Wednesday, 8 November 2017

American terrapins (or turtles): problems as pets and pests

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Red-eared Slider - photograph by Greg Hume (used on Wikipedia) Those of us who came into the biological sciences through a particular i...
Monday, 6 November 2017

A Jock Marshall story I had forgotten

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Stories of the exploits of ‘Jock’ Marshall (1911-1967) when he was Reader in Zoology at Barts in London and later in Monash University aboun...
Sunday, 5 November 2017

Another Orang-utan species? I doubt it too. I strongly doubt it

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Orang-utan in Borneo Orphaned animal photographed in 1999 No sooner had I written the last post on ‘taxonomic inflation’ than the med...
Thursday, 2 November 2017

‘For the survival of the species’: The mismatch between evolutionary biology and conservation biology...and 'taxonomic inflation'

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'Jock' Marshall from here In the 1960s there was a board for newspaper clippings, notices and other ephemera on the corridor wal...
Tuesday, 17 October 2017

‘For the good of the species’—Where did we get that crazy idea?

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How we all cringe when we read or hear ‘for the good of the species’ or ‘for the survival of the species’ when an aspect of the life of an a...
Sunday, 15 October 2017

At last…a Giant Anteater

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Who amongst those of us of a certain age can forget the film and photographs of a Giant Anteater and of the visit to Edward ‘Tiny’ McTurk...
Thursday, 12 October 2017

On making a living as a naturalist and on Galapagos tortoises in the 19th Century

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Archives of Natural History , the journal of the Society for the History of Natural History , always contains articles that inform and ent...