Adorable obscure critters

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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Thu Aug 31, 2017 2:49 pm

I've noticed something fishy: it looks like nobody's posted a sawshark or sawfish. The two are similar-looking animals, but sawsharks, as the name suggests, are sharks, while sawfish are rays. The sawsharks have two genera—one with one species, one with seven—but they appear to be fairly obscure compared to the sawfish. Sawsharks are neat in having catfish-like barbels coming off the middle of the "saw."

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The sawfish appear to be better-known, perhaps because for all species for which we have data they are critically endangered. The "saws" are popular with collectors, and they're also considered a delicacy in China (half the world's endangered species seem to be endangered because the Chinese like to eat them). Here's a researcher tagging a baby smalltooth sawfish:
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Another group of rays that the Chinese are driving to extinction with their love of shark fin soup are the guitarfish. Pictured below is a shovelnosed guitarfish:
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The angelsharks are neat ray-like sharks, though finding good photographs seems nigh-impossible. One Atlantic species is known as "sand devils," and I'm starting to think that any animal humans call "devil" is inherently harmless to humans.
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Snipe eels were once considered to not be really eels, but now are considered to be true eels. They're long, really thin eels with heads like those of a snipe, hence the name.
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Finally, the batfish are a group of anglerfish all of which are interesting-looking, though some are quite ugly. I think the starry handfish or starry seabat is beautiful though:
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These last four fish are new-ish to me (I've heard about and forgotten the guitarfish and snipe eel), I found them as a result of scouring that book I mentioned in the last post (edit, which is on the previous paged but it seems stupid to link), when I saw something that reminded me of the sawfish and sawshark and wanted more fish to go with them. Also found some more fish, but also have some more mammals and birds I want to post, so I'll see how I feel tonight/tomorrow morning.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby Arkyle » Thu Aug 31, 2017 3:08 pm

To be honest, I didn't post the sawfish because I didn't think they were obscure. My local aquarium has plenty of guitarfish - although I do prefer the rays.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Thu Aug 31, 2017 3:20 pm

I had trading cards from National Geographic: Kids which had sawfish, but I also had a plastic pangolin and a sticker set with pangolins. Then Creep posted a Mandarin duck and Tess was amazed at some ornamental pheasants which I didn't think were remotely obscure since both of those are staples of even small roadside zoos. (May post the pheasants at some point if Tess doesn't.) At this point I've revised my definition of "obscure" downwards considerably.

By the way, I made a post last night which ended up being the last on the page. I wish I'd reversed the order because I think that the animals in that one were somewhat more interesting; though I may just be a bit biased against fish. Which too be fair is a common bias. I should count the animals I've posted by taxonomic category; I bet I've posted far more each of mammals and birds than all other categories combined.

Edit:
By my count—not including the reposts I did the other day and trying to only count each species I posted once (some animals I've posted multiple pictures of each)—I have posted:

209 birds

116 mammals

142 animals that aren't birds or mammals

including
39 insects

26 lizards/snakes/tuataras

26 bony fish

22 amphibians

8 turtles

8 cartilaginous fish

7 crocodilians

3 crustaceans

2 non-avian dinosaurs

1 jellyfish

And 1 plant that looks like an insect
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Thu Aug 31, 2017 11:08 pm

So when I was looking up batfish, I discovered the dusky batfish, which is unrelated to the other group of batfish I posted one of. It looks pretty boring as an adult but damn cool as a juvenile.

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And here is the caiman lizard, which I found while trying to see if my book had the monkey-tailed skink. It doesn't—it's one of the few vertebrates I or anyone else posted here that it lacks—but it does have caiman lizards, which are cool-looking, largish semi-aquatic reptiles that only eat snails.
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Also, I'm on a marsupial kick, and there's a genus in Australia and New Guinea related to sugar gliders and Leadbeater's possums, which contains the striped possum (found in both New Guinea and Queensland) and the trioks (found only in New Guinea). The striped possum has an enlongated fourth finger with a hooked nail that it uses to get grubs from trees, analogous to the aye-ayes of Madagascar (both animals have been called "mammalian woodpeckers." The long-fingered triok has a similar adaptation and other trioks might as well, but the striped possum is the easiest one to find images of.
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Speaking of woodpeckers, a bird I'm surprised I haven't posted is the wryneck: a genus of two species related to but not woodpeckers. They have really flexible necks.
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They also have really long tongues.
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And their genus—I kid you not—is Jynx.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby CarrieVS » Sat Sep 02, 2017 12:38 am

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This delightful little chap is Satomi's pygmy seahorse, the smallest (known) seahorse in the world. They can get to fractionally over half an inch long.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Sun Sep 03, 2017 12:30 am

Another animal I'm surprised I haven't posted is the desman. Desmans are small aquatic animals related to moles, with super-sensitive noses. They are convergent to otter tenrecs (which I've posted previously), and—with the way they use their noses—to the much larger platypodes.

There are only two species, both endangered. The Pyranean desman of northern Spain... (Pic cropped from here.)
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And the Russian desman of ... I dunno, Brazil?
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Tokay geckos probably aren't that obscure among reptile keepers, but I hadn't heard of them until a few days ago, or if I had I'd forgotten them.
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Maybe hoatzins aren't super-obscure because they're in a lot of kids' books about neat birds, since the chicks have claws on their wings? Or maybe they're so obscure y'all didn't know about them? I don't know, so to be safe I'm posting them. When I was a kid they were my favorite bird, and they are really neat-looking.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Sun Sep 03, 2017 7:26 am

Normally I'd wait at least twelve hours before double-posting, but I decided to do a post with just salamanders and realized that there were more than six I wanted to post. I've had complaints that most of the animals I post aren't that weird-looking, and a post of all salamanders—which are basically slimy lizard-looking creatures (though I think the diversity of forms in lizards and even salamanders is interesting)—doesn't help with that (though I tried to include some of the weirder-looking salamanders), but hey, after I'm done with salamanders I've got some nice rodents to post. (And birds; I've always got more birds, for when I can't think of anything else.)

However I find taxonomy neat, for example would you believe that the blue-spotted salamander—my favorite salamander as a kid—is closely related to the axolotl? It's in the same genus, which is the only genus in its family.
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Meanwhile, though it looks like the axolotl and also like the Texas blind salamander the (blind and albino) olm of the Balkans is closely related to the mudpuppies of eastern North America. Image cropped from here.
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The West Coast of the US is home to two small families of salamanders with only one genus each containing four identified species. One is the Pacific "giant salamanders," which are nowhere near as big as the true giant salamanders I posted earlier, reaching only a foot in length. Pictured is the coastal giant salamander.
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The other group is the tiny torrent salamanders, which have kind of froggy-looking faces:
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The closest relatives of the true giant salamanders are a large and diverse group called the Asiatic salamanders. One of the most remarkable looking of those (and one of the most distinct within the group, is the Shangcheng stout salamander. It's more "ugly-cute" and than "adorable" (and I'd say closer to the ugly end), but it is interesting, and I decided that I'd go for weird over "cute" this post; the runner-up will make the next post.
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Finally, the climbing salamanders are a neat group of prehensile-tailed salamanders. I may post more since there's several salamanders I'm not getting to in this post, but for now I'll just share the green salamander of Appalachia:
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Mon Sep 04, 2017 7:38 pm

Nobody likes salamanders, eh? Well, I'm still gonna post some more, and then at some point I'm going to do a post of reptiles and amphibians that look like worms, wherein I post even more.

Last post I skipped over the sirens because I felt that to do them justice I needed multiple shots, one in water showing the gills, one out of water showing the true size of the greater siren. Then I realized I don't like any shots of the greater siren I can find, but I still want to show you the lesser and dwarf sirens, of two different genera.

So first, a lesser siren in water, look at that magnificent gill-work.
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I'm spoilering the dwarf siren because I've got a lot of text and spoilered images here
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Claw-footed salamanders are what I considered posting instead of the stout salamander, and are in the same "Asiatic salamander" family. They're even more distinct from the rest of the family, but there's several species.
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Another Asiatic salamander is the Japanese clouded salamander. I was also going to post an American clouded salamander, related to the green salamander I posted, and when I decided not to I debated posting the Hida salamander (closely related to this one) instead. Ultimately, I decided I'll post both of those in spoiler tags and you can tell me whether I made the right call. Both the Hida and Japanese clouded salamanders are banned in Washington State as invasive species.
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Hidden Hida salamander
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American clouded salamander, of Oregon
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The reason I went against including those unspoilered is because I wanted to talk about Bolitoglossa, the tropical climbing, web-footed, or mushroom-tongued salamanders. As those names imply, these salamanders have a whole lot of unusual features. Here's the Mexican web-footed salamander, which is the most strikingly-colored of those.
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They have prehensile tails, webbed feet, and chameleon/frog-like tongues. Like the other prehensile-tailed salamanders, they're lungless salamanders.
Here's O'Donnell's climbing salamander showing the feet better
Click through for more images.
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And here's a member of the related hydromantes showing tongue action
Click through for a scientific article describing the phenomenon.
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And finally, despite already having four unspoilered images and tons of spoilers, I want to share a salamander which I didn't think was all that exceptional because it's common as dirt where I come from, but which is really beautiful and I realized is probably quite interesting for people not used to it: the red eft. It's probably prettier than the blue-spotted salamander, it's just that the blue-spot is rare while the efts are ubiquitous.
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Strictly speaking the red eft is the juvenile form of the eastern newt, but the adult newts are dull-colored and water-dwelling, while and the efts are land-dwelling and brightly-colored.

The adults do have red spots, though
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Tue Sep 05, 2017 5:16 am

OK, some more rodents. Following Grim's recommendation I'm finally playing around with Imgur, but URLs still link to the original source.

Y'all might think that rodents are overrepresented on here, but given that they make up 40% of all mammal species they're probably underrepresented among the mammals I post, particularly given my bias for small mammals.

Y'all probably know about naked mole rats, which I think are ugly with a capital "ug" but some weirdos find genuinely adorable. There are also a whole group of mole rats which I think are almost as ugly, but then there are two related families which I think are cute.

The cane rats have only two members in one genus, and are a common food source in Africa.
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The dassie rat, meanwhile, is all alone in its family.
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The giant pouched rats are part of a larger family, and Gambian giant pouched rats have been trained to detect mines. They've also been naturalized on Key Largo, where they're supposedly invasive, but haven't spread to elsewhere in South Florida. Here's an Emin's giant pouched rat:
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And here's a mine-detecting Gambian and a baby one in the training program
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None of these are true rats (though the pouched rats are somewhat closely related), nor are what I'm about to post next true doormice, which are related to squirrels. Rather, they are the only genera in a family basal to the family of rats and mice.

The Malabar spiny doormouse is alone in its genus.
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While the pygmy doormice are a genus of closely-related species from China and Vietnam.
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Also basal to the rats and mice are the bamboo rats, zokors, and a different kind of mole rat not closely related to the naked mole rats. I might post bamboo rats at some point, but in the mean time I have to post a zokor, which is a mole-like animal, and this picture of one being lifted by the loose skin around its neck appealed to me. They look just like moles except that moles are insectivores and these are rodents.

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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby Grimstone » Tue Sep 05, 2017 8:56 am

The following are a few different species of long-tailed kingbirds in the tyrant flycatcher family. The first two can be found in north and central america and the other two are found in south america. The scissor-tailed flycatcher is especially common here in the southern great plains region(mainly oklahoma and texas) during the summer months.

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scissor-tailed flycatcher
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fork-tailed flycatcher
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streamer-tailed tyrant
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strange-tailed tyrant
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby Arkyle » Thu Sep 07, 2017 11:28 am

Cane Rats scared the living crap out of me when I was a kid...
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Mon Sep 18, 2017 4:36 am

I ran across this site somehow. It's a blog where an Australian woman, every day for a year, tried to post a drawing of an animal she did. A few of the examples aren't drawings including three photographs of her face painted as an animal (never the usual suspects), two or three cross stitchings, and a couple of photographs she took of animals instead. One time she didn't post for five days then made up for lost time. But overall she managed it, though her artwork gets better as you go back through the archives, showing that she increasingly stopped giving a fuck.

Surprisingly, despite the fact that she posts a lot of well-known animals and repeats many of them, there are a few creatures I didn't know of specifically, though I usually knew of relatives of theirs. And she gave me enough material to do two overly-long posts or three slightly short posts, so this is going to be the "birds only" post. Next I'll do an insects post and then an "everything else" post.

I'll start with the willie wagtail, which is native to Australia and like many of the animals there is named after an English animal which isn't closely related. I know about fantails, and should probably post some of them (also the British wagtails, which I'd never heard of before I went to Wales), but just look how irate this fellow looks:
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Arkyle's posted bee-eaters before but the red-bearded bee-eater of Southeast Asia is new to me:
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The male brown-throated wattle-eye is pretty neat-looking.
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Finally, I want to end with the most impressive of the animals I hadn't heard of, the royal flycatcher:
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Tue Sep 19, 2017 6:34 am

As promised, the new insects from that site. Compared to the insects I've already posted, I don't find them particularly interesting (except the moth, a little bit), but insects are severely underrepresented here so I'm posting them anyways.

I'll start with a leaf beetle, which looks like it has gold leaf on it:

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The rest are butterflies and moths. Here is the crimson-spotted flunky moth.
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Finally, here's the red-spotted purple butterfly, which isn't purple in any pictures I can find.
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Here's Miami blue butterfly, endangered butterfly endemic to South Florida. It actually is blue.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Tue Sep 19, 2017 6:48 am

Double posting because I don't expect people to find the insects I just posted particularly interesting; I just had to post them for OCD completionist reasons, and because I'm not going to roll over onto a new page by my count. So now I finally get to the animals from that blog that aren't birds or insects and are "new" to me. Three of them actually aren't, exactly, but my reaction on seeing them was "oh yeah, that exists!" so I'm counting them.

First of those is a monkey: the lion-tailed macaque. As she notes, it's weird that it's called "lion-tailed," like that's the most lion-like thing about it.

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Next up is a lizard, the oriental garden lizard. As agamas go, it's not particularly interesting (I posted some cooler-looking ones here), but the male has some interesting colors during breeding season, and those colors shift.
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Now, I know I said no more salamanders for awhile, but in the spirit of posting all the animals that are new from this blog, I'm gonna violate that.

Here are Alpine newts:
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And this is the Luristan newt:
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Don't think I've heard of the guinea fowl puffer:
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Finally, the red gurnard looks like a somewhat ugly fish you'd eat from some angles (and it is a fish you can eat), but with its fins spread is quite pretty. Sadly, not many good pictures in large sizes of that.
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Sometime soonish I'll post some birds that the royal flycatcher reminded me of.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby CarrieVS » Tue Sep 19, 2017 2:41 pm

cmsellers wrote:Here is the crimson-spotted flunky moth.
[snip]
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