SCOTTIE WESTFALL: Jaguarundis in Florida

I thought you might find this interesting:
http://t4studios.com/thefloridajaguarundi.html

Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/56/Puma_yaguarondi.jpg/800px-Puma_yaguarondi.jpg

FAKE WOLVES OF LONDON

Scottie W. posted the following comment to Sunday's posting of another rather dubious video purporting to be of a wolf in Hackney.

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2011/12/few-days-ago-we-posted-video-purporting.html#comments

For those of you too young or musically naive to know what he is on about:



Hell, I just wanted an excuse to post some Warren Zevon....

SCOTTIE SETS A CONUNDRUM

http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/identify-the-wild-dog-puppy/

I think the claws give it away.

SCOTTIE WESTFALL: North American Canid stuff

Just thought I'd send this along-- and send a theory along.

I think some of the animals that are being identified as coyotes in Texas are actually a derivative of the same line as the Mexican wolf. The part of Texas where that specimen was collected is not within historical Mexican wolf range.



(C.l. baileyi historically was found to the west of most of Texas.)

However, I think that it might be possible that the Mexican wolf and a coyote-like animal might share the same lineage. One line evolved into the Mexican wolf, and the other evolved into an undocumented coyote-type wolf. This "coyote" regularly interbreeds with C. latrans, but it shares a heritage with the Mexican wolf. I don't know if you've explored this possibility or not.

That may be why this particular specimen looks very coyote-like and not in the least bit wolfish.

Mexican wolves were found to have a unique mtDNA haplotype. It has sometimes been suggested that they are actually a unique species or the oldest form of C. lupus in North America.

Coyotes and wolves have been exchanging genes for a very long time. The coyotes of the Great Lakes. Eastern Canada, and the Northeastern US are heavily interbred with wolves and have evolved into deer predators that hunt in large packs.

We don't have a firm grasp on the wolf subspecies yet, and no one has performed an extensive analysis of coyote molecular evolution. Coyotes range from Alaska to Panama and can interbreed with wolves and dogs.

Determining what is a wolf and what is a coyote can lead to big fights among canid experts. Some experts believe in a single wolf species that has evolved in much the same way as the multiregional theory for human evolution suggests for our species. Of course, the multiregional theory has been discredited in humans. I have yet to see it discredited in wolves.

IT'S AN AARDVARK!!!

http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/identify-the-species-2/

I'm not sure what happened here, because various people posted comments correctly identifying the subject of yesterday's teaser from Scottie W aka `Retrieverman` as the skull of an aardvark. The two bloggophiles who correctly identified it first were Robert Schneck and Max Blake. Bloody know-it-alls....

RETRIEVERMAN (aka Scottie W) HAS SET US A CHALLENGE

http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/identify-the-species-2/


'A quandary for your readers, maybe?' Writes young Scottie. Can we identify the skull?


I can't - how about you guys?

Scottie Westfall - Dog Domestication

As the CFZ expedition in Texas reaches its climax, and dog genetics are on the minds of most CFZ members, Gavin brought us some interesting news coming out of the Middle East...

Now, Scottie Westfall brings his own inimitable take on the matter.

http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/dog-domestication-first-happened-in-the-middle-east/

I KNEW THAT OUR SNOWFALL OF THE OTHER DAY WAS A BIT MEAGRE, BUT...

Scottie aka Retrieverman writes:

'The big east coast storm gave us 14 inches of snow just in time for Christmas, the Solstice, and Festivus. Check out the photos: '

http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/more-snow-photos/
http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/snowbirds/
http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/snow-photos-and-some-of-miley/

Far more impressive than the teensy sprinkling we got. And long may it remain so....

SCOTTIE WESTFALL: Climate Change

I'm sure it tore you up to publish that 'science via Glenn Beck' post on global warming. Fox News has a lot of people fooled.

My dad was listening to that bloated gasbag Rush Limbaugh the other day. He was doing an analysis on global warming, which was even more crude than that one. He said that global warming was a myth because the bible says that it will reward men for being industrious. Thus, if we make our economy grow and grow and grow, God won't destroy us.

I'm going to not say anything in terms of comments, because I respect you too much.

However, I'm sure that you're going to get loads of comments on it.

I live in one of the main coal mining states in the United States. All of the electricity for my state is generated from coal-burning power plants.

And the coal itself is mined by tearing off the mountain top and putting it in the valley, leaving a lunar landscape though much of the southern part of West Virginia.

The people are poor because there are no opportunities. The coal severance taxes are very low, so they cannot use that wealth to fund good schools, built good transportation infrastructure, or develop a good tourism industry. While the people are poor, the coal company executives live like kings. They buy politicians and judges so they can continue doing awful things to people and the environment. West Virginia has almost no campaign finance laws in its state elections. As a result, a few wealthy individuals control virtually everything.

After the Civil War, West Virginia was a fully-fledged state, which opened itself up to coal, timber, and oil and natural gas speculators, who approached poor farmers who had lost nearly everything in the war. They offered them some crumbs for the rights to the timber and the royalties to the gas, oil, and coal. Poor people on the very edge of existence will take what they can get, so they took it, not fully understanding what the full worth of their natural resources were.

And the rest has been history.

We've been told our whole lives that unless the coal companies do well, West Virginia will starve. And so the people would rather be hewers of wood and drawers of water for these parasitic corporations. Climate change denial is now the state religion here.

I'm very sorry that people don't accept the reality of climate change. I can tell you that the winters here are much milder than when I was a boy, and my grandparents once knew of winters in which the snow fell in November and didn't melt until the end of March. Now, you have to go to Northern New England to find winters like this.

For more information:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/i-read-through-160000000-bytes-of.html

BLUE DOG PROJECT

Scottie Westfall is an invaluable addition to the CFZ family. Over at his blog http://wildlifemysteries.wordpress.com/ he does much the same sort of fringe natural history as we do, and his is one of the few blogs (along with TetZoo and the Birdchick) that I read avidly. He has been following the ongoing debate about the hairless blue dogs of Texas which have been the subject of CFZ investigations since 2004, and has thrown another piece of information into the investigative melting pot:

http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/hairlesskhala.htm

He writes: "Hairless Village dogs in Latin America - they exist as far north as Mexico. Perhaps some of their genes have trickled into the coyote population, and then the Mexican coyotes with these genes wandered into Texas."

BEAM IT UP SCOTTIE

Finally it looks as if the sage of the mystery deer is over, and that its not actually a deer at all. It is probably a steenbok (Raphicerus campestris), which is a common small antelope of southern and eastern Africa.

It was part of a group of specimens given to us as a gift by Lionel Beer, from the collection of his late father, who was born in 1879 and died at the venerable age of 107. He spent time in southern Africa, which supports the identification well.

But I am not going to take the credit. It is all down to Scottie aka Retrieverman who did a pretty neat piece of detective work. Check out the link below....

http://wildlifemysteries.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/identifying-the-deer/

SCOTTIE WESTFALL: All because I lost my router

Jon,

I lost a router last week, and I was without internet access.

However, if I had internet access, I would have noticed an unusual cat story in my local daily news website. Amazingly, for a small county in very rural West Virginia, we have a daily internet news site.

This cat was captured in a cage trap. And no one knew what it was. It was like a domestic cat with rounder ears and lots of spots.

After perusing the photos on the news story, I instantly thought "Bengal!" Bengals are a hybrid between domestic cats and the Asian leopard cat. They are widely marketed as pets in the US, although they are usually backcrosses with domestic cats. The F1's are often too much for the average person.

It turns out that a local cat breeder had purchased an F1 Bengal for breeding purposes. Somehow, the cat got out.

It was then trapped in the cage trap. The owners of the trap didn't know what it was. So they called the local authorities-- who didn't know what it was either!

And here's the kicker: instead of doing some research on what the animal was or even trying to find its owner, they took the cat to a remote area AND RELEASED IT!

Now, the cat's owner is looking for her. And local authorities look like total fools.

This has now made statewide news. It's not quite to the level of the supposed African lion that was running loose in the southeastern part of the state, but it's pretty bad.

Now, if I had been able to access the internet on Monday, I would have known what it was. I know the owner of the news website, and he would have received a response from me. He then would have passed this along to the authorities, and I'm sure the authorities would have at least performed a google search. And then they probably wouldn't have been as cavalier about turning such an animal loose.

And then a woman might have been reunited with her cat.

And all of this because my last router stopped working.

I've done a full story on it here: http://wildlifemysteries.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/strange-cat-captured-and-then-released/