Here is another pigeon. I had a pigeon picture in June. I find that pigeons are one of the few small birds that will stand still to be photographed.
If you look closely, you will see that the pigeon is standing on a nail, which doesn’t look comfortable.
I took this picture many years ago. At the time, one of my friends wrote a food blog, and I thought about sending the picture to him, but I don’t think that I ever did. And I doubt that it was the kind of food that he would have been interested n anyway.
An Osprey sits on a piling in the river.
A Five-lined Skink hides under a board.
A Red-bellied Turtle looks kind of smug.
Today’s illustration comes from “Ontogenetic mechanisms of size change: implications for the Lilliput effect and beyond” in the journal Paleobiology. The paper concerns such topics as ontogeny, phylogeny, heterochrony, allometry, and taphonomy, and can be viewed here or here. (The journal is subscription-only, but maybe you are one of the lucky few who has access!)
One of the examples considered in the study is an animal called Lystrosaurus, which lived during the Permian and Triassic. It was once considered a reptile, but is now know to have been more closely related to the mammals.
Although Lystrosaurus is not nearly as well known as some of the more charismatic prehistoric animals, it did gain a certain measure of fame because its fossils are found on what are now several separate continents, thus providing evidence for the theory of continental drift.
I never knew that Lystrosaurus looked like such a doofus.
I had been thinking about making my next blog post about another item of paleontological art, but then O. J. Simpson died. And, as one of the few people left alive who is old enough to remember the Nineties, I felt obligated to comment. (And then, of course, it took me a few weeks to actually do it.)
As I noted before, the O. J. trial gave Saturday Night Live its greatest Weekend Update moment ever.
Perhaps my most significant personal O. J. memory is that, during the trial, I had no idea that Simpson had been regarded as one of the best professional football players of all time. I have never been a sports fan at all, and during his football career I was too young to be aware of popular culture in general. Thus, though I had some vague knowledge that he had played football, I knew him mostly as an actor and rental car spokesman. And I really didn’t understand why everyone was making such a big deal about a guy who was in The Naked Gun. (If Leslie Nielsen had been accused of murdering two people, would that have been the Trial of the Century?)
And then there was a Hertz commercial that aired a few years before the murders, in which a line toward the end proved rather prescient:
“Brutal, Juice, brutal.”
As I’ve discussed before, I don’t usually blog about paleontology, even though that’s the field in which I work ( . . . kind of . . . sort of . . . somewhat . . . ). But recently I’ve been noticing illustrations in scientific papers that might provide good blogging material, without requiring much effort on my part.
The illustration under consideration today is from the cover of the July 2023 issue of the journal Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia e Stratigrafia. (You can read the relevant paper here.) It depicts Megalancosaurus endennae, a drepanosauromorph reptile from the Triassic of Italy. Megalancosaurus was not very big (as one can see from the fact that it is perched on the end of a tree limb), and is generally assumed to have been similar to a chameleon (in terms of its arboreal and insectivorous lifestyle, though not necessarily in terms of changing color).
What strikes me about the picture is how evil Megalancosaurus is made to appear. It has an absolutely crazed expression on its face, and its claws are poised to grab someone or something.
It definitely looks to be up to no good.
