Pygmy elephants, Asiatic lions and Siamese crocodiles are among the endangered species in the news this week. Pygmy elephant update: Remember the 14 pygmy elephants (Elephas maximus borneensis) that were poisoned in Borneo back in February? There’s both good and bad news about the case. The good news is that Baby Joe, the youngster that [...]

The body of the last wild Siamese crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis) in Vietnam was found floating in Ea Lam Lake on September 29. The 3.2-meter-long, 100-kilogram female had been strangled by two steel wires, possibly by hunters. She was estimated to be nearly 100 years old. Once present throughout Southeast Asia, critically endangered Siamese crocodiles have [...]

This week’s blackouts in India have been blamed at least in part on the lack of rain during the annual monsoon season, which hindered hydropower production and increased the demand for electricity for use in agricultural irrigation. But the unusually dry year has also had at least one positive effect: it has helped to boost [...]

Sometimes conservation plans work so well that once-endangered species no longer need protection. That’s the case in Central America, where the Morelet’s crocodile (Crocodylus moreletii) has recovered enough that many of the protections put in place decades ago to help it are now on the verge of being lifted. Once heavily hunted for their skin, [...]

Tet Zoo regulars will remember the detailed montage I’ve produced that hopefully gives some idea of crocodylomorph diversity (Crocodylomorpha = the archosaur clade that includes modern crocodylians and all taxa closer to them than to croc-branch members of Archosauria like the aetosaurs and rauisuchians. Crocodylomorpha is basically equivalent to ‘Crocodilia’ of tradition; most members of [...]

The Tet Zoo crocodile series is not yet finished, and here we embark on part VI in the series (see below for links to previous parts). This time, we come to the Nile crocodile lineage, and I refer here to a ‘lineage’ rather than to a species since there’s now good evidence that C. niloticus [...]

Way back in November 2010 a remarkable photo appeared online, showing an adult Nile crocodile Crocodylus niloticus biting the trunk of an adult female African bush elephant Loxodonta africana (a plague upon those bloggers and others who identified the crocodylian as an… alligator. Duh). You’ve almost certainly seen the photo already: it was widely features [...]

I knocked this up in a hurry yesterday but I think it’s good enough to share publicly. The pristichampsine is meant to be trotting along at speed, and that explains why its hat is falling off. Have a great Christmas and New Year – here’s to 2013. 2012 was a crazy year for me (annual [...]

The Mesozoic was not a ‘dinosaurs-only theme park’. Numerous other tetrapod lineages were around as well, and there was enough ‘ecospace’ for members of at least some of these groups to evolve giant size and macropredatory lifestyles, and even to dominate certain sections of the Mesozoic world. It’s well known in particular that this was [...]

In the previous article we looked at Wealden goniopholidids, focusing in particular on the new taxa named by Steve Salisbury and myself in the review of Wealden crocodyliforms we published last year (Salisbury & Naish 2011). Having gotten some of the relevant taxa out of the way, we now need to crack on and get [...]

Regular readers of Tet Zoo might know that much of my specialised technical research centers around the dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other fossil reptiles of the Wealden Supergroup. What is the Wealden Supergroup? It’s the name given to a series of mudstones, siltstones and sandstones, deposited across the floodplains, lagoons and estuaries of south-eastern England during [...]

I’ve been drawing crocodylomorphs. Lots of them. Crocodylomorpha, as if you need reminding, is the archosaur clade that essentially includes all archosaurs traditionally dubbed ‘crocodilians’: the living crocodiles, alligators and gharials and all their fossil relatives. These animals were hugely diverse in the past, and hopefully you can get some idea of that diversity (by [...]

It’s time to carry on once more with the Tet Zoo crocodile series – for previous parts, see the list of links below. In the previous article we looked at the New Guinea crocodile Crocodylus novaeguineae and Philippine crocodile C. mindorensis, and before that the Saltwater, Indopacific or Estuarine crocodile C. porosus. This last species [...]

It’s time to crack on with the Tet Zoo guide to the crocodiles of the world (part I here, part II here, part III here). I haven’t been able to do much on the blog lately due to technical work on pterosaurs, cats and the whole sexual selection project. Anyway – – in the previous [...]