Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2017

Albertocetus meffordorum, the post-cranial anatomy of which
was described for the first time this year.

At the end of each year, I do a slightly different post to wrap up the blog for the season. The format of these has changed over the years, and this year, again, it's time to do something slightly different from previous occasions. Not that there haven't been some interesting new species discovered this last year, with, to my mind, the Skywalker gibbon (Hoolock tianxing) being the stand-out example. This was announced early in the year, having been discovered in the Chinese/Myamar border region by a group of researchers who were fans of a certain science fiction franchise ("tianxing" literally translates to "sky-walker" in Standard Chinese), and is likely already endangered.

But this year, instead of discussing just how many new kinds of bat we discovered in the last twelve months, I'm going to note that my posts on fossil mammals tend to be more popular than those on the living sort, and take a look at a partial assortment of scientific papers published on this subject in the last year that, for various reasons, didn't end up in my regular blog posts. So here goes.

Short-Necked Giraffes of Spain

The giraffe family is a classic example of a mammal 'family' that consists of very few living species. Giraffes are sufficiently distinctive, and, arguably, odd, that they clearly deserve a family of their own, yet there just aren't very many of them. Exactly how many living species there are in the family is currently the subject of a dispute, since there is good reason to suppose that the animal we actually know as "a giraffe" represents multiple species, but many researchers feel that the hard evidence for that supposition is lacking. What we can say is that, apart from the giraffes proper, there is only one other living species in the family - the okapi.

Fortunately, being large creatures, prehistoric giraffes tended to leave reasonably decent skeletons behind. They're distinctive in more ways than you might think, too, having, for example, a particularly odd canine tooth that ends in two or three (admittedly small) points, rather than just the one. So our knowledge of fossil giraffes is fairly good, and it turns out that there were a lot more species of them in the past than there are today - they were once a larger, and more widespread group.

Counting the Clouded Leopards

There's no definitive answer to the question of which group of wild mammals have the greatest public popularity, but there can be little doubt that the big cats are up there with the best of them. They are a popular subject for wildlife documentaries, and, for example, the BBC's Big Cat Diary ran for nine seasons (some under slightly different titles) between 1996 and 2008.

Because they're the easiest to film, living as they do in relatively open and accessible terrain, four species of big cat get the lion's share (ahem) of the televisual attention: lions, tigers, leopards, and cheetahs. But, of course, these are not the only ones. Taking a wider look, the cat family as it exists today has two major branches: the big cats, or "pantherines", and the "true felines". That latter group is the larger of the two, including not only the domestic moggie and such species as the ocelot, but even some relatively large animals, such as servals and bobcats. Perhaps more surprisingly, both the puma/cougar/mountain lion and the cheetah actually turn out to be "true felines" when you look at their evolutionary ancestry - in fact, they are closer to domestic cats than they are to, say, lynxes.