Prosotherium |
Synapsida
A random wander through the world of mammals
Sunday, 19 January 2025
Oligocene (Pt 13): The First Porcupines
Sunday, 12 January 2025
The Struggles of a Pollinating Bat
Note the dusting of pollen... |
Even aside from the obvious importance that this gives bats to the wider ecosystem, this can also have direct economic importance to we humans. For example, sour pitayas are an important cash crop in parts of Mexico. Similar to the much sweeter dragonfruit (although not closely related), they grow on a particular type of cactus that is native to the country but is also commonly cultivated. As it turns out, this cactus relies on bats for pollination. While they are not essential, crop yields drop by over a third when the bats are prevented from reaching them, which would clearly be devastating for a Mexican farmer who may be living on the edge of profitability to start with.
Sunday, 5 January 2025
Miniature Mediterranean Mammoths
Sunday, 15 December 2024
Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries 2024
Zalamdalestes |
Large Herbivores
Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) are among the best-known of all prehistorical mammals to the general public and, aided by the fact that some lived recently enough to be preserved in permafrost, they are also amongst the best-studied. But there is still more to learn about the details of their lives and habits. A study published this year looked at the detailed isotopic composition of a fossil mammoth that had died about 12,000 BC in Alaska, showing that she was female, and had migrated over 1000 km (600 miles) during her lifetime, having originally been born in the Yukon. The area in which she died was popular with mammoths, but also with humans - she may have died peacefully, but the presence of people where mammoths congregated may not be a coincidence.
Sunday, 8 December 2024
Ancient Parrot-Beasts of Canada
Psittacotherium |
Saturday, 30 November 2024
Antelopine Antelopes: Antelopes with Trunks
Saigas once lived across the steppes of central Asia, in lands stretching from Moldova to China. Hunting, for both meat and horns, caused a dramatic decline in their numbers throughout the 20th century, accelerating after the collapse of the Soviet Union and leaving them virtually extinct by the dawn of the 21st. A mass outbreak of infectious haemorrhagic septicaemia in 2015 threatened to finish the job, but since then there has been a truly remarkable recovery, with what's thought to be an eleven-fold increase in their numbers between 2015 and 2022. This is so great, in fact, that the species was removed from the international endangered species list in April 2023.
Sunday, 24 November 2024
Oligocene (Pt 12): Reign of the Hyena-Cats
Apterodon |
In most parts of the world today, all large, carnivorous, land-dwelling mammals are members of the order called, appropriately enough, the Carnivora. This is the group to which cats, dogs, and bears belong, along with many other animals from weasels to seals. If we go back far enough in time, we find that this group originated on the northern continents and was unable to reach the then-isolated southern ones until much later. During the Oligocene, therefore, there were no carnivorans in Africa.
Which isn't to say that there were no carnivorous mammals at all; absent some non-mammalian predator to out-compete them, it's just too useful a niche for nothing to evolve to make use of it. But those mammals were not close relatives of the lions and hyenas that live there today, belonging to different branches of the mammalian family tree.