Tuesday, 18 January 2022

The worm in the toad in the washing machine. Not the usual method of discovering a new species

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Don’t leave your clothes on the floor in the tropics is a good maxim. It only takes a few cockroaches or venomous centipedes to run out in o...
Thursday, 13 January 2022

Were the ancestors of mammals, birds and crocodylians warm-blooded? A new paper argues they were

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Claud Bernard’s dictum, La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition de la vie libre et indépendante …, developed in the latter half of th...
Wednesday, 5 January 2022

Joan Procter and Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell at London Zoo: Barbary Apes and Innuendo

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The relationship between Joan Beauchamp Procter, Curator of Reptiles at London Zoo until her death in 1931 and her boss, Sir Peter Chalmers ...
Tuesday, 21 December 2021

A dissenting review of J.Z. Young’s Life of Vertebrates from 1951. Who wrote it?

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I had a surprise when I found a book review in Zoo Life , a magazine circulated to fellows of the Zoological Society of London from 1946 unt...
Friday, 17 December 2021

Introduced snakes on snake-free islands are bad news. The California Kingsnake on Gran Canaria devastates the local lizard populations

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Did you know that an introduced snake is having a devastating effect on the three endemic lizards of Gran Canaria? No, me neither but a pape...
Sunday, 12 December 2021

Scientists who kept animals. 1. Parr Tate, Canaries and Antimalarial Drugs

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There are those who think people who keep or have kept animals (excluding pet dogs and cats) are strange. On the other hand there are those ...
Thursday, 9 December 2021

Monkeys and Vitamin D. Pioneering science successfully applied to wild animal husbandry in the 1920s and 30s by Miss Hume, Miss Smith and Dr Lucas

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The story of the discovery of Vitamin D in the early decades of the 20th century as part of an effort to cure rickets is well known to histo...
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