Stories by Darren Naish

If, as I have, you've spent copious time wandering the British countryside, visiting amusement parks and visitor attractions that feature life-sized `prehistoric animals', you'll surely have seen all those Phorusrhacos* models.

Time for another classic from the archives. This article originally appeared on Tet Zoo ver 2 back in August 2008 (my god… about six years ago), and appears here in tweaked, updated form.

Are you interested in the evolution and diversity of tetrapods? In dinosaurs? Pterosaurs? Herpetology, mammalogy, wildlife photography, palaeoart?

If you pay any attention to the world of zoological research (as you will do, given that you're reading a blog called Tetrapod Zoology), you'll know that the study of anatomy has very much come to the fore in recent years.

No time to finish anything new, gah. In desperation, here’s a classic article from the Tet Zoo archives, originally published in March 2009.

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for… stem-pinnipeds at Tet Zoo. Or, probable stem-pinnipeds anyway. This minimum-effort post is brought to you on the back of work showing that pinnipeds (seals, sea lions and walruses) are monophyletic, not diphyletic, and that the taxa shown here – Potamotherium, Puijila and so on – really are [...]

Crocodiles, alligators and gharials are the modern members of a far grander, far more diverse clade of archosaurian reptiles termed Crocodylomorpha.

While on a family holiday recently I visited Dan yr Ogof, the famous National Show Cave for Wales. Besides being interesting for the expected geological and speleological reasons, Dan yr Ogof is set within landscaped gardens that, bizarrely, feature one of Europe's largest `dinosaur parks'.

Regular readers of Tet Zoo might know that I've published extensively on the theropod dinosaurs of a famous and much-studied Lower Cretaceous rock unit known as the Wealden Supergroup.

There have never been enough primates on Tet Zoo. That isn't because I'm not interested in primates, nor because I don't think about primates, or look at primates, that much… in fact, I probably think about, and look at, primates more than I do any other group of animals… it's simply because - as is [...]

Regular Tet Zoo readers will recall the article from March on ratite and tinamou evolution. Ratites, just in case you don't know, are the flightless kiwi, ostriches, rheas, emus and so on, while tinamous are their diminutive, flight-capable, superficially pheasant-like close relatives.

This isn’t a normal scheduled blog post; instead, it concerns some announcements. Firstly, TetZooCon – the first ever Tetrapod Zoology Convention – is go.

In a further effort to relieve Turtle Guilt (see the previous turtle-themed Tet Zoo article), I give you the following article devoted wholly to kinosternids, an exclusively American group of about 25 species of seemingly mundane and unspectacular turtles.

There's been a bit of a monitor lizard thing going on here for the past few months: articles have covered Australian goannas, the Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis, Dumeril's monitor and Timor and Peachthroat monitors, and the `prasinoid' tree monitors.

I photograph birds a lot - something that's more possible than it was before due to the fact that I now own a half-decent camera (thank you, parents).

There have never been enough amphisbaenians on Tet Zoo. In fact, the only time I've written about them at any sort of length is in the 2008 (and 2012) April Fool's article wherein they were convincingly (cough) shown to be the true ancestors of mammals.

Hornbills are among the most charismatic, fascinating and awesome of birds, yet surprisingly little is known about them, dedicated studies are few, and they are incredibly elusive and hard to study.

I have had extensive turtle guilt of late - that is, there just haven't been enough turtles on Tet Zoo for a while… by which I mean, there haven't been any.

As is so often the case, I find myself unable to make the time to finish the numerous Tet Zoo articles I want to complete and release upon the world.

Some considerable years ago - February 2007, actually - I made the decision to write a short Tet Zoo article on speculative zoology. It was on the biology of Godzilla, and I published it with trepidation, my concern being that people would balk at the fact that I was covering an imaginary creature, not a [...]

Yet again, the world is cockahoop and head-over-heads in awe over another thrilling, dumbfounding, truly novel zoological discovery. No, I'm not talking about the discovery of suspension-feeding anomalocarids, ancient echolocating odontocete cetaceans, or even of new tapirs (did I mention the new tapir?), but of a stupendous new living bird, discovered clinging to existence in [...]

So much for posting more on ratites - alas, I just haven't had time to finish the next article. Inspired by an article recently published by my friend and homeboy Brian Switek, I thought it time to republish this 2010 article.

As blasphemous and offensive as it seems to say it, birds are pretty samey. Generally speaking, they're small flying things with long forelimbs, proportionally large heads with big, globular braincases, and grasping feet where an enlarged first toe (the hallux) opposes the remaining three.

Scientific projects are very often years in the making. Within the past few days, I've had a new paper appear in the open-access journal PeerJ.