occupied by a lonely whale

I see two whale sharks and several other fish...

In case you're *really* interested, Cunha et al. 2003 seems to be the best review out there. I can't believe this setup works.

Just so we're clear, Spotted Hyenas are the one mammals that don't have an "external vagina"*. What they have is a vagina with a totally novel route.

*Which is a bizarre and misleading phrase which would seem to imply a prolapse of some sort. "Vaginal opening" is just so much more clear.

external vaginas

According to Mammalian Species, head and body lengths are somewhere between 700 and 900 mm with the tail apparently being of similar or slightly shorter length (not as many measurements).

The aardvark is the only member of its species. It is the only member of its genus. It is the only member of its family. And it is the only surviving member of its order.

Nobody has ever defined what a 'family' or 'order' is, aside from being a monophyletic group. The surviving Aardvark species (there's a surprising…

Yep, that would have been it! Turns out it was on display for longer than any other BMNH object.

Seems about right for a Critically Endangered species.

Was it the original model with a carapace length of 8 feet? Turns out that was a bit... over-enthusiastic and it should be more like an inch under 6' (1.8 meters). The AMNH specimen is about that size and it's still really friggin' big; in comparison, the maximum carapace lengths of Galápagos tortoises are 0.75–1.25…

Definitely the giant turtle Stupendemys. The specimen at ground level at the Harvard Museum of Natural History is an amazing sight, a proportionally 'normal' carapace the size of a dining room table. It's also the smallest known specimen and one other individual got far larger with a straight carapace length of nearly…

The art was done by Cheung Chungtat, not Zhongda Chuang/Lida Xing.

(From Badenhorst et al. 2013)

"Most scientists believe that the XY and ZW systems diverged only once"

I'm a bit puzzled by this because birds and mammals seem to be incredibly stable compared to the other amniotes. Even turtles — the bulk of which have their sex determined by temperature — evolved both XY and ZW systems…

There's a really nice website called OZCAM that lets me know how many other specimens of Frilled Shark were scientifically collected off Australia. 30 have been documented from 1975–2010, generally near Tasmania and Victoria (where this specimen was found). And of course, who knows how many others never found their…

Cockroach species evolve and go extinct just like everything else.

"Scotland's first known icthyosaur"

Brian Regal has done a lot of work on the Jersey Devil and its actual origins are far more horrific than can be imagined — New Jersey politics.

Meiolaniform turtles also evolved into big round things with a thagomizer. They seem to have been really good at it too since they evolved when ankylosaurs were still around and went extinct after the glyptodonts.

The closest I can find to lancelets being called 'fish' is this book from over 100 years ago which calls them, hagfish and lampreys... 'fish-like vertebrates'. I had no idea that term was so old. And speaking of historical, the 'Pisces' of Linnaeus was really strict and included only ray-finned fish; within 'Amphibia'…

Presumably you could call the more aquatic sarcopterygians 'non-tetrapod sarcopterygians', although this seems to be very unpopular according to Google Scholar. The term 'fish-like vertebrate' is also out there which is... also not too popular (but used on Digimorph). Stupid English wasn't built for cladistics (see…

The term 'fish' has been getting progressively narrower in definition and there are some people — e.g. the authors of Digimorph — who only use that term for actinopterygians (ray-finned fish). Now I'm all for this as a big fan of strict monophyletic naming but, eh... I can certainly see how people will be confused.…