Ungulates: Celebrating Them, Conserving Them, And Eating Them..? (Part 1)

An infographic celebrating ungulates of the world  from Peppermint Narwhal Creative, a fantastic graphic design company which used their superb work to advocate for environmental conservation.

June 6 was International Ungulate Day, and numerous preoccupations have made me very late to finishing what was supposed to be timely recognition of a notable zoological holiday (many zoos and conservation foundations commemorate this day, so no I’m not just making it up). Since then, it has remained in the static position of a draft which has been somewhat nagging to me. I also began to expand this post in an unexpected direction, to the extent that I feel it necessary to split into two articles, with the forthcoming one being a musing on conservation at a time of dietary shift. This first article acts as a sort of homage to hoofed mammal lineages across the globe, in which I share some personal photographs and lesser known information that I’ve come across.

Spanning from a childhood obsession with cattle to the many hours my family and I have spent observing elk, ungulates have played an integral role in my life and have often been the primary source from which I gained an appreciation for biodiversity. While many belittle ungulates as boring, placid animals that do little more than graze and provide meals for carnivores, those who work and live with these animals can attest to their charismatic nature and profound ecological importance. I suspect that the aforementioned perspective is one founded in an anthropocentric lack of concern for these animals, as they provided more fuel than competition or danger to our species’ expansion. The diversity of the ungulates is tremendous: from tiny duikers slinking cryptically through deep African bush, to massive and culturally distinct orcas coursing through the water as they strategically hunt their prey. I must note that the term ‘ungulate’ seems to have largely fallen out of use in the scientific literature, with some specialists now considering it to merely function as a form taxon or folk taxon rather than a technical grouping. Referring to cetartiodactyls, perissodactyls, and paenungulates is more proper but, for the sake of International *Ungulate* Day, we can let it slide for now.

Redating Homo floresiensis and Reconsidering the Genocide Hypothesis

The Liang Bua cave (LB1) Homo floresiensis individual and the cover of Dr. Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee (Source; Source)

I have no intention for this blog to act as a regular news source, but I will occasionally cover current zoological issues or findings if I feel that I can offer any sort of valuable commentary. This is an example of a brief news-oriented article. A paper published last Wednesday in Nature titled Revised stratigraphy and chronology for Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua in Indonesia proposes a new date for the diminutive-bodied and small-brained hominins uncovered in 2003. Rather than attempt to summarize the paper, here is the abstract:

Homo floresiensis, a primitive hominin species discovered in Late Pleistocene sediments at Liang Bua (Flores, Indonesia)^{1, 2, 3}, has generated wide interest and scientific debate. A major reason this taxon is controversial is because the H. floresiensis-bearing deposits, which include associated stone artefacts^{2, 3, 4} and remains of other extinct endemic fauna^{5, 6}, were dated to between about 95 and 12 thousand calendar years (kyr) ago^{2, 3, 7}. These ages suggested that H. floresiensis survived until long after modern humans reached Australia by ~50 kyr ago^{8, 9, 10}. Here we report new stratigraphic and chronological evidence from Liang Bua that does not support the ages inferred previously for the H. floresiensis holotype (LB1), ~18 thousand calibrated radiocarbon years before present (kyr cal. bp), or the time of last appearance of this species (about 17 or 13–11 kyr cal. bp)^{1, 2, 3, 7, 11}. Instead, the skeletal remains of H. floresiensis and the deposits containing them are dated to between about 100 and 60 kyr ago, whereas stone artefacts attributable to this species range from about 190 to 50 kyr in age. Whether H. floresiensis survived after 50 kyr ago—potentially encountering modern humans on Flores or other hominins dispersing through southeast Asia, such as Denisovans^{12, 13}—is an open question.

Of ‘Giant Horned Bunnies’ and Perplexing Phylogeny

The large Eocene uintathere Eobasileus as illustrated by Tim Morris. Read on for why this spectacular mammal has significance to this particular article.

Phylogeny, which can defined as the study of the evolutionary history and relationships amongst the animal kingdom, is one of the branches of zoological research which most captivates me with its complex and often unexpected nature. In the earliest article published on the Blogger-based Bizarre Zoology blog, I made brief reference to an obscure phylogenetic hypothesis which I first caught word of in paleozoologist Dr. Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology Book One. This was done with the intention of introducing the sorts of topics which would form the focal point of my writing, yet I did so quite poorly in that I neglected to elaborate beyond a few sentences. To kick things off after this blog’s relocation, I have chosen to return to this topic which has been given scant attention in scientific literature but just enough to grab hold of my taste for all that is bizarre and zoological. This is the fascinating albeit tenuous link proposed between Dinocerata and Lagomorpha, something which may not sound so interesting unless you are familiar with the animals grouped within these taxonomic orders.