Weird Anatomy

I'm fascinated by weird and flamboyant nasal structures, so here's a dik-dik, a recent addition to the Zoological Museum of Naples The dik-dik displayed at the Zoological Museum of Naples. Specifically, this is a Damara dik-dik, often treated as a subspecies of the Kirk's dik-dik (as Madoqua kirkii damarensis ), and thus labeled as such here, but elevated to full species level by some authors (as Madoqua damarensis ) (see for example Castelló er al. 2016). Dik-diks are quite small antelopes with a series of adaptations to desert environments, the most characteristic of which is their elongated snout: the enlarged nasal cavity, which features a moist, black mucosa, allows increased air flow through the nostrils, cooling the blood directed to the brain via evaporative cooling, while also minimizing water loss. Brain overheating is thus avoided, as the brain is made cooler than the core body temperature (Castelló et al. 2016; Blank & Li 2022). Gunther's dik-diks ( Mado...

The large double-crested theropod dinosaur displayed at the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE).   Surely this is Dilophosaurus right!? Surprise, it's not. Nope, the mounted skeleton you see in the photo, a cast displayed at the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE), is not actually Dilophosaurus wetherilli . What you're actually seeing here is instead another early theropod dinosaur, the Chinese  Sinosaurus triassicus.  Despite the name, Sinosaurus is from the Early Jurassic, and it's an early example of large theropod dinosaur: it's been recently estimated at around 5-6 m long and more than 800 kg in weight (Liang et al. 2024). Other than S. triassicus , a second species, S. sinensis , is usually ascribed to the genus (see Zhang et al. 2023 and references therein).  Another view of the same mounted skeleton, from a slightly different angle. Note the somewhat surprisingly thin skull. As you can see from the photos, Sinosaurus had a relatively delicate skull construction with a pair ...

The skeleton of a dromedary at the Zoological Museum of Naples...what's up with all those fangs!? Camelids are extremely interesting and puzzling creatures, with a long list of peculiarities both in their soft and hard anatomy, including those allowing life in deserts. Today I want to talk a bit about skeletal oddities mainly, exemplified here by the skeleton of a dromedary ( Camelus dromedarius , see above photo) and the skull of a wild camel ( Camelus ferus , see below), both displayed at the Zoological Museum of Naples. UPDATE: note that according to Pietro Martini, who is cited below, the museum's labels may be wrong here: the skeleton should be that of a Bactrian camel, the skull that of a dromedary. The aforementioned wild camel skull (note that I'm following Jemmett et al. (2022) here in restricting the common name "Bactrian camel" to the domestic form Camelus bactrianus alone). You may notice the presence of multiple fangs in both the upper and lower dent...

Skeleton of a brown bear ( Ursus arctos ) standing up, at the Zoological Museum of Naples.   Bears (Ursidae) are an ecologically diverse and widely distributed group of carnivorans: originating in the Late Oligocene-Early Miocene, they would go on to colonize almost every continent, so that bears can be found in Eurasia, North and South America, and until recently, Africa (Galdies 2022; Luna-Aranguré & Vázquez-Domínguez 2024). Bears have a long history in Europe, here we have on the left an Auvergne bear ( Ursus minimus ) from the Pliocene, and on the right an Etruscan bear ( Ursus etruscus ) from the Early Pleistocene, both from Italy and both displayed in the Museo Paleontologico di Montevarchi. They've both been posited as possible ancestors of cave and brown bears, with U. etruscus  probably being the best candidate (see Galdies 2022), and U. minimus has also been regarded as the possible common ancestor of all extant members of Ursus (see Charters et al. 2024)....

  The male reindeer (or so it is labelled) specimen at the Zoological Museum of Naples. I'm not sure to what species/subspecies/ecotype it belongs to, or if it is indeed a reindeer and not a caribou. Reindeer and caribou are deer of extremes: they evolved in Ice Age environments and have a circumpolar distribution, encompassing quite a wide variety of ecotypes and forms, including barren ground, woodland, mountain, and even insular forms (Geist 1999; Holand et al. 2022). Incidentally, while traditionally all placed in one taxon, Rangifer tarandus , with a number of subspecies, some authors have erected them to full species level (Harding 2022).  As for common names, "reindeer" usually refers to members of Rangifer  from Eurasia, "caribou" to those of North America (Geist 1999; Harding 2022).  I have technically seen live reindeer...though only from very far away. These were at Belpark, Parco Faunistico di Spormaggiore, Trento, a theme park housing a number of sp...

  One of the incredible suspended taxidermy displays at the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE), showing two male Central European or common red deer ( Cervus elaphus hippelaphus ) entangled in combat. In some rare instances interlocked males can no longer separate, and they usually both die. As promised in the previous post , here's more on deer and why they're so fascinating. For how mundane we may find them, deer (family Cervidae) are actually some of the weirdest mammals you can think of, for a variety of reasons, which include laryngeal modifications to enhance their calls during rut, ancient hybridizations, bipedal walking, carnivoran-like aggressive posturing and roaring, and much more (if you want to know more on this stuff, as you should, Darren Naish has previously blogged on all this here , here and here ). But what deer are most renowned for, and arguably their weirdest specialization, is their headgear: instead of just evolving horns (keratinous structures with a bony core...