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 ...