Adorable obscure critters

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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby sunglasses » Thu Aug 24, 2017 2:44 pm

Good news everybody!

http://gizmodo.com/rare-mop-topped-monk ... 1798320660

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Vanzolini’s bald-faced saki has been seen again after 80 years! Look at that little mop on its head.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby Absentia » Thu Aug 24, 2017 2:58 pm

Looks like a cross between a monkey and a Monkee.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:29 pm

So I'm annoyed because I went through last night and found all the pictures that need replacing, then my computer restarted when it went to sleep (something it's been doing a lot though this is the first time that it did so as a result of sleeping from inactivity) and lost it all.

Then I realized that between today and yesterday, sunny's tiger quoll picture went down (I know it was there yessterday; I saw it). She's also missing a cuscus picture, but posted more one post later so I see no need to replace those. Any rate, continuing with my last post of replacement pictures for animals other people posted: replacement tiger quoll, people.
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Tuli posted a bunch of baby tapirs but I'm gonna only post one. You can always google to see more, or just click on this picture of a baby Baird's tapir and follow the link.
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Oweston's Civet. Once again I've uploaded a picture because I cannot find a good picture hosted somewhere I expect it to remain for awhile, and once again it's the fault of Ashley the BearJew. Between them Ashley and Rainy Days seem to be responsible for half the dead image links. Where are y'all finding your pictures anyways?
Chrotogale owstoni.jpg
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I don't need to replace the pink fairy armadillo NoodleFox posted, since I already posted one back on the second page.

Oh, speaking of dead images from RainyDays, here's a marbled polecat, but only one.
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I've got to run out into rush hour traffic so I'm leaving this at four animals. I think it's going to take me two more posts (beyond this one) to replace the rest of the missing animals either way. This has taken me a bit longer for a number of reasons, one is that I've found a few more of my posts missing pictures on first pasts. Honestly, I probably had the greatest number of dead pictures, but I've probably posted more pictures total here than everyone else combined. And thanks to my attempts to mostly use Commons most of my posts have lasted pretty well.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Thu Aug 24, 2017 10:22 pm

Back sooner than I expected and I managed 100% Commons pictures for this batch.

More replacements for lost pictures from Rainy:

Namib web-footed gecko:
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Electric blue day gecko:
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Underside of electric blue day gecko:
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Anglerphobe posted margay:
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Carrie posted blue dragon sea slug:
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Can you spot a spotted dogfish like Anglerphobe did?
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Thu Aug 24, 2017 11:10 pm

When I got to the end I realized that there were at least two posts from RainyDays I missed, so I found those and now I'm passing through again like the OCD person I am to see if I missed anything, and I did indeed miss a few. But let me know if you notice I missed one. It's tricky to compare with other people, but since I direct-edited my own posts if there's one missing I'd like to know about it.

From Rainy Days' posts, replacement images for:

Black and rufous elephant shrew:
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Valais blacknosed sheep:
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Pink orchid mantis:
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I missed Arkyle's post of the malachite kingfisher twice. Sorry, Kylie. Caught it this time though.
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Looking through I don't see any more dead links, so I'm gonna post two larger pics of interesting animals that have picture links still working but are low res. I posted them somewhat small because they're vertical, but you can click through to the Commons page to see the full-res image and click the category on the bottom to see even more. Or just use Google.

First is the Nicobar pigeon, which I'd probably have posted eventually if Ashley hadn't beat me to it. (That did inspire me to make a couple of pigeon posts. It's the closest living relative of the dodo.
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Second is the armadillo girdled lizard, which I told sunny won her this thread. It's still my favorite animal that somebody else posted which I hadn't heard of at the time.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby D-LOGAN » Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:23 am

Absentia wrote:Looks like a cross between a monkey and a Monkee.


Why doesn't THIS have every upthumb in the universe?
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Not just yet, I'm still tender from before.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Fri Aug 25, 2017 1:40 am

Going through to find dead images, I noticed some startling omissions. Mostly on my part, though I'm surprised nobody's posted any of these first three:

I'm going to start with the giant salamanders. Like alligators and paddlefish (scroll to bottom of post), there's one genus found in eastern North America and one in East Asia. Now the Asian genus also has a species found in Japan, but alligator bones have been found in Japan and maybe we'll find paddlefish pones there too.

Any rate, in North America we have giant aquatic salamanders called "hellbenders." There's a lot of them near where sunny lives.
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The Chinese giant salamanders are critically endangered in the wild because Chinese people like eating them, which means there's a lot of people breeding them to eat and/or conserve them, which means, paradoxically, it's easier to find good pictures of them than of the Japanese giant salamander.
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In the US we also have neotenous salamanders called mudpuppies, which look a bit like the Mexican axolotl but are less fun to say, less commonly available as pets, and don't come in pink. Since I couldn't find a good picture on a website I trust to remain up I'm uploading a picture I found and scaled. I'd link the original source but cannot find it.
mudpuppy.png
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Next up are sifakas, which are neat because unlike so-called flying lemurs (which I posted here as a "colugo," an alternative name), these are lemurs that can actually glide due to loose skin on their limbs and torso. The most famous is Zobomafoo, who was portrayed by a Coquerel's sifaka (and I've often seen misidentified as a ring-tailed lemur despite his lack of a ring tale), but here is a diademed sifaka:
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Here is a golden-crowned sifaka:
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And here is a silky sifaka, one of the rarest primates in the world, but still known to locals as "lunch."
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Sun Aug 27, 2017 3:57 am

Another group of gliding animals I'm surprised I haven't posted about: the anomalures. That could just be because I couldn't find good photographs, looking now I'm finding a lot more good photographs of two of the genera than the first time I looked them up, though one genus still lacks them.

Together with the springhaas they occupy their own special suborder of the rodents (two springhares, seven anomalures: the smallest rodent suborder), and they're one of two independent evolutions of gliding in the rodents, the other being the true flying squirrels.

There are three genera, one of which doesn't glide and two of which don't.

First the scaly-tailed "flying squirrels." Pel's seems to to the the one it's easiest to find clear pictures of, possibly because of its striking color pattern when it splays its flaps.
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Here's one giving a good look at the scales on its tail.
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And here's one of the all-black Lord Derby scaly-tailed "flying squirrel", showing a distinctly unsquirrellike face.
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Beechcroft's "flying squirrel" is sometimes put in another genus, and I think this is a photograph of it (since the dwarf and Lord Derby's both have black fur), though many pictures of anomalures are not labeled properly.
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The Cameroon scaly-tail doesn't glide, and is the only genus for which I cannot find photographs of living animals. So enjoy this illustration by one Joseph Smit, courtesy of Commons:
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Finally, a picture of one of the flying mice:
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Sun Aug 27, 2017 8:22 pm

Another rodent I'm surprised I hadn't posted but probably didn't because I couldn't find good images is the mountain beaver, aplodontia, or sewellel. The only really good images I can find are stock photos, and as a rule I don't use pictures I know to be stock photos (even if I could find one without watermarks; the whole point of stock photos is you're supposed to pay for them). But I did find one OK image, and it's neat because it's the only surviving member of its family. It's a distant relative of the squirrels, about as closely related to them as doormice are. It's native to the Pacific Northwest.
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While we're on the subject of squirrels, the neotropical pygmy squirrel is likely basal to all other members of the squirrel family, meaning prairie dogs are more closely related to flying squirrels than either are to each other.
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Tess said that the only monkeys I post are small ones, which is true, but that's only because I generally don't find larger monkeys cute. I might make an exception for the Ethiopian geladas though. Despite looking like baboons, they're in their own genus. Unlike baboons they're strict vegetarians, and like humans (well, female humans) they've got an extra butt on their chest. You can't see the chest butt in this picture, but here's a mother gelada with her baby:
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And now, here's a couple more sifakas I've been wanting to post:

Milne-Edwards' sifaka:
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Crowned sifaka:
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Mon Aug 28, 2017 3:12 am

Since nobody else has been posting and I do image-heavy posts, I was going to try to do a shorter post with just a couple marsupials. But then I ended up picking multiple images of each one because I have no self-restraint. So much for that.

Y'all probably know sugar gliders, and I've posted the closely-related squirrel glider before (last pic on this post), but there are two other gliding marsupials each in its own genus and the only member of their family that glides. I'm curious about how these three groups evolved: they're all in the same superfamily, but the differences at the family level suggest they're independent evolutions of gliding from animals with already somewhat loose skin.

The greater glider has at least three color morphs: dark, pale, and white. Here's the dark morph:
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And here's the pale form:
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The feather-tailed glider is the smallest gliding mammal, smaller even than the dwarf flying squirrel:
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Here's a picture that displays the "feather" tail well.
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And in the family that includes sugar gliders, there's only one member that does not glide: the critically-endangered Leadbeater's possum, also known as the fairy possum. It was thought to be extinct for half a century until it was rediscovered in 1961.
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And here's one as a baby:
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Tue Aug 29, 2017 12:13 am

I've had a rule that I only post extinct animals if they're recently enough extinct that people could paint them from life, or at least fresh corpses. I'm violating that now because I discovered a dinosaur so neat I have to share it.

Meet Yi qi. Yes, that is a dinosaur with bat wings you see. In other words, our geological history seems to have had a real-life proto-dragon.

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While I'm on the subject, I'd like to mention two other extinct animals that really, really excited me when I first discovered them.

One is Microraptor gui, which is a feathered dinosaur with four wings. I first saw it at the American Museum of Natural History, at an exhibit on rethinking dinosaurs. At the time it was brightly colored, but based on the file description it looks like they found black pigments in its feathers and no others.
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The other is Simosuchus clarki, an armadillo-like vegetarian member of the crocodile family from my favorite island: Madagascar.
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I also thought about including a Dimorphodon, which was my favorite animal from Dinotopia as a kid, but since A. it's not that obscure if it's in Dinotopia and B. I cannot find any freely licensed paleo-art of it I really like, I'm actually managing a reasonably short post today.

What can I say except...
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby Arkyle » Tue Aug 29, 2017 4:24 pm

Thank you for making my day - it's been a rough couple of weeks from a work point of view - this stuff always makes me smile!
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby sunglasses » Tue Aug 29, 2017 4:31 pm

BTW sellers I really appreciate you finding the pics that have been taken down.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Tue Aug 29, 2017 10:59 pm

sunglasses wrote:BTW sellers I really appreciate you finding the pics that have been taken down.

I mean, they're not necessarily the same pictures, though I think some of them are. But all the same...

...fuck, I posted "You're Welcome" too early. Dammit!
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:52 am

OK, another short post, because there's some miscellaneous animals I've been wanting to post:

The two species of three-banded armadillo are the only armadillos which can roll themselves up into a perfect ball.

Here's one of two Brazilian three-banded armadillos taking on that ball position:
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Here's the honey possum, which sits all alone in its family. The family is part of the superfamily which includes the three groups of gliders I talked about earlier, and the only family in the superfamily not to have any gliding member. Being not airborne is also unusual because it's a major pollinator, and most pollinators can fly.
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Also, while Sunny posted a bunch of cuscuses (without labeling the species), she appears not to have posted a bear cuscus (there are two species), which I like because they remind me of binturongs. This is the Sulawesi bear cuscus.
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Finally, another turtle. I was going through a book I have to see how many of the animals I posted it had and found the big-headed turtle, which isn't closely-related to the Malagasy big-headed turtle. The book grouped it with snapping turtles, but it's two decades out of date and it in fact has no close relatives.
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