Synapsida

Latest Blog Posts - Synapsida

• Fossil Giraffes of Ethiopia
  on May 19, 2013 in giraffe chronospecies Evolution fossils Pliocene
  Giraffes on the Serengeti There is some debate about exactly how many species of giraffe there are alive today. The official answer is 'just the one' (Giraffa camelopardis), but there may be two or even three, depending on how you define a 'species'...
• Going for a Song
  on May 12, 2013 in cetaceans humpback whale behaviour sea lions
  Aquatic mammals can be among the most difficult to study. Animals such as seals, dolphins, and whales spend a lot of their time below the water, or far from the shore, making long-term observation of them relatively difficult even compared with free-...
• Bears n the Hood
  on May 5, 2013 in conservation diet American black bear population urban areas
  Got any apples? One of the most significant effects on the patterns of wildlife across the world is that of the presence of humans. For many animals, it isn't such obvious culprits as pollution or hunting that are the main problem - significant thou...
• Caprines: Lands of the Ibex
  on Apr 28, 2013 in ibex turs Goats caprines
  Alpine ibex The Ice Ages were, on the whole, not a bad time for goats. True, they had to leave the vertiginous cliffs of their mountain homes when they became too cold and barren to support life - and, in many cases, were swathed in vast glaciers. B...
• Pleistocene (Pt 8): Mammoths v. Mastodons
  on Apr 21, 2013 in mastodon mammoth Evolution Ice Age Pleistocene
  American mastodons The arrival of the first mammoths in North America was a significant turning point in the development of the local wildlife. It's so important that this date, 1.9 million years ago, marks the beginning of the first of just two 'la...
• Freedom to Dive
  on Apr 14, 2013 in water shrew swimming ecology shrews ecological release
  Mediterranean water shrew There are well over 5,000 different species of mammal in the world. From a human perspective, a great many of them are very similar - at least a thousand of them can reasonably be described as either 'mice' or 'rats'. Where...
• Life in Ngorongoro
  on Apr 7, 2013 in conservation ecology population Ngorongoro
  The Ngorongoro Crater There are a great many species of mammal (and, indeed, other animals) that are endangered, or at least have their continued survival threatened to some extent. If we're at all interested in conservation, we obviously need to kn...
• Caprines: At Last, The Goats
  on Mar 30, 2013 in wild goat markhor Goats caprines
  In English-speaking countries, and, for that matter, South America, sheep are a far more common sight on farms than goats are. (To be fair, in much of the US, even sheep aren't as common as they are in Britain, let alone Australia and New Zealand). H...
• The First Placental Mammals
  on Mar 9, 2013 in Eutheria Evolution placental Marsupial taxonomy
  Shrews most closely resemble the ancestor of all living placentals I don't normally cover stories if they've had extensive coverage in mainstream media. I prefer to cover the interesting peculiarities that those outside the field are unlikely to hea...
• Go West, Young Sheep!
  on Mar 3, 2013 in bighorn sheep Goats snow sheep sheep caprines Dall's sheep
  Bighorn rams As we've seen, the domestic sheep is descended from one of what may be quite a large number of related species native, broadly speaking, to southern Asia. Back in the Pliocene, however, long before those species separated from one anoth...

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