Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 3: Tet Zoo's Tetrapod Treatment in 2015

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Yes, as usual, my plans to do some good for the world and blog about amphibians, rodents, bats, small lizards and snakes, and turtles failed miserably… yet again.

And this is despite my unashamed efforts to have amphibians better represented by publishing a list of frog-themed articles during January 2015. Here’s how 2015’s articles break down (with the year running from January 21st 2015 to January 21st 2016)...

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Amphibians (lissamphibians)

• 'Strange bedfellow frogs' (part II): pig-nosed or shovel-nosed frogs, or snout-burrowers

• Tiny Frogs and Giant Spiders: Best of Friends

• Horned Treefrogs and Other Marsupial Frogs

• Nobody Expects the Korean Crevice Salamander

• A Need for News on Nototriton

Squamates

• The Atomic Worm-Lizard and Other Aprasia Flapfoots

• A Fine First Finding of Darevskia

• People Are Modifying Monitors to Make Gargantuan Geckos

• Goannas Dig the Deepest, Twistiest Burrows of All

• The Galliwasps

Turtles

• Turtles I Have Recently Seen

Pterosaurs

• Late News from the 2015 Pterosaur Meeting

Non-bird dinosaurs

• Brian J. Ford's Aquatic Dinosaurs Claim Holds No Water

• That Brontosaurus Thing

• Yi qi Is Neat But Might Not Have Been the Black Screaming Dino-Dragon of Death

• Jurassic World and the Build a Better Fake Theropod Project

• The Climbing, Flying Babies of Deinonychus

• Late Cretaceous Animals of Romania's Haţeg Island--a More Complex View

• Hot News From Planet Archosaur

Birds

• Inside the Cassowary's Casque

• Curious Complex Contentious Coots

• The Huia and the Sexually Dimorphic Bill

• The Romanian Dinosaur Balaur Seems to Be a Flightless Bird

• Voyeurism and Feral Pigeons

• Your Awesome Neighbourhood Herring Gull (And Its Many Cousins)

• For The Love of Crows

Mammals

• Spots, Stripes and Spreading Hooves in the Horses of the Ice Age

• The Tet Zoo Guide to Gazelle Camels

• Meet the Scaly-Tail Gliders

• You Never Hear Much About Shrew-Opossums

• Cetacean Heresies: How the Chromatic Truthometer Busts the Monochromatic Paradigm

• The Turcana and Other Valachians

• World Tapir Day, 2015

• Domestic Horses of Africa

• 5 Neat Things about Warthog Skeletons

• The Refined, Fine-Tuned Placental Mammal Family Tree

• Surprises from Placental Mammal Phylogeny 1: Pangolins Are Close Kin of Carnivorans

• Surprises From Placental Mammal Phylogeny 2: Skunks Are Not Weasels

• On World Rhino Day 2015, Some Things about Rhinos You Might Not Know

• Piltdown Man and the Dualist Contention

• Piltdown Man Came from The Lost World... Well, No, It Didn't

• African Climbing Mice and the Congo Link Rat

• Unusual Giraffe Deaths

• A Quick History of Hippopotamuses

• Introducing the Treeshrews: They Don't All Live in Trees and They Aren't Close to Shrews

• Fabulous Crested Indian Wild Pigs

• "If Apes Evolved From Monkeys, Why Are There Still Monkeys?"

Speculative Zoology

• Speculative Zoology at Tet Zoo, The Story So Far

Book reviews

• New Books on Dinosaurs 1: Matthew P. Martyniuk's Beasts of Antiquity: Stem-Birds in the Solnhofen Limestone

• New Books on Dinosaurs 2: Dean Lomax and Nobumichi Tamura's Dinosaurs of the British Isles

• New Books on Dinosaurs 3: Bakker and Rey's The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs

• Books of the TetZooniverse: of Paleoart, Bats, Primates and Crocodylians

• Speculative Zoology Grand and Photoreal: Boulay and Steyer's Demain, les Animaux du Futur

Miscellaneous

• Some of The Things I Have Gotten Wrong

• TetZooCon 2015 Is On

• The Events of TetZooCon 2015

• A Tet Zoo Christmas

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 1: 2015 in Review

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th Birthday Extravaganza, Part II: the Rest of 2015 Reviewed

And here’s all of that portrayed as a graph. I used the same categories as per the 2014-2015 graph so that the two are more easily comparable…

What do I see here? Appalling, epic failure. Look how a whole bunch of subject areas – the tetrapods we generally imagine as ‘prehistoric amphibians’ (= non-lissamphibian anamniotes), Mesozoic marine reptiles, croc-line archosaurs – received no coverage at all and how others – most notably turtles – barely got a look-in. The turtle thing explains the image at the very top (the photo is by Jason Noble). Meanwhile, it’s pretty much all mammals (living mammals at that) and dinosaurs dinosaurs dinosaurs (including birds). 

Once again, I am not happy. Why does this keep happening? Why don’t I get to write about the obscure tetrapods I really want to, the ones that need more internet coverage? It’s complicated. I can think of several reasons, one being that it’s hard to find the time needed to properly research and write articles on more obscure beasts, another being that images are less readily available when you want to write about frogs, lizards and poorly known long-dead things. Feel free to help out if you can.

I want to say that there is some sort of light on the horizon. As some of you know, I’m busy (when other work allows) putting together a substantial textbook on the vertebrate fossil record. Because I want it to be well illustrated with cladograms, life reconstructions and so on, I’ve been drawing (and am still drawing) a large number of vertebrates living and fossil. Yes, ‘vertebrates’, not just tetrapods – the book includes fish, though the less said about that the better (>>>sound of teeth grinding and breaking as I clench my jaws<<<). Once the book is done (and it’s in its ‘final’ stages) I’ll have a good number of illustrations that I can use here in articles on… well, you name it. Finishing the book is slowed and even prevented by other work though, so I’ll just leave this link here and invite you to help out should you wish. Thank you once again to those who support me already, you know how appreciated you are.

That’ll do for now. There’s one more set of birthday-themed thoughts I want to share, and they concern both the long game, and the role of Tet Zoo in blogging as a whole. Check back soon. I’ve given up on the 23 comments game for reasons that should be obvious…

For the previous Tet Zoo birthday articles, see...

• Happy first birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part I)

• Happy first birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part II)

• Happy second birthday Tetrapod Zoology (part I)

• Tetrapods of 2007 (happy birthday Tet Zoo part II)

• Happy THIRD birthday Tet Zoo

• Tet Zoo = 4 years old today

• 2009, a year of Tet Zooery

• Four years of Tet Zoo: to infinity... and beyond!

• It is with some dismay that I announce Tet Zoo's first hemi-decade

• Tet Zoo 5th birthday extraTetrapod Zoology 10th Birthday Extravaganza, Part II: the Rest of 2015 Reviewedvaganza, part II

• Happy Birthday Tetrapod Zoology: SIX YEARS of blogging

• Happy 6th Birthday, Tetrapod Zoology (part II)

• Tetrapod Zoology enters its 8th year of operation

• Today marks NINE YEARS of Tetrapod Zoology

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th-Birthday Extravaganza, Part 1: 2015 in Review

• Tetrapod Zoology 10th Birthday Extravaganza, Part II: the Rest of 2015 Reviewed