B., Brindley, S. & Godefroit, P. 2013. A basal thunnosaurian from Iraq reveals disparate phylogenetic origins for Cretaceous ichthyosaurs. Biology Letters 9, 20130021

Naish, D. 2021. Dinopedia: A Brief Compendium of Dinosaur Lore. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ.

Naish, D. & Cau, A. 2022. The osteology and affinities of Eotyrannus lengi, a tyrannosauroid theropod from the Wealden Supergroup of southern England. PeerJ 10:e12727.

Naish, D. & Moon, B. 2020. Ichthyosaurs. In Martill, D. M. & Etches, S. (eds). Fossils of the Kimmeridge Clay Formation 2. The Palaeontological Association, London, pp. 75-90.

Naish, D. & Tattersdill, W. 2021. Art, anatomy and the stars: Russell and Séguin’s dinosauroid. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences https://doi.org/10.1139/cjes-2020-0172

Naish, D., Witton, M. P. & Martin-Silverstone, E. 2021. Powered flight in hatchling pterosaurs: evidence from wing form and bone strength. Scientific Reports 11:13130.