Muton

umzoology:

Pholidota; Manis javanica 

There’s nothing quite like a Malayan, or Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) to help me feel better the day after a museum catastrophe!  It was a great trend the first few months I was in the museum to play the “Do we have _____ in the collections?!” game, because more often than not the answer was ‘Yes’ (the things I’ve asked about which we do not have are a platypus, unicorn, big foot/Sasquatch, Tasmanian devil, and some other odd Monotremes and Marsupials…).  Such was the case with the pangolin.  I thought for sure that there was no way a little University Zoological Museum in Montana would be in possession of a pangolin, but here it is!  Our collection actually houses one study skin, one tanned skin, and a complete skeleton.  Not bad considering this pangolin is from Southeast Asia! 

Pangolins are interesting for a multitude of reasons, from the unique thick keratin scales that cover their mammalian bodies, to their fierce claws for digging and climbing, and on top of that they completely lack teeth.  Some species of pangolins have claws that are so large they are unable to put any weight on their forelimbs when walking for fear of breaking them, so they have become one of the only mammals to walk bipedally.  Not that I’m one to pick favorites, but if I absolutely had to, the pangolin would probably win! 

umzoology:

Felidae

Last month I featured a variety of genera and species of canids but I’m personally a cat person (secret’s out), so here’s my favorite family: Felidae!  I had no idea how many different genera of felines we had in the collection; twice as many as the canids with fourteen, including one extinct species!  AWESOME!  

Here they are from largest to smallest: 

Smilodon - Cast skull of the saber-toothed cat, lived between 2.5ma - 10,000 years ago, endemic to the Americas
Panthera leo - Lion
Puma concolor - Puma, Cougar, Mountain Lion
Panthera pardus - Leopard
Lynx canadensis - Canada lynx
Lynx rufus - Bobcat
Felis yagouaroundi - Jaguarundi  
Felis wiedii - Margay
Leopardus tigrinus - Oncilla, Tiger cat 
Felis catus/Felis domesticus - Domestic house cat
Leopardus pardalis - Ocelot
Prionailurus bengalensis - Leopard cat
Felis silvestris - Wildcat

I’ll refrain from going into great detail about any one of these species at the moment, but I find it interesting how despite some size discrepancies and a slight variation on the degree of pronunciation of the sagittal crest, most of these genera are surprisingly similar in the morphological sense.  With the exception of the oddly rounded cranium of the Ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) I don’t know that I would be able to identify any of these based on anything besides size comparisons, but then again there aren’t exactly a lot of jungle cat species up here in Montana to worry about! 

umzoology:

Phyllostomus hastatus 

This photoset is in response to a few requests I got for bats, the numerous flying mammals of the order Chiroptera!  Although I photographed a few different species today, the Greater Spear-nosed Bat (Phyllostomus hastatus) caught my attention for the unique appearance of its face.  The common name ‘spear-nosed’ really applies here, and you can imagine this interesting feature is beneficial for improving its sense of smell.  Bat dentition is also especially fascinating and this one is no exception with the enlarged canines and raised sagittal crest which lends itself towards thick cheek and jaw muscle attachments for accommodating its omnivorous diet.  
If you’d like to see some more bats, I wrote a lengthy post about them last November and you can read it here!

umzoology:

I just found out this morning that tumblr is going to feature this blog in a new Spotlight category, Museums!  This has been such an awesome week for the UMZM, between that and Monday’s video.  Next week, a journalist from the Montana Kaimin is going to interview me about my role on campus and the work I do here in the museum, and on Thursday I’m leaving for Washington, D.C. to look at some graduate schools and actually meet with the Mammalian Collections Manager at The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to discuss some collections management issues.  I feel extremely fortunate for all of these opportunities, and am so glad to have a venue in which I may share this news! So thanks! 

I thought I would feature some small and somewhat unlikely carnivore specimens to be found in our collection (From top to bottom):

• Banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) from the Republic of South Africa Zululand, 1968
• Small Asian mongoose (Herpestes javanicus auropunctatus), found in Puerto Rico, 1979
• Meerkat species (Suricata sp.), Kalahari GNP, 1970
• Another Asian mongoose sp. (Herpestes sp.), West Pakistan, Jan. 1965

zoologygirl65:

1) Rabbit
2) Dugong
3) Bird
4) Armadillo
5) Turtle
6) Shark
7) Orangutan
8) Toad
9) Salamander
10) Chuditch hands

umzoology:

Desk bookshelf in the museum.  

We had a meeting with the UM President Royce Engstrom yesterday and were all very pleased with how things went!  We look forward to giving him and his cabinet a tour of our museum collections sometime after classes are out this summer.  During our short meeting I was able to show him some pictures of our Fish collection, as it’s an important and potentially hazardous situation that we can’t seem to bring enough attention to, not even considering the historical, educational, and cultural value of those specimens! 

umzoology:

Monkey Sale

Now for the hands-down (no pun intended) creepiest drawer in the museum: the primates.  Something about their little faces and fingers with fingerprints and skulls that look like children really gives me the heebie-jeebies.  All of these individuals were donated by F. S. Todd, who’ve I’ve mentioned before as being a huge contributor to our collection in the 1960’s while he worked for the L.A. Zoo.  A few of these specimens, however, were actually donated to him from pet shops in that area.  I find it a little hard to believe that people use to (and still try) to own primates as pets, or any wild animal for that matter.  It gets a little too Planet of the Apes meets Battlestar Galactica meets Animal Farm for me. 

Top to bottom, left to right: Saguinus oedipus, Cottontop tamarin; Cebuella pygmaea, Pygmy marmoset, and Alouatta villosa, a juvenile howling monkey that apparently died of starvation when its mother was killed in the Panama Canal area. 

The Monkey Sale clipping is from the Spokane Washington newspaper back in the 1960’s, advertising a local monkey sale.  So affordable! 

zoologygirl65:

The inner workings of a Lamprey
I do love these creepy little things

umzoology:

Passerina caerulea  (formerly Guiraca caerulea)

There are some minor details that are a wonder to come across — like finding a specimen whose taxonomic name has changed over time, or seeing a hyphenated ‘85 written on a tag and knowing it means 1885.  A few days ago while I was killing some downtime I decided to play the “What’s in this cabinet?” game and came across this beautiful Grosbeak, looking stunning at 127 years old.  Apparently this individual at one point was donated from The University of Arizona and now has a place in diversifying our collections. 

umzoology:

A photograph of some of the permanent collection birds by my friend Louis Habeck.