700th Synapsida

Well, here we are again with another biennial look-back at the last 100 posts, highlighting what may have been missed and taking a brief peek at where I might go next. I can't say it's entirely gone without a hitch over the last couple of years, but I've mostly kept to the weekly schedule... although you might get more regular gaps in the summer going forward.

Evolution remained the single most common category for the past 100 posts, which is hardly surprising given how many are about extinct species, and how important it can be to understanding how the living ones got to be the way they are. However, diet and habitat, which are often linked, have overtaken animal behaviour to nab the second and third spots... although the latter has remained common. Since I pick most topics on the day, without any grand plan to even things out, that's probably just the vagaries of what I happen to have come across. 

The fact that the related topic of climate has become one I've tagged more posts with may, however, be due to a genuine rise in the number of research papers highlighting how things are changing, especially for animals with restricted requirements - although several of these posts are actually about the climate millions of years ago. I've also talked about quite a few endangered species and about conservation issues more generally.

Coverage of the different groups of animals remains uneven, and likely always will outside of the fossil history posts, since it depends on what research gets published and whether I think it might be more widely interesting. It's probably due to that that, ignoring the regular series posts, I've written more about carnivorans than any other order, with rodents coming a distant second. Marsupials have had more coverage than usual of late, which I think is a plus, and I'm pleased to see that bats didn't get ignored, but, sadly, you were out of luck if you were looking for anything on (say) modern armadillos.

In terms of the number of hits, the most popular post I have written in the last two years was the one on the common raccoon and its closest relatives. While there's inevitably a bias towards older posts, which have had longer to accumulate readers, others that stand out as having significantly more readers than those of similar age are mostly the fossil posts, with notable examples being those on the early dogs of North America, pseudailurine-grade cats and the origin of cats in general (I mean, cats on the internet, who'd have guessed?), Asian shovel-tuskers, and the Grande Coupure - when the straits between Europe and Asia died up over 30 million years ago.

However, it's not just cats that are popular on the internet, sex sells too. Which may explain why a post combining the two was my most popular non-fossil post recently, although the odd-looking appearance of the living giraffe-gazelles of Africa also seems to have garnered a more-than-usual number of hits.

Some of the less popular posts that I nonetheless particularly enjoyed writing include the one on hammer-toothed snail-eating marsupials just because they're weird, and the complexity of sperm whale vocalisations - often overlooked in comparison to the more obvious (to our ears) sophistication of humpback whalesong and the like. Perhaps surprisingly, one of my favourite posts was that on mammals at very high altitude, probably because it required some different research than I normally do. And, well, perhaps it's a recency effect, but I'm quite pleased with last week's post on fur. Others that stick in my mind include a post about wolves moving about in the day once humans stop pestering them, and it's always good to change things up with the annual posts about fossil birds - falcons and pelicans being the topics this time around.

Following post #600 I still had the series on leaf-eating monkeys to wrap up, including the proboscis monkey, but after that, I broke with my usual format and detailed no fewer than three mammal families in 2023. That's because, after ten years of doing the family series, it's getting harder to find those that contain exactly the right number of species to fit into twelve(ish) monthly posts. Doing the two smaller, but closely related, raccoon and skunk families together in one year made sense, and I obviously then had to throw in the red panda, since it will never go anywhere else. For obvious reasons, you can expect more of this sort of grouping of smaller families together in future years - including the next one.

As noted above, the posts on the raccoon family were generally popular, especially those on species found in the US. Skunks, while equally American, were somewhat less so, but still above average for this blog. This year, of course, I have been doing the gazelles, which I never expected to be popular in the same way - although a couple of posts have done quite well, including the one on the main Asian species. As the year draws to a close, I'll be including some of the lesser-known species, none of which are particularly gazelle-like in form. 

After that, it will be off to look at a new group of mammals for 2025. This will, as I noted above, consist of two related families rather than just the one, but you'll have to wait a little longer to find out which they will be. I don't expect it to be one of the more popular such series, consisting as it will do, of some relatively understudied species, but it's an interesting gap to fill in and hopefully worthwhile. I'll probably be returning to carnivorans in 2026, but that's a way off yet.

Since the 600th post, I wrapped up the five-and-a-half-year series of posts on the Miocene, the long epoch running from 23 to 5 million years ago. To the surprise of presumably no long-term readers, I followed that up by starting on the preceding Oligocene epoch, pushing things back about halfway to the time of the non-avian dinosaurs. I said last time that this would be a much shorter series, and that's proven to be the case - the Oligocene is both shorter and more distant than the Miocene, so less is known about it. I don't exactly know how much longer it will take to complete it, but I'm fairly confident I'm over halfway through, which means that I should be well into the Eocene by the time post #800 rolls around. How long it will take to do that, I'm far less certain.

But, until then, normal service will (mostly) be resumed...

[Photos by Kevin Walsh, Bernard Gagnon, Yathin S. Krishnappa, and the US Fish & Wildlife Service.]