Before Owls Ate Mice

Palaeoglaux

Most bird species are diurnal. Doubtless, if you're flying about and don't have sonar, as bats do, it helps to be able to see where you're going. Nonetheless, there are many exceptions to this general rule, and none are more obviously so than the owls.

There are well over 200 living species of owl currently recognised, ranging in size from the mighty Eurasian eagle-owl (Bubo bubo) with a wingspan of up to 180 cm (6 feet) down to the tiny elf owl (Micrathene whitneyi) with a wingspan of just 27 cm (10 inches). They are grouped into two closely related families; the great majority of species belong in the Strigidae family, with just 20 assigned to the barn owl family, the Tytonidae. While there are some internal differences between the two, the most visible in the living animal is that barn owls, unlike regular owls, have distinctive heart-shaped faces.

Both families have been around rather longer than most mammal families have, with fossil representatives dating back to at least the Early Oligocene, around 35 million years ago. The two families are, however, rather like pigs and peccaries, each others' closest relatives, together forming the order Strigiformes. Since few people would deny that a barn owl is, in fact, an owl, it's this order that's really the scientific counterpart of our everyday understanding of the word.

All the World's Deer: Sambar and Rusa

Sambar

Deer are predominantly woodland animals, so it's no surprise that the extensive warm forests of Southeast Asia, with their many isolated islands, are home to a number of different species. Some of these are closely related to the red deer that live in cooler environments further north, so much so that some authors have recommended moving them back into the genus Cervus to join the red deer and their immediate kin. 

Nonetheless, they do seem to form a distinct branch on the deer family tree - although how many species might be in that branch, and even which ones they might be, is debated. For much of the 20th century, just two or three species were recognised, but genetic evidence gathered in the 21st century has made it more obvious that some of the island forms have been isolated from their mainland relatives for long enough to become clearly distinct.

Miocene (Pt 25): The Large Clawed Cat-Cat and the First Dog in Africa

Lokotunjailurus

Today, the hyena family consists of just four species. All of them live in Africa and, generally speaking, they look somewhat like dogs. Three out of the four are scavengers, with powerful teeth adapted for cracking open bones to consume as much of a carcass as possible. The largest and fiercest of these is the spotted or "laughing" hyena, which is the one most people think of when the word "hyena" is mentioned, although there is more variety in the group than that. But even so, with just four species, it's not what you'd call a large taxonomic family.

During the Late Miocene, however, things were very different. It's hard to know the exact number of species that existed, even among the fossils we have, since some of the subtler differences may not be apparent from bones alone. But there were certainly plenty of genera, spread widely across Europe, Asia, and Africa. They were also more varied than today, and their success at the time may well have been due to the fact that actual dogs were still restricted to North America at the time, leaving the hyenas without direct competitors.

How Rodents Can See Ultraviolet Light

Primates, including our own species, have unusually good colour vision. This is thought to be due to the need to identify when fruit is ripe and ready to eat. Most other mammals don't see the world in the same way that we do, having colour vision that's at best limited and often, so far as we can tell, absent altogether. 

But at least some animals do have an advantage that we don't: in addition to visual light, they can also see in ultraviolet.

In terms of physics, there's no real difference between visual light and ultraviolet; the latter simply has a higher wavelength. In a sense, as its name suggests, it's just a colour (or range of colours) that are more violet than violet. Our own inability to see it naturally gives us something of a bias here, but, in principle, there's no real reason why an animal shouldn't be able to see UV light if it would be useful to do so.