Stories by Darren Naish

Last year the Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia volume titled Extinct Life appeared in print. I was asked to cover South American mammals, perhaps because they wanted me to write about borhyaenoids, toxodonts, litopterns, astrapotheres and so on (some of which have been covered on Tet Zoo in the past - I really need to get back [...]

Hey, Darren, how's it going with that plan to discuss all the fossil crocodylomorph groups? Huh? Well, ha ha, it ain't going so well… goddam life getting in the way of my blogging.

October 2014 continues - for no particular reason at all - to be Lizard Month here at Tet Zoo and right now it's time for more skinks. The previous article is a sort of general introduction to the group as well as a review of the limbless acontiines/acontids and weird feylinines.

Skinks (properly Scincidae… though read on) are one of the most successful of squamate groups, accounting for approximately 1500 species - in other words, for about 25% of all lizards.

Today we're here because of the lacertid lizards, the Old World clade that includes Eurasian wall lizards, green lizards, fringe-toed lizards and a great number of less familiar species groups that rarely get much attention outside of the specialist literature.

Here are some amazing things that me and my friends have been talking about lately. They all concern fascinating discoveries or insights into unusual aspects of tetrapod behaviour.

I'm still not sure whether I blog about Mesozoic archosaurs - specifically dinosaurs and pterosaurs - too often, or too infrequently. As I always say, the problem as I see it is that dinosaurs and pterosaurs have so much presence in the blogosphere that writing about them always feels like jumping on a bandwagon.

I'm an unashamed fan of cryptozoology - this being (for the two of you that don't know) the field of study that revolves around those creatures thought to exist by some, but which remain unrecognised by mainstream science in general.

Foot deformities are ubiquitous in urban pigeons - why? As you'll know if you've spent any time watching the pigeons of towns and cities, something like one in every ten (or more) has missing or partial toes, or swollen toes, or other pedal deformities of some sort.

Earlier in the year I made a promise that I'd get through more rodents here at Tet Zoo. Rodents, you see, divide people like no other group of tetrapods.

Anyone who knows anything about Mesozoic dinosaurs will be - or certainly should be - familiar with the fact that our view of what these animals looked like in life has changed substantially within the last several decades.

Today I'd like to focus on passerine birds again, and this time on a group that I don't think I've ever blogged about before: the certhioids.

Welcome to another of my articles on passerines from the peripheries. As before, the idea here is that we're looking at passerine bird groups as seen `from the fringes' - from an obscure, maritime archipelago on the eastern fringes of the North Atlantic, far from the places where these birds underwent most of their evolution [...]

I've just returned from LonCon3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, held at the enormous ExCel Exhibition Centre in east London. Yeah, I know, sci-fi isn't exactly a normal part of the Tet Zoo remit but, on this occasion, there really is overlap since I was there for a set of special Speculative Biology talks [...]

Today I want to talk more about passerines, and I know that this will make you happy. In particular: TITS!! Tits of several species are ubiquitous here in Europe.

A series of meetings meant that I found myself in London’s Natural History Museum yesterday, and with my friends and Tet Zoo supporters Dan and Felix Bridel (great t-shirt, Felix) I spent a while gawping at the always fascinating life-sized Blue whale Balaenoptera musculus model that hangs in the Mammal Hall.

Every now and again I make an effort to get through a little bit more of passerine bird diversity (see the list of articles below for previous efforts).

Some time round about 165 million years ago, the group of small, feathered dinosaurs that we call birds evolved from within the theropod radiation (theropods are the so-called `predatory dinosaurs': the great group that includes animals like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor as well as the birds).

The event you've all been waiting for is here: Simbirskiasaurus and Pervushovisaurus have been resurrected, and we're all wondering what the hell's going on with their absurd, complex nostrils.

It is not in the least bit controversial to picture humans* within the context of the placental mammal group that we belong to, the primates.

Purely because the time feels about right, I thought I’d post an excerpt from the cryptozoology-themed book that John Conway, Memo Kosemen and myself published last year – Cryptozoologicon Volume I (Conway et al.

The world's very first Tetrapod Zoology Convention - we're calling it TetZooCon - happened on Saturday 12th July, and what fun it was. Our venue: the London Wetland Centre, a Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust conservation park officially opened in 2000 and situated in Barnes, west London.

Things here at Tet Zoo will be quiet for a while since I’m preparing for, or away at, TetZooCon, the first ever Tetrapod Zoology-themed convention.

Let’s face it, there’s an extraordinary number of fairly obscure Paleogene artiodactyl groups that are only familiar if you’re a specialist.