Skip to main content

Felid skulls

I've been looking at and taking measurements from felid skulls now for a few weeks. I've been up in Edinburgh at the National Museum of Scotland for three days and I've also been at the osteological collections at the Bristol City Museum and Art Galleries for the last week now. I've covered 30 species of the 41 recognised extant felid species.

The funny thing is that some of the older specimens in the Bristol Museum are either mislabeled or not labeled at all and we sat there for some time comparing specimens trying to ID the damned things. I'm starting to pick up some subtle morphological distinctions but it's all kind of useless unless I can link them to the right species. All I need is a list of diagnostic characters...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The difference between Lion and Tiger skulls

A quick divergence from my usual dinosaurs, and I shall talk about big cats today. This is because to my greatest delight, I had discovered today a wonderful book. It is called The Felidæ of Rancho La Brea (Merriam and Stock 1932, Carnegie Institution of Washington publication, no. 422). As the title suggests it goes into details of felids from the Rancho La Brea, in particular Smilodon californicus (probably synonymous with S. fatalis ), but also the American Cave Lion, Panthera atrox . The book is full of detailed descriptions, numerous measurements and beautiful figures. However, what really got me excited was, in their description and comparative anatomy of P. atrox , Merriam and Stock (1932) provide identification criteria for the Lion and Tiger, a translation of the one devised by the French palaeontologist Marcelin Boule in 1906. I have forever been looking for a set of rules for identifying lions and tigers and ultimately had to come up with a set of my own with a lot of help...
5 comments
Read more

Maximum bite force in Tyrannosaurus rex

I'm on a roll today. Might as well post another. So obviously, this is a Tyrannosaurus rex . It's so famous I'm afraid I don't really know what else to write about. Oh well, I'll just ramble on about bite forces then. T. rex has been the focus of many biomechanical studies. Bite force is no exception. However, as much of a celebrity T. rex is, as far as I'm aware, there have only been two studies so far that have attempted to estimate the bite force of T. rex : Erickson et al. (1996) and Meers (2002). Erickson et al. (1996) had an interesting approach of reproducing bite marks using cast replicas of a T. rex tooth and ramming it into a cow bone. They recorded the forces needed in order to penetrate the bone to different depths. The depths of T. rex bite marks found on a Triceratops ilium was compared to this relationship of puncture depth and forces needed. As a result they found out that a bite force of 6.4 kN were needed in order to to make that bite mar...
7 comments
Read more

Top 10 scientifically important theropod dinosaurs of all time (off the top of my head)

I thought I'd do a fun post for once. And since list based articles are the norm for fun on the internet, I thought I'd do one on dinosaurs, but given that I know most about theropods, I've decided to restrict my list to theropods (...maybe in a future post, I'll do other clades). My ranking is based mostly on scientific importance so it may not reflect awesomeness, and it is obviously subjective as to how I rank importance to science. For instance, interesting discoveries or unique palaeobiology are ranked relatively low compared to wealth of information and data or completely revolutionising our understanding of the evolution of theropods. So here are my top 10 scientifically important theropod dinosaurs of all time (off the top of my head) 10. Megalosaurus Being the first dinosaur to be named, Megalosaurus automatically deserves a spot on this list, but given the fragmentary nature of known fossil specimens, and being mostly useless as a meaningful source ...
Post a Comment
Read more