For over 100 years, a potentially significant dead cat has been sat in storage in a British museum. Specifically, the specimen – the lynx Ab4458 – has been at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery ever since it was added to the collections there in February 1903, and what makes it significant is that it was [...]

Back in 2005, the discovery of a weird reddish, long-tailed mammal, photographed by a camera-trap at Kayan Mentarang in central Borneo, was announced by the Swiss World Wildlife Fund. I covered the case and how it unfolded back at Tet Zoo ver 1 during January 2007. That’s such a long time ago that now is [...]

We’re all excited by, and interested in, ‘new’ species; that is, those that have been discovered and named within recent years, with “recent years” variously being considered synonymous with “since 2000”, “since the 1970s”, or “since 1899/1900”. In the modern age, species discovered within the 20th century are generally considered ‘surprising’ and ‘recent’, and we [...]

Cryptozoology is the study of animals or alleged animals that are known only from anecdotal evidence. The field has a bit of an image problem. Frankly, this isn’t much of a surprise when you look at the busy efforts of the various creationists, true believers and cranks who express interest in the subject. And several [...]

Tonight, Channel 4 here in the UK screens a new TV show called Alien Investigations [adjacent screengrab from here on the Channel 4 site]. I believe that it has already been screened on the Science Channel in North America, where it was titled Alien Mummies. I haven’t yet seen the show so cannot comment on [...]

Over the last few months, I and two of my colleagues have been involved in an interesting dialogue in the literature. It concerns the entity dubbed ‘Cadborosaurus’ – a marine, horse-headed ‘mega-serpent’, supposedly reported by witnesses from the waters off British Columbia and elsewhere in the North Pacific. People who read my stuff (both here [...]

Virtually all people interested in animals are aware of the so-called ‘mystery big cat’ phenomenon. Large, often black, cats are reported with apparent frequency from the eastern USA and the UK. But the phenomenon isn’t unique to those two areas. Here, we’re going to look specifically at the ‘mystery big cat’ phenomenon in Australia. The [...]

By night, I work as a technical research scientist, writer of papers and so on, but by day I walk the beaches of the world, looking for partially decomposed mystery carcasses and identifying them. Kidding: of course I don’t, but you get the idea – thanks in no small part to the Montauk Monster flap [...]

Welcome to part II of my ‘review of the year’/Happy 6th Birthday Tet Zoo stuff. The previous article took us up to May or thereabouts. Tet Zoo – still based at ScienceBlogs at this time – gave us the viviparous sauropod meme, part VII in the pouches, pockets and sacs series (still not finished), and [...]

It’s that time again. Today is January 21st, meaning that it’s this blog’s birthday. Lo, for the internet blogging sensation known as Tetrapod Zoology came into being on this very day, six years ago. Yes, SIX YEARS ago. As is normal on Tet Zoo birthdays (or blogiversaries), it’s time once more to look back at [...]