The Z-Letter Archive

In best cryptozoological tradition, it’s kind of blurry and far away… The human in the picture is called Nicole Duplaix, and the photo’s from her website, so using Google would be a dead easy way of IDing the beast, but that is called CHEATING. So straight answers please, no peeking.

The Guardian has an exciting-looking article, entitled “New to Nature”, which is about a centipede, Scolopendropsis duplicata, which has been discovered in Tocantins State, central Brazil. This discovery is described in this open access article from the journal Zootaxa by Chagas Jr, Edgecome and Minelli. (Incidentally, Chagas Jr’s first name is highly appropriate: “Amazonas”; his nickname, [...]

I spotted this via a link on the Le Monde website. The cat is called Rocky, he’s two year’s old, and he lives with a young woman called Daisy in the Gard region of France. Sadly, he doesn’t do this too much now, as she’s moved the furniture. When the video was taken (November 2009), [...]

As a special Easter treat, here are two animals for you. First, what about this? No, it’s not from Alien. And now, what about this, picked up from both The Times and The Telegraph by Greg Mayer over at WhyEvolutionIsTrue.com. The papers describe it as “an oriental yeti” (duh?) or a hairless bear (duh? it [...]

It’s not often I’ll cite the rightwing UK newspaper The Daily Mail, but yesterday – as spotted by  Nelly Gidaszewski (PhD class of 07) - they picked up on an amazing set of photos by Polish amateur photographer Mirosław Świętek. Świętek, a 37 year old physiotherapist, went out into the woods at about 3am and took these [...]

What is the name of this mammal, in what part of the world does it live, and what is the name of the tree it burrows under?

A recent article in Time looks at various examples of alleged animal suicide, taking as its starting point the recent distressing film about Japanese slaughter of dolphins, The Cove. Animal-rights activist Richard O’Barry, who features in The Cove, is convinced that animals can commit suicide, having allegedly seen Kathy, a dolphin in the 1960s television show Flipper, [...]

This video is an advert for dog food, but nevertheless shows how dogs manage to leap to catch food. The neuronal processing is in fact remarkably complex: pattern recognition (it’s a treat), measurement of velocity and parabolic trajectory, computation of appropriate power needed, and its distribution, to get body to right place at the right [...]