New Animal Discoveries!

[RJDiogenes]

All glory to the Hypnotoad.

[mudshark]

Meet your new overlord....

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas ... otoad-irl/

I liked this bit from the NatGeo item linked in the comments:

Amazon horned frogs achieve their enormous girth by being generally indiscriminate about what they eat. Typical ambush predators, they squeeze their bodies into the forest substrate or leaf litter so only their heads protrude. When anything smaller than their own bodies happens by, they spring from the mud and swallow their prey whole, locking it in their jaws with their sharp teeth.

They are aggressively territorial and voracious to fault. Some have been found dead in the wild with the remains of an impossible-to-ingest victim still protruding from their mouths. Their ravenous appetite and huge mouths have earned them and other horned frogs the pet-trade nickname "Pac Man frogs."

Big enough to choke a hypnotoad, as it were.

[RJDiogenes]

They can just never turn down a dare from the other Horned Frogs.

[Lupine]

Just when the veggies thought it was safe....

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3067 ... t-its-kind

[mudshark]

Just when the veggies thought it was safe....

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3067 ... t-its-kind

Unfortunately, the link to a video of the spider harvesting one of those Beltian bodies returns a 404 error. The thing which really stood out for me was not that the spider was a vegetarian, but the name they gave it. Why Bagheera kiplingi, of all names to give a Central American spider?

Looking it up in Wikipedia, I find that it is one of two members of a genus named for Kipling's Bagheera (from the Jungle Book stories -- "bagheera" is Hindi for "black panther") and that there are other genera of jumping spiders (Akela, Messua, Nagaina) similarly named for Kipling characters, encompassing species the majority of which are resident in the Tropical Americas and only one found outside of the Americas altogether (in Pakistan? Go figure.) It just doesn't mention how or why the names came to be chosen. I guess Peckham & Peckham were fans or may even have been personally acquainted with Kipling.

[Lupine]

^Perhaps the Pakistani species was named first? It was part of India during Kipling's time.

[RJDiogenes]

It's creepy looking, vegetarian or not.

In trying to find references to why spiders are named after Kipling characters, I found this, which is pretty interesting. There's a spider named after Cthulhu.

[mudshark]

^Perhaps the Pakistani species was named first? It was part of India during Kipling's time.

True about Pakistan (both of them), but it doesn't seem to be the case for the Pakistani spider. The bulk of the Peckhams' work took place between 1883 and 1909 (a date of 1896 would appear to be a big milestone for them for genus names are concerned) and the Akela fulva of Pakistan wasn't named until 1935, and then by another researcher.

Edit:

In trying to find references to why spiders are named after Kipling characters, I found this, which is pretty interesting. There's a spider named after Cthulhu.

Getting back to this: that's an interesting page. *bookmarks* Names I found amusing, for one reason or another:

Ichabodcraniosaurus Novacek 1996 [nomen nudum] (dinosaur) Named for a character in Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It was found without a head; a head was found later, but it is uncertain whether the head belongs to the skeleton.

Paramphientomum yumyum Enderlein, 1907 (psocopteran) Probably named after the character Yum-yum in Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado." This is not confirmed, but it is supported by the fact that the insect is native to Japan.

Humbert humberti Sime & Wahl, 2002 (ichneumonid wasp) Named for Nabokov's Lolita pederast Humbert Humbert. [Zool. J. Linn. Soc. 134: 1]

Bambiraptor Burnham, Derstler, Currie, Bakker, Zhou & Ostrom, 2000 (theropod dinosaur) after Disney's Bambi, because of its small size. [U. Kansas Paleo contributions 13] (See also a dinosaur mailing list thread which includes much discussion of the appropriateness of the name.)

Han solo Turvey 2005 (agnostid trilobite) Officially, the genus is named after the Han Chinese (the fossil is from northern Hunan Province, China), and the species is so named because it appears to represent the last surviving member of the Diplagnostidae. Really, Turvey's friends dared him to name a species after a Star Wars character, as most of the characters' names sound like scientific names. [Trans. Royal Soc. Edinburgh: Earth Sci. 95: 527-542]

There are plenty more.

Funny about the dare in the last one -- I've always sort of rolled my eyes at the name "Ki-Adi-Mundi" and thought "Oh, come on, now - that's just silly". And not even original, when used as a name.

Doesn't seem to be anything in Wiki about Pimoa cthulhu or the rest of his genus, unfortunately.

It's creepy looking, vegetarian or not.

Aw, I think he looks pretty sharp.

[RJDiogenes]

Bambiraptor. Now there's a cartoon I'd like to see.

[Lupine]

^Maybe on the Syfy channel .

[RJDiogenes]

"This time... man is the hunted."

[Lupine]

"They killed his mother. Now it's personal!"

[Lupine]

Not sure this belongs here:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80bea ... idnt-work/

Odd and interesting as some have suggested that modern crocodilians are descended from warm-blooded animals.

[mudshark]

Not sure this belongs here:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80bea ... idnt-work/

Odd and interesting as some have suggested that modern crocodilians are descended from warm-blooded animals.

Well, the trend toward pygmyism has been observed before in groups of animals which have become geographically isolated in locations with a less-plentiful food supply (I'm thinking of the pygmy mammoths of the Channel Islands or Sardinia or the dwarf woolly mammoths on Wrangel island, but there are other examples.) Perhaps a shift in the cold-blooded direction is a more extreme adaptation in response to drought or extreme variations in climate? (I don't see any firm dates, but it seems to have been a development which came after or near the end of the ice ages, plus Majorca would have been far enough south that effects caused by glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere would have been fairly minor.)

I'm not so sure that this would fit in the same box as the notion of crocodilians evolving from warm-blooded animals, as that would have occurred over a significantly longer period of time, wouldn't it? (I'm not really very familiar with that hypothesis -- this is just a guess.)

[Lupine]

I'm not sure. The idea that crocodilians evolved off warm-blooded animals (and as far as I know it's not an overly popular idea) is based (if I remember any of this correctly) off studies of the bone structure. But if that particular branch of Archosauria went through a period of hardship, like those goats, they might have gone back to an exothermic metabolism.