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| Some primates, to make up for a scarcity of posts... |
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.
When it comes to the different types of mammal I have covered, the usual suspects remain the most common. Carnivorans top the list, with bears randomly getting above average exposure of late. Of course, the carnivorans are a broad group, since they include things like seals and walruses as well as the more obvious land-based animals. More likely, though, it's just that they are relatively charismatic, so that I suspect they will tend to be of more interest to readers.
It's probably for similar reasons that cloven-footed animals have also been common. They aren't the only large herbivores, of course, but there are far more species of them than of any other sort, so they tend to dominate in scientific studies. Rodents are also relatively popular in studies, partly due to being small, numerous, and (in some respects) comparatively easy to study, so they have had a fair amount of coverage too - although this has included a couple of relatively obscure groups, in the form of zokors and mole-voles.
There have been several posts on bats, too, which is probably down to me finding them particularly interesting animals, and to some of the research on them still being at a relatively early stage. (They're small, fly, nocturnal, and often hide in inhospitable and unreachable caves, so they're not exactly easy to study). On the downside, coverage of these groups has meant only two regular posts on primates, although one of them was an ape, which is unusual for the blog, and one just on a marsupial.
In terms of number of hits, the single most popular post in the last 200 was the post about speciation and coat colour in lemmings. This is, of course, somewhat biased by it having been up for a long time, and it's impossible to judge how popular posts that have only been up for a few weeks will eventually turn out to be - in light of which, I can note that post #699, on the nature of hair, has outstripped everything since, but obviously didn't feature as a heavy hitter on my last 100-post roundup.
With that in mind, I can say that, as of this writing, other especially popular posts have included those on dik-diks, Portuguese snow leopards, Oligocene Australia, brown bears fishing for salmon, spectral bats, and the evolutionary history of llamas. Some of these may be due to the vagaries of what people happen to type into search engines - related more to the title of the post than its content - but that's often the way this sort of thing goes.
I'll also note, for what it's worth, that the two posts on fossil birds have also scored above average on the popularity stakes. Maybe there's just not much palaeontological ornithology out there on the internet...
Many of the posts that did well also happen to be ones that I was particularly pleased with at the time, which hopefully tells me something. (The topic for most posts being decided on the day means that sometimes if I do decide something isn't working, it's usually too late to do anything about it). A few posts that were particularly interesting to write that ended up merely average in terms of readership include those on walruses, Ice Age rabbits, how to get hedgehogs to avoid lawnmowers, and the history and lives of Pleistocene cave bears. I'll also single out, because it's unusual for this blog, a post about the broad ecology of a fossil site in South Africa, covering the whole range of what has been found there, and what it can tell us about the climate and vegetation at the time.
My series on the dolphins of the world proved relatively popular, with a particular interest in the posts about deep-sea species and pilot whales, perhaps because those get relatively little coverage elsewhere. Of course, the series covered only the dolphin family proper, and therefore excluded both the porpoises and some of the stranger, freshwater, species that we might normally call "dolphins". Porpoises may prove tricky to do in my usual format, so I don't know how, or if, I will fit them in at a later date, but the others are a stronger bet for an eventual appearance.
After that, I moved on to the one of the few large groups of carnivoran mammals I had not previously covered, looking at both the viverrids, such as civets and genets, and the unique carnivores of Madagascar. This proved less popular, probably because few of them are familiar animals in the West, but they were necessary if I was going to eventually cover the full range of carnivorans. Relatively few remain on that front, with the mongooses the only major group left; like the porpoises, I'm not sure how I will cover them, but the smaller groups are lined up for a future series.
A similar theme of filling in the gaps lies behind my current series on antelopes that aren't either gazelles or bovines. While it's too early to judge, I don't expect this to prove particularly popular, and there is some degree of repetition within the subfamilies, with many species closely resembling one another. I'm currently about a third of the way through, and it will take some time to get to the impalas, which I know some fans of my other blog will have an interest in...
I'm not sure what the next mammal group will be once I've finished it; they could be primates, or they could be cetaceans. After that, however, it will be time to wrap up the carnivorans as effectively as I can, and I will probably be on that series by the time post #900 rolls around.
The posts on particular periods of Earth's past have a rather clearer future, since they follow a distinct pattern. In the last 100 posts, I have wrapped up the Oligocene, and I am now working on the Eocene, which is both a longer stretch of time, and further back in the past. It is necessarily going to be a long series, most likely with a section specifically on Asia, which I have tended to cover as an adjunct to Europe in the past. I would guess that it's unlikely to be completed within the next 100 posts. That's probably just as well since, while it isn't anywhere near the start of the mammalian story chronologically, it is where most of our detailed knowledge begins. There will be more once it's done, but not a lot more.
That's it for now, though. Next week, normal service will be resumed with... I have no idea yet.
[Photos by Alex Dunkel, K.A.I. Nekaris, Hans Hillewaert, Thomas Bresson, Ana Cotta, and "Lady of Hats", from Wikimedia Commons.]
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