JAN EDWARDS WRITES: This is the location the polecat was found. It is close to Heights Quarry on the A 689 – the main road through Weardale. There is the river Wear, just 100 yards away to the south – near the tree-line across the road. The quarry is about a quart-mile up hill and to the north of the junction where the animal was found.
DATE FOUND: 28th Sept 2011 (been frozen since then apart from photos.)
TIME FOUND: Approx 8:40am, and the body was still warm to the touch, indicating that death had occurred recently.
WHERE FOUND: On the junction between the A689 and Heights Quarry , DL13 1PF, Side of the road nearest the river (IE south)
And this is the polecat. Blood and grime are leaching into the preservative, so we will wait for it to precipitate out before changing the medium...
(The chicken wire is to old it in place pro tem)
Many thanks to Jan Edwards for securing us this irreplaceable specimen, which is, as far as we are aware, the first wild polecat specimen from Co. Durham in many years, possibly since WW1....
I find this fascinating; not just the latest claims that the thylacine had particularly low genetic diversity, but that this story has proliferated across the Internet in a remarkably short time, with all sorts of different spins being put upon it...
Thylacine DNA reveals lacks of diversity ABC Online Tiny gene pool The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, had very limited genetic diversity before it died out, according to a new study, which suggests a similar fate for the Tasmanian devil. Hunted to the brink of extinction, the last known thylacine... See all stories on this topic »
Cautionary tale in tiger DNA study ABC Online The team combed the world's museums for thylacine specimens, testing 12 different tasmanian tigers for genetic diversity. Scientists extracted DNA from bone, pelt and tissue samples, with some almost 160 years old. They found significant parts of the ... See all stories on this topic »
Tassie tiger study sounds warning Ninemsn Professor Marilyn Renfree, who was part of a team that cloned a thylacine gene in 2008, says the result supports an earlier finding that the Tasmanian devil is also of limited genetic stock, a factor that may be making the fight against its facial ... See all stories on this topic »
Rarest leopard making comeback China Daily [Photo/China Daily] "Thanks to (China's) enormous efforts to protect forests and crack down on poaching, the big cat appears to be rebounding in China," said Jiang Jinsong, an official from Jilin provincial forestry department.
Urban sprawl blamed for Squamish cougar encounters CTV.ca The witness who reported the big cat believed it had recently killed a dog, but conservation officers have not confirmed that. Officers were unable to locate the cougar during a search of the area and local trails have been closed, although many hikers ...
Backyard mountain lion habitat myfoxny.com But De Rosa says he doesn't have a zoo; he has an educational program called Ghost Cat Habitat Center. He has a state license and gives educational tours. He gave us one as well. De Rosa says he wanted to educate kids about the big cats that used to ...
The hunt for British Big Cats attracts far more newspaper column inches than any other cryptozoological subject. There are so many of them now that we feel that they should be archived in some way by us, so we should have a go at publishing a regular round-up of the stories as they come in.
It takes a long time to do and is a fairly tedious task so I am not promising that they will be done each day, but I will do them as regularly as I can. JD
Big cat-like animal spotted in Hale Messenger Newspapers A FATHER and son got a shock when they caught sight of a mystery cat-like animal in Hale. Mark Jackson was driving home from a party with son Jay, aged 14, when he saw the creature on Belmont Road. The 43-year-old described the brown-coloured animal as ...
The first report this time is one an animal with a 'hooked tail' near Manchester, but soon we go back south to Gloucestershire, where Rick Minter neatly plugs his book whilst answering claims that these big cat reports make the locals seem like yokels.
Gloucestershire big cats: Reports don't make us rednecks This is Gloucestershire RICK Minter, author of BIG CATS – Facing Britain's Wild Predators, considers Gloucestershire's big cat reports. "THE big cat reports make us look like yokels," read a comment on the TIG website recently. But far from being rednecks, people who report ...
And, yes, there are more Gloucestershire reports...
New A38 big cat sighting This is Gloucestershire BIG cat sightings in Winchcombe have prompted one man to reveal he had a similar experience near Tewkesbury. Following Echo stories earlier this month about a panther-like beast having been spotted in Winchcombe, Cheltenham resident Ian Nicholl said he ...
A Happy Saturday to all of you out in bloggoland. We have some jolly good stuff for you, but first apologies for yesterday. It turned out that the Jon Anderson video that we linked to should not have been let out of its cage, so we withdrew the link. There will be another one up in a day or so.
And the problems at Gmail have led to a major disruption of my business I would have transacted this week. With the result that three or four deals I needed to hear back on are still in limbo there. The fate of Cedar and Willow hangs on one of those, so I am most anxious that the email problem be sorted out ASAP.
On this day in 1934 the Surgeon’s photograph depicting the Loch Ness Monster was published in the Daily Mail for the first time. It was officially revealed to be a hoax many decades later.
Our cultratus have bred again. It is the first time for 18 months, and is yet another twist in the saga of these peculiar little fish at the CFZ.
We first bought them at the livebearers’ auction in Redditch during June 2010. Me, Max and Dave B-P had a jolly day out and came back laden with livebearers. Somehow, through the magic of mobile phones, Dave had also acquired a girlfriend during our 12-odd hours away from base, but that is another story entirely.
As I am sure Max will tell you, I bought the cultratus by accident. I thought they were something else, and when I heard the words livebearer, and £3 in the same sentence I shoved my hands in the air and bought them. They are angular, gun-metal grey little fish that I always think look like miniature porbeagle sharks and they live in a two-foot tank on my desk so that I can commune with them on a daily basis.
They bred for the first time in the autumn of 2010, but just before Christmas disaster struck. There was a power cut and something went wrong with our heater. The temperature plummeted and my nascent colony of cultratus, together with two nannacara cichlids died. I was devastated. Then the two largest female cultratus swam out from a hitherto overlooked hiding place. I was still devastated; even at Christmas virgin births are not something that an aquarist likes to count upon. But it happened. Nine tiny babies, much smaller than the conventionally produced cultratus were soon to be seen in my tank. I nurtured them. Oll made infusoria, I purchased special livebearer feed, and slowly the babies grew. But for the last 18 months they hadn’t bred. I was wondering if – because they appeared to have been produced parthenogenetically. I was beginning to wonder if the babies had been born sterile. But no. They were just late starters.
Of course parthenogenesis is not the only explanation. I believe the females of some livebearer species can store sperm inside their bodies for some considerable time before choosing to become pregnant. This sounds like the ultimate feminist ideal, and it may be what happened here.
It could be that the female cultratus were pregnant and that the gestation period was far longer than I had imagined. But my personal inference, particularly as the babies were so much smaller than either of the clutches that were born before or since, is that Alfaro cultratus can – under certain circumstances – reproduced parthenogenetically. It would be interesting to find out what the trigger mechanism would be for this. I imagine that there would be some chemical changes to the water when all the male population gets wiped out at once, and this may well be the trigger mechanism. I am presently trying to devise some experiments to test this hypothesis, but without killing off all my precious males. They have been through enough already.
I have to congratulate myself a little bit; I thought they looked like tiger beetles but assumed they drank blood, which of course, would leave out tiger beetles.
The important part, however, is that they are identified, which makes me ridiculously happy.
JAN EDWARDS WRITES: This is the location the polecat was found. It is close to Heights Quarry on the A 689 – the main road through Weardale. There is the river Wear, just 100 yards away to the south – near the tree-line across the road. The quarry is about a quart-mile up hill and to the north of the junction where the animal was found.
And this is the polecat. Blood and grime are leaching into the preservative, so we will wait for it to precipitate out before changing the medium...
New at the Frontiers of Zoology: 
