CSI Miocene: The Marks of Hyena Violence

Adcrocuta

Today, there are four species in the hyena family, one of which arguably isn't a hyena. However, not only does the family have a long history but, for most of that history, there were many more species than there are now. One estimate indicated that as many as 60 fossil species had been named as of 2008. We can be fairly confident that some - perhaps most - of those will eventually turn out to be the same species named twice, but there are also others that have been named since.

There is considerable variety among those species, as we might expect given over 20 million years of evolution. There are, for instance, at least three subfamilies, only one of which contains the three species we would consider "true" hyenas today. Even that subfamily includes animals that can be considered to have three basic lifestyles: bone-crackers, "running" hyenas, and those considered to be transitional.

All the World's Antelopes: Duikers of Bush and Forest

Common duiker

While the term "antelope" probably conjures up the image of something like a gazelle or a blackbuck, a great many species are much smaller than these animals. Often collectively referred to as "dwarf antelopes", they are scattered across the wider antelope family tree, belonging to several different groups. Being small and relatively inconspicuous helps when you're a herbivore, even if it isn't the only route to survival.

In terms of number of species, the duikers, technically referred to as the subfamily Cephalophinae, are one of the more successful groups of such small antelopes. The exact number of duiker species has fluctuated widely over the years, with some estimates reaching as high as 25. The latest version of the Mammal Diversity Database, however, lists 21, so that is what I am going with.

The Family Lives of Elephants

In 1961, Irven Buss published a scientific paper in which he proposed that the fundamental social unit among African elephants could best be described as a family group. While this put the subject on a firm scientific footing for the first time, he was hardly the first person to have noticed. Even white Europeans had at least mentioned the idea going back to the 19th century, particularly with regard to the Asian elephants living in the British Raj. 

Not to mention that the locals had surely noticed, and just not written scientific papers about it.

800th Synapsida

Some primates, to make up for a scarcity of posts...

This will be the 800th post to be posted in this blog. That means it is once again time for me to take a break from doing anything original and take a look back at the last couple of years or so. There have been some changes in how I've been doing things since the last of these updates, but they're relatively minor, and posting has generally been pretty regular.

The most common topic in the last 100 posts has been animal behaviour, which has overtaken the usual frontrunner of evolution. It's a broad topic, of course, and the exact ranking will come down to the variability of how I happen to label posts, but it shows that it's not all taxonomy and anatomical adaptations here. In particular, there have been several posts about sociability of late, partly due to the discussions of how different dolphin species associate into pods. There have also, as usual, been several posts on diet and habitat, both topics that inevitably come up a lot when I discuss particular living animals, or even the way that they have changed over millions of years.