Zihlman's 'pygmy chimpanzee hypothesis'
I had to scan some hominid pictures today; came across this old classic and thought it worth using here. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

'The Secret World of Naked Snakes': a ZSL event
As a Tet Zoo regular you'll know and love the remarkable limbless amphibians known as caecilians. In case you don't know, caecilians have sensory tentacles, sometimes have protrusible eyes, sometimes lack eyes entirely, often exhibit sophisticated parental care [maternal skin-feeding is going on in the middle image above], are incredibly long-bodied yet often lack tails, sometimes possess large, anatomically complex, eversible ma

Riding the sivathere
My good friend Luis Rey was kind enough to pass on the following photos, taken at the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris. It's the extinction carousel, (presumably) the only place in the world where you might ride a sivathere... Read the rest of this post... |

Big animalivorous microbats
Time only for a picture-of-the-day post... here are portraits of the big animalivorous microbats Otomops (a molossid, of course*), Cheiromeles (also a molossid) and Vampyrum (a phyllostomid). The pic is from Freeman (1984), but you might notice that two of the drawings are based on the photos featured in Walker's Mammals of the World.

Hippos are photographed biting a crocodile to death
You've probably seen - presumably on TV - Nile crocs Crocodylus niloticus interacting with Common hippos Hippopotamus amphibius (if you've seen it in real life, lucky you). By and large the two seem to keep apart. Having said that, there are certainly photos of the two sharing the same sandbanks. And then there are those instances of hippos scaring crocs away from carcasses, the weird reports of hippos mouthing and chewing the backs and tails of resting crocodiles, and those cases where crocodiles have been seen to walk or run across hippos' backs.