By Colline Brassard and Trish Fleming. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are descendants of the grey wolf (Canis lupus). The earliest accepted dog remains date back to about 15,000 years ago. Although all dogs share this same ancestor, their life as human domesticates has led to considerable variation, and modern dogs are one of the most variable…
Category: Functional Morphology
How to eat a mouse whole; changes in skull shape in a large elapid snake
By Matt Patterson and Ash Wolfe. It’s not that easy to eat your food whole. Especially if you don’t have limbs to assist you. That’s what snakes have to deal with every day. The challenge is even harder for young snakes, which have to develop their abilities to handle and ingest their food. The dugite…
Spiny, striped, pygmy and giant bandicoots of New Guinea
By Natalie Warburton. Quenda are quirky inhabitants of many gardens and parks in the Perth metropolitan region. But did you know that they are only one of more than twenty species of bandicoots that are found around Australia and New Guinea? Unlike our local species, little is known of the diets and behaviour of their…
The great escape
By Natasha Tay. Australian animals get a bad rep for being a bit obtuse when it comes to predators, with more than half (73 of 124) of Australia’s Extinct, Threatened and Near Threatened terrestrial mammal species considered to be extremely susceptible to introduced red foxes and feral cats (Radford et al. 2018). For this reason,…
Ancient animals reveal unexpected environments
By Natalie Warburton @aNATomy_lab. Studying animal behaviour and ecology can involve hundreds of hours of field work in uncomfortable conditions, and for Australian mammals at least, very long nights. But what about animals from the past? How can we understand their behaviour and ecology, and what can this tell us about how ecosystems and the…
Australian diggers – strong-arm excavators and aerators of Australian landscapes
By Meg Martin. Digging marsupials play an especially important ecological role in Australian ecosystems by helping with soil turnover, nutrient mixing, seed dispersal and increasing breakdown of organic materials. Many of these species are highly specialised diggers – with strong forlimbs and long claws. Historically, the interactions between bones and muscle during behaviour has been…
A Rubbish Diet
By Heather Crawford, Mike Calver and Trish Fleming. Domestic cats (Felis catus) are one of the most widely distributed and successful carnivores globally. In cities, unowned cats (‘stray’) live in close association with human habitations and can roam across neighbourhoods, commercial areas, parks and bush reserves, hunting wildlife and scavenging food where they can find…
A fearsome predator — even small stray and feral cats take large and difficult-to-handle prey
By Trish Fleming, Heather Crawford, Clare Auckland and Mike Calver. Despite thousands of years of domestication, pet cats (Felis catus) retain a strong hunting drive. It is therefore easy for cats to survive independently of people. Today in Australia, it is estimated that there are 1.4–5.6 million feral cats in natural environments, and another 0.7…
Runways and fancy feet – tracking escape paths of marsupials
By Natasha Tay. Ever thought you’d spend two weeks in the bush giving bettongs rave party feet and putting them on a runway for science? I travelled to Arid Recovery in South Australia this past May to do exactly that. My PhD investigates anti-predator behaviour in marsupials, focussing on how anatomy affects their physical ability…
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