Delphinids: White-sided Dolphins

Atlantic white-sided dolphin

The taxonomy of dolphins is far from settled, with exactly how we should classify some species having been an open question for years. There is a good chance that the scientific names I am using for some species in this series will not still be in use in a decade, as old genera are split and the family tree re-arranged. Such is the case, for example, with the dolphins of the genus Lagenorhynchus.

The genus was named by John Edward Gray in 1846 for a specimen of a previously unknown species sent to him for analysis at the British Museum, after having been caught somewhere off the coast of Norfolk. It translates as "bottle-nose", for the shape of the beak... which is, perhaps, unfortunate, given that the animal we refer to in English as the "bottlenose dolphin" is something else entirely. Over the centuries since, five new species have been added to the genus, giving us the six we recognise today.

The Diets of Parallel Pigs

Peccaries from South America

The word "ungulate" refers to a broad category of mammals that are generally large and herbivorous. They form a natural evolutionary group, although only if you include the cetaceans, which are descended from vaguely hippo-like ancestors. The word comes from the Latin word for "hoof", and the great majority of living ungulates have hooves of one kind or another. Even ignoring the cetaceans there are exceptions, but it doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to see that camels, for instance, are at least the same general kind of animal as deer or cows.

All living ungulates can be placed into one of two mammalian orders: the artiodactyls, which includes the cloven-footed kinds, and the perissodactyls, which includes, among others, the horses. If you start looking at fossils, however, it becomes clear that other ungulate orders once existed. Most were very early, dying out in the first half of the Age of Mammals, representing early branches in the great ungulate family tree that ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Of Pregnancy and Progesterone

Female mammals, like those of many other creatures, are not permanently fertile. Instead, they go through regular cycles, ovulating at intervals under the control of hormonal signals produced by the pituitary gland and the ovaries. In humans, this manifests as the menstrual cycle, but this is a relatively unusual feature of our species.

Whether or not other mammals menstruate may depend on your exact definition of the term. Chimpanzees certainly do (and, indeed, rarely experience menopause), and it's present to a variable extent in other apes and Old World monkeys. In New World monkeys it's microscopic and it's completely absent in lemurs. At least some bats menstruate, as do sengis (elephant shrews) and, so far as we know, just one species of rodent.

The Earliest Landfowl

Gallinuloides

This post will be the latest as of 1st April, so if you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know what that means... 

The humble chicken (Gallus domesticus) is a member of the pheasant family. This is a moderately-sized family, with around 180 species. Alongside the chicken and its wild ancestor, this also includes, not just pheasants, but many similar ground-dwelling birds, such as grouse, partridges, true quails, turkeys, and peacocks. 

It is, in turn, a part of a larger taxonomic group technically referred to as the Galliformes, or more commonly the "landfowl". The other four living families in this order have fewer species and are generally less well-known, but they share the same features of being generally plump, often quite large by avian standards, and having short, rounded wings unsuited for long-distance flight. 

Delphinids: Humpback Dolphins

Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin

The genus Stenella, to which many of the closest relatives of the well-known bottlenose and common dolphins belong is, genetically speaking, a mess. A combination of interbreeding and rapid speciation have made it very difficult to determine how its family tree should be constructed or if, indeed, there is even a clear pattern to find. 

Our best evidence suggests that it probably isn't a "real" group, in the sense of one consisting of a common ancestor and all of its descendants. That's because three other genera of dolphin appear to be descended from that common ancestor, forming part of the same cluster of what we might describe as "typical-looking" dolphins. The common and bottlenose dolphins form two of these interspersed groups, while the third is represented by the humpback dolphins.

As it turns out, their classification has also had to undergo significant revision in recent years, albeit for different reasons.

Oligocene (Pt 14): The Southern Horses That Weren't

Scarritia

30 million years ago, South America obviously lacked horses, since those (still three-toed at the time) originated in the north, and the southern continents had long been isolated from their homeland. What it did have, however, were a group of mammals called the notohippids, a name that literally translates as "southern horses". While they might not be closely related, the name might lead one to suspect that they had at least a resemblance to the modern animals.

They didn't.

Well, not much. When the name was originally coined, for the Miocene genus Notohippus, back in 1891, it was assumed that they really were horses, or at least closely related. This is because of the shape of their teeth which, did indeed resemble those of equines. It only took until 1914 to realise that, teeth aside, they weren't very horse-like. That their teeth were similar suggests a similar diet with plenty of tough vegetation, and their head was elongated in an almost horse-like fashion to accommodate them... but that's pretty much where the resemblance ends. For one thing, they had claws, not hooves; their bodies were also stockier, albeit with long limbs that may have given them a certain agility.

Gorilla Communities

It is, I would hope, well-known that the closest living genus to our own is that of the chimpanzees and bonobos. The second-closest is, of course, that of the gorillas. There are two species of gorilla, each with two subspecies, and both are considered "critically endangered" - literally on the verge of extinction. For one species, this is, as one would expect, largely due to their tiny surviving population and restricted range. 

There are many factors that we need to consider when attempting to reverse this, and some of them also have a bearing on the evolution of our own species. Among these is the question of how gorilla groups are socially constructed and how they interact. It turns out that here, we can't just consider "gorillas" en masse because the two species behave in very different ways. For example, while one species can have multiple silverback males in the same troop, this is rare (but not unheard of) in the other.