Drawing With Beasts

Adult allosaurs don't really like the young ones...

Like Gastornis was thought to be a carnivore for decades and then carbon isotopes were like, "nah this thing was basically a giant goose honk honk".

Art by Ja Chirinos

Oviraptor was thought to be an egg eater, then much ink was spilled about whether it ate mollusks, and now it's thought to be an omnivore, but mostly a fruit/seed eater like a parrot.

Somehow this Adobe Stock image is the only art of an Oviraptor eating plants I can find. How is that?

And even birds with some teeth are getting in on these dietary mysteries.

Longipteryx was first thought to be a kingfisher-like hunter of aquatic prey, but it has since been found with seed contents in its guts, making it another surprise frugivore.

insane headline to pair with the actual photo of the beastie itself

Divergent effects of native deer and alien wild pigs on forest understoreys

Large herbivores are becoming more common in forests, but their impacts are not always what we expect.

Using nationwide forest inventories and camera-trap data across the eastern United States, researchers compared the effects of native white-tailed deer and alien wild pigs on forest understories. They found that deer generally reduce native seedlings and promote invasive plants, although these effects weaken in warmer, wetter, or steeper landscapes. In contrast, wild pigs often suppress invasive plants and have mixed, context-dependent effects on native seedlings. These results show that herbivore impacts depend on species identity, functional traits and environmental context, with important implications for forest management under global change.

Read the article in Proceedings B:

https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.2461

See the First-Ever Photos of Cozumel’s Mysterious Dwarf Fox

Many believed the tiny fox had gone extinct

Strange things happen to animals when they colonize islands. Some of them get larger, like the enormous rabbit Nuralagus rex of ancient Menorca, while others get smaller, like the dwarf fox of Cozumel. This mysterious species of gray fox is estimated to be only around 60 to 80 percent the size of its larger mainland brethren. Fossils indicate it first arrived on the Mexican island around 5,000 years ago, predating the arrival of humans...

Where science meets art: Paleoartists bringing dinosaurs to life

Exhibitions in Devon and Lyme Regis are showcasing how paleoartists combine science and art to reconstruct dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Image credit: Lee Brown

Collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu/Pecari tajacu) with leucism amongst a squadron of regular peccaries

Captured by Ramiro Gonzalez, CC BY-NC 4.0

Mammals normally shed their skin in small flakes all the time when their skin cells die off, but because whales are living in the ocean -AKA, Bacteria Stew- flaking off like that would cause microabrasions (really tiny cuts) that would mean the whale is continually fighting off infections.  So, when a whale needs to replace it’s dead skin cells, it preps it’s new skin underneath, then sheds all it’s dead skin cells at once, like a lizard:

but not having hands makes it hard to remove this gross film, so molting brings many whales clsoe to shore where they can roll around on rocky/sandy coastal seabeds to scratch it off.  Here’s a bunch of Beluga coming in for a mass scratch:

And THIS is what a chunk of Sperm Whale Molt looks like, floating in the water before it’s devoured by pelagic microfauna, because you take what calories you can get in the open ocean: