Stories by Darren Naish

I'm a big fan of palaeognaths - the terrestrial bird group that includes the mostly big, flightless ratites and the chicken-sized, flight-capable tinamous.

Via bizarre and unexpected circumstances I recently* found myself secretly and furtively attending a lecture by Brian J. Ford. Ford is a British author and researcher who dabbles widely in matters of science and science communication.

Recent months have seen the publication of several new dinosaur-themed books, and in this and several future articles I want to share brief thoughts on them.

A few weeks back - during the Tet Zoo frog event - I wrote about the peculiar African brevicipitid frogs, variously termed short-headed frogs or rain frogs.

Yet again, it's January 21st and, yet again, Tetrapod Zoology is another year old. As of today, Tet Zoo has been going for nine years. I've discovered that children (should you produce and raise them) are a good means by which you can plot the swift burning away of your short time on the planet*.

Here's a very brief article to a group of frogs. It's a slightly modified version of an article that initially appeared on Tet Zoo ver 2 during November 2007.

Back in October 2007 (at Tet Zoo ver 2) I wrote a very brief article on a poorly known, gigantic, deeply weird South American frog: the Helmeted water toad, Chilean giant frog or Gay's frog* Calyptocephalella gayi (long known - incorrectly it turns out - as Caudiverbera caudiverbera).

Suddenly and unexpectedly, I have the urge to write about frogs. Today we look briefly at the first of two behaviourally peculiar, anatomically surprising groups, both of which are endemic to sub-Saharan Africa, both of which belong to a major neobatrachian frog clade called Allodapanura, and both of which have been united in a clade [...]

Episode 2 of David Attenborough's Conquest of the Skies appeared on TV the other day, and I watched it (in fact, I livetweeted throughout, mostly because I wanted to talk about their portrayal of pterosaurs and Mesozoic theropods).

The world is full of frogs, and while I've made reasonable efforts over Tet Zoo's nearly nine years of operation to cover some of this diversity (see the links at the bottom of this article), there are many groups that I've never even mentioned.

Readers with supernaturally good memories might remember the two articles, published here back in January and February 2013, on glassfrogs, a highly unusual and poorly known group of Neotropical frogs, so named due to their incredible translucent or transparent ventral skin.

Thanks to that recent Tet Zoo article about American spadefoot toads and their tadpoles, I've had visions in my mind of drying ephemeral pools in hot, arid environments, crammed with crowded, gasping tadpoles.

Time for more spadefoot toads (that is, members of the anuran clade Pelobatoidea or Anomocoela). This time, we're going to look at the two North American spadefoot toad genera (Spea and Scaphiopus).

In the previous article, we looked at parsley frogs or pelodytids - a small and conservative lineage within the anuran clade Pelobatoidea (also known as Anomocoela, and commonly as the spadefoot toads).

Anurans - frogs and toads - haven't received enough coverage on Tet Zoo of late, so here's one of several efforts to redress the balance. For no particular reason, in this article I want to talk about pelobatoids, also known as anomocoelans: the anuran group that (as conventionally conceived) includes spadefoot toads (Pelobatidae) and parsley [...]

It's time to wind things down for Christmas, so what better way to do it than to write a short article about robins. And here I mean the `original' or `proper' robin - the European robin Erithacus rubecula - a Eurasian passerine that also occurs in northern Africa and is (conventionally) regarded as the only [...]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: one of the most familiar and frequently encountered of mammal groups (at least, to those of us in Eurasia and parts of the Americas) - DEER - are weird and fascinating when you get to know them.

Long-time Tet Zoo readers will be familiar with the long-running series on the toads of the world. It's been running intermittently since October 2009 and is something like 50% published.

Deer are strongly associated with Eurasia and North America and less so with the other regions of the world. In this brief article - part of which is an excerpt from my 2013 article on the conservation status of South American mammals (Naish 2013) - I'm going to say a few things about the deer [...]

One of the most spectacular and visually fascinating Tet Zoo-related books of recent-ish months is Chet Van Duzer's Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, published in 2013 by the British Library.

Regular readers will know that I have a major interest in ichthyosaurs, the so-called fish-lizards of the Mesozoic (see links below). As you'll know if you keep your finger on the pulse of Mesozoic reptile news, last week saw the publication of a really interesting new animal from the Lower Triassic: the Chinese `proto-ichthyosaur' Cartorhynchus [...]

Time for more phytosaurs. The previous article is probably required reading. Phytosaurs are (so far as we can tell) members of the great diapsid reptile clade Archosauriformes.

As I hope I've said several or many times, there are many, many, many tetrapod groups that have never, ever received coverage on Tet Zoo. I know, it's shocking.

In recent articles I've made an effort to review the skinks of the world and today - it's a momentous occasion - we see the last part of this series.