Just discovered some recent beaver activity and several beaver dams. There are only very few and very fresh bite marks, and a few very old ones, so I suppose this was a rather recently repopulated habitat.

Für alle die vielleicht noch für Weihnachten etwas Besonderes zum Verschenken oder auch für den eigenen Wunschzettel suchen, kürzlich erschien von mir und Tobias Möser "Unsere Exoten Pflanzen, Pilze und Tiere als Neubürger in Deutschland", 398 Seiten über heimische Neobiota youtu.be/Iq67Vpjkc_g?...

Was wenige engagierte Leute in einer BUND-Ortsgruppe alles erreichen können. Anekdote: Von der wiedergekommen Sibirischen Iris traut man sich gar nicht, sie auf die Beweidung zurückzuführen. Dabei ist es typisches, giftiges Weideunkraut. Aufzeichnung in Kürze hier: www.youtube.com/@naturnahewe...

Faszinierende Art von der ich noch niemals gehört habe! Vielen Dank @thoerren.bsky.social

Sadly you can't see the beaver which is right at the moment sitting and eating in the grass in front of me.

🔬 Phenotypic plasticity drives the development of laterality in the scale-eating cichlid fish 𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑠 𝑚𝑖𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑙𝑒𝑝𝑖𝑠.🐟🧪 🔒 academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

The Phenomenon of Piebaldism in Sharks: A Review of Global Sightings and Patterns.🐟🧪 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Risso's Dolphins from Berry Head this afternoon. May seems to be a good month to see them as they are probably coming in close to shore to feed on adult Cuttlefish which have come into the shallows to lay eggs and die at this time of year.

Find the error.

An old-ish drawing of a Chinese Paddlefish for today's #SundayFishSketch 🐡

Imagine you went out to the forest for a sunday walk & saw an elephant herd. Wait, there would certainly be trees, but no forest. Interesting new paper: Europe’s lost landscape sculptors: Today’s potential range of the extinct elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus biogeography.pensoft.net/article/1350...

Noch gar nicht gesehen: Ein Video über die Wasserbüffelweide Burglehen bei Rottenburg am Neckar. Dank an @markusbuehler.bsky.social für den Hinweis. Der Regierungsbezirk Tübingen könnte deutscher Büffelweidenmeister sein. Wir inventarisieren gerade. youtu.be/4Y4Fbvh1FAw?...

Voay robustus! a recently extinct species of crocodile from Madagascar, most of its remains were found in a "sub-fossil" state, where not enough time has passed for them to fossilize suggested by @convictclaude.bsky.social! who surely apreciates me calling it a 𝙃𝙤𝙧𝙣𝙮 𝘾𝙧𝙤𝙘𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙡𝙚

#paleoart commission: the bulkiest, heaviest and possibly even longest crocodilian with the strongest biteforce in animal kingdom: the giant miocene caiman Purussaurus!

Yesterday I visited another fantastic place in the Chiemgau Alps, it must look even much more awesome when everything is green and flowers all around.

Today I visited this awesome lake in the Chiemgau Alps of Bavaria. The weather was rainy but the colours of the water still incredible. I could see a few rainbow trouts, some brown trouts and a single char of unknown species plus a lot of minnows, and as an ornithological surplus also a merganser.

Today I visited a very nice special exhibition in the Mammut-Museum Siegsdorf about the fossils from the Hammerschmiede Lagerstätte in Bavaria, illustrated by one of my favorite paleo-artists, Mauricio Anton.

I just hope we will also see anytime footage of a fully adult Mesonychoteuthis in its natural habitat.

The beavers in the bog area Inzeller Filzen are very active and their activities can be seen all around. The beavers themselves are very elusive however. Just saw this really nice artwork in honour of the local beavers.

Some impressions from lake Chiemsee. The weather was really great, and despite rather low overall number of waterfowl I have seen, I can add two pretty awesome new species on my list of first sights in the wild.

Great crested crebes from my tour to lake Constance. I have seen them even in "Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus"-style but also feeding on fish, like the stickleback on the last photo. Not really rare but really remarkable birds with fascinating behavior and intersting anatomy.

Yesterday I was on a very awesome birding tour on Lake Constance. Besides many wonderful wild birds and other animals I came along a particularly flamboyant captive bird. Can you imagine what it was?

Another photo from my visit of Wilhelma Zoo in Stuttgart, a white-naped crane (Gruß vipio). The texture of the skin is really remarkable, and photos like this are always great references for palaeoart.

Since you asked so nicely

This are my favourite photos from my recent trip to Wilhelma Zoo Stuttgart. Not even of a zoo animal, but a wild nile goose which was hanging around near the pelicans. Not exactly a particular popular and invasive bird, but I still really like their appearance.

Did you see the deep-sea anglerfish that bubbled up to the surface? Did you wonder WHAT IN THE DING DANG HECK it was doing there? I talked to some scientists to find out everything I could! HT @sternarchella.bsky.social, @mbarinews.bsky.social 🧪🦑 www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

A gryphon vulture which I´ve recently seen during my last visit to the #Wilhelma Zoo in Stuttgart. I had the great pleasure to see this awesome birds in the wild on Crete (Greece) and Cres (Croatia). But this was once a rather wide spread bird, which also populated vast parts of central Europe.

Kommenden Mittwoch um 19.30 Uhr halte ich einen Vortrag am Senckenberg-Museum Frankfurt, der auch online übertragen wird. Fühle mich sehr geehrt, in diesen heiligen Hallen sprechen zu dürfen. Dank an @juliakrohmer.bsky.social für die Einladung! museumfrankfurt.senckenberg.de/de/bildungsa...

Wild boars as ecosystem engineers:

#ShiftingBaselines and the forgotten giants: integrating megafauna into plant community ecology🦣🌿 With #megafauna lost, have we built #ecology on already-degraded ecosystems? Led @skjoldsoendergaard.bsky.social as part of his thesis - well done! doi.org/10.1111/oik.... #theory #rewilding #vegetation

You could place a takin into a movie set and people would later not even notive that it´s a real animal. Their horns alone are absolutely insane. I took this photos in Wilhelma Zoo Stuttgart, sadly the specimen (which was already rather old) is no more alive.

A beautifully preserved termite soldier in a 16 million year old piece of amber from the Dominican Republic. It is a member of the Nasutitermitinae in which highly specialized soldiers have a protruding " fontanellar gun" on top of their heads, with which they can spray a resin-like substance.

I just found some old photos I took in 2015 in Kreuzlingen, on the western lakeside of Lake Constance. At that time highland cattle was used for landscape maintenance there. For some time there were also water buffalos (which were probably better dealing with the wet conditions).

Fascinating case:

Camels are weird for a whole bunch of reasons, and likely some of the most bizarre extant ungulates. A rarely noted feature are their very unusual toes and hooves, which are fully unlike those of other ungulates. Photos of Bactrian Camels, Tierpark Mundenhof.

Illustrative case of how fast large mammals can shift their range: First record of the spotted #hyena Crocuta crocuta in Egypt during the past 5,000 years - Read on www.degruyter.com/document/doi... @degruyterbrill.bsky.social🐾 #megafauna #rangeexpansion

Highly recommend read about the world of Tetrapod Zoology of 2024. It was great that I could met last year with Darren during a symposium in the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann where we gave both a talk and it was really fantastic to visit Cologne Zoo with him.

When I recently visited Wilhelma Zoo in Stuttgart, I took the chance to take some detail photos of the legs of Grevy´s zebra (Equus grevyi). Their pattern is much, much more complex than mere stripes, especially the pattern around near the hooves is really fascinating.

So the beavers in my neighborhood have been rather active.

I recently visited the "Hidden Länd" exhibition in Stuttgart where I saw this very interesting 11th-12th century tokens carved from antler. They were quite recently found near Lichtenstein-Holzelfingen below the rubble of an old wall.

I dunno about that silly croc from Borneo supposedly trying to lure humans with flailing jazz hands (bit.ly/4gYVGMC), but OHIO Honors student Grace Vance has been assembling the hands & feet of our alligator known as #ShoeGator. Its left hand is pretty messed up with broken & poorly healed bones. 🐊

Our new study on the diet of one of Europe's more controversial animals, racoon dog provides no evidence that it is a threat to ground-nesting #birds nor to endangered #amphibians🐾🦆🐸 link.springer.com/article/10.1... #racoondog #mesopredator #alienspecies #dknatur

I think my favorite part about my new publication is the figures. It's on whether headbutting adaptations extend to the brain case in bovids (spoiler alert... maybe not?). Here's a thread with figures that made it into the paper and others that didn't! 🧪 🧠 nicoleackermans.com/2025/01/13/n...

Just visiting "The Hidden Land" exhibition about the early history of southern Germany.

Minoan art has probably the finest depictions of sealife of the whole European Bronze Age. Faience inlay in the form of a flying fish. Knossos, around 1600 BCE. #Archaeology

Watch our video to learn how compressive forces sculpt the intricate head scales of #crocodiles! 🎥🐊 And read the full @nature.com article here ⬇️ nature.com/articles/s41... @rorylcooper.bsky.social @genevunige.bsky.social

The two Asian lions - the brothers Kajal and Shapur - in #Wilhelma Zoo Stuttgart. They developed amazing manes in the rather cold central European climate. That´s how the late surviving medieval European lions in Europe did look like:

Schöner Jahresstart - mein neues Buch ist da! Ich freue mich, einen Einblick in die Welt des Totholzes geben zu dürfen. Denn auch wenn es tot ist: es ist die Lebensgrundlage für tausende von Lebewesen direkt vor unseren Haustüren Ab nächster Woche Montag (13.01.) dann überall im Handel erhältlich