What happens when squirrels invade the tundra? Well, in one case, they got chubby, fluffy, flappy-tailed, and occasionally kinda cranky, sorta like a hydrophobic alpine beaver. Here in the Rockies, they’re called yellow-bellied marmots. Until recently, I’d rarely seen one and had never heard one call. They seemed to maintain a strict code of silence [...]

The thick, waterproof fur that once made the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) a valuable target for trappers may soon present another danger for the unique mammal: Australia could soon end up being too hot for the species to survive. Platypus fur is so warm and watertight that it insulates the semiaquatic animals from virtually all heat [...]

The world’s largest forest antelope faces almost certain extinction in the wild in as few as 14 years if current population trends continue, according to a statement by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). Just 103 critically endangered mountain bongos (Tragelaphus eurycerus isaaci) remain in Kenya, the last country where the animals exist in the wild. [...]

Are Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) doomed to extinction in the wild? The infectious cancer known as devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) has killed off as much as 90 percent of the world’s Tasmanian devils since it was first observed in 1996 (up from 70 percent when we last wrote about the species nine months ago). [...]

Britain’s beloved hedgehogs are in crisis. Some 50,000 hedgehogs die every year under the wheels of cars and trucks throughout the U.K. That high death rate has had a mighty toll on the cute little creatures: There are now 300,000 fewer hedgehogs in Britain than there were a decade ago. (Other threats to hedgehogs include [...]

Kill a rare animal to help preserve it? That’s the plan in New Zealand, where a team of hunters will soon go out to collect a few critically endangered Arapawa Island boars, a breed that only exists on that tiny island. Their plan is to kill two pigs, then extract their semen for later research. [...]

The common wombat (Vombatus ursinus) is, as its name suggests, fairly common in Australia. In fact, the indigenous badgerlike mammal is often considered to be a pest. But widespread species are usually ignored because they are pervasive, and in the case of V. ursinus new research warns that the meter-long marsupials could soon be in [...]

Protecting the nearly extinct Sonoran pronghorn in Arizona is making it more difficult to prevent illegal immigrants from entering the U.S., at least according to Fox News. "Environmentalists and governmental stewards have been repeatedly blocking customs and border protection from expanding border technology in their habitat—despite complaints that illegal immigrants are taking advantage of the [...]

Biologists in Canada are encouraged that critically endangered Vancouver Island marmots (Marmota vancouverensis) are once again learning how to be marmots—a tough task since the species’s population had crashed so far that the animals almost lost the knowledge of how to exist as a society. In a classic example of what is known as the [...]

Despite documented threats posed to the American pika (Ochotona princeps) by global warming, the rapidly disappearing mammalian species will not be protected under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) ruled last week. Almost exactly one year ago, the FWS agreed to assess the health of the pika—a tiny cousin of [...]

Captive breeding of endangered snow leopards (Panthera uncia) has relied since 1976 on an international studbook that matches animals at zoos around the world for purposes of keeping the big cats from becoming too inbred. Breeding via studbook, however, is a slow process that does not offer many benefits to an endangered species with small [...]

A newly described pointy-nosed, rat-like animal did not just crawl out of some unsuspecting city’s sewers. Rather, this now-extinct species spent its time scampering among prehistoric trees some 160 million years ago during China’s Jurassic period. Its modern appearance might seem unremarkable, but its advanced anatomical features—both internal and external—are exactly what have drawn the [...]

Although today’s awe-inspiritng African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta africana) might seem a mighty beast, it’s a fraction of the size of ancient mammals that roamed the Earth 37 million to 2.7 million years ago. The Eocene and Oligocene’s Indricotherium measured in at more than five meters tall, and the Miocene and Pleistocene’s Deinotherium likely weighted some [...]

As a young girl, Katie Hinde became quite excited when her dad was preparing to watch the Bengals vs. the Bears on TV. It seems she was expecting this: What an education for the then four year old as she did not see a single tiger OR bear on TV that day and instead saw [...]

I haven’t had time to provide answers on the previous article, sorry about that. Busy with preparation for the International Symposium on Pterosaurs, this year being held in Rio. Purely for the sake of adding something new (TetZoo podcast followers will understand the motivation, I hope), here’s some recycled text from Tet Zoo ver 2 [...]

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 [...]

Over the weekend I (with others) visited the Hampshire County Museum Service store at Chilcomb House, Winchester. Lots of fossils, preserved insects, and also taxiderm birds and mammals. I especially enjoy going there because it’s the repository of the famous Hayling Island Jungle cat (or Hayling Island Swamp cat). Here’s a photo of me and [...]

For all their popularity as the subject of dedicated books, cats, dogs, bears and their relatives have never previously been the focus of a single, field guide-style volume that treats all of them together. Luke Hunter and Priscilla Barrett’s A Field Guide to the Carnivores of the World (published 2011) is a beautifully illustrated, comprehensive [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s January 21st, meaning that Tetrapod Zoology is another year older and has now been going for more than seven years. Time once again to look back at the year that’s passed… or, the year as seen from my own personal, Tet Zoo-themed perspective. As per previous birthday events (or, blogoversaries, or whatever), I’m going [...]

This amazing fossil represents the diceratheriine rhino Subhyracodon occidentalis from the Late Eocene and Early and Middle Oligocene of the USA. Subhyracodon seems to have been ancestral to the better known Diceratherium*, a very long-lived diceratheriine that appeared in the Early Oligocene and persisted into the Middle Miocene. Diceratherium is well known for being one of [...]

The three talks given at the All Yesterdays launch earlier this month are now viewable online. I’ve been having trouble getting them viewable here at Tet Zoo: here’s mine (with a link to the youtube appearance below)… All Yesterdays Book Launch Talk – Darren Naish For John’s go here; for Memo’s go here. I will [...]