"With most animals, males duke it out and the winner gets the girls," says Holekamp. "But with hyenas, females have 100 percent say." They decide when and under what conditions they will tolerate deferential sperm donors. At age 2 or 3 a male leaves his natal clan and wanders off to beg acceptance into another clan. After vicious rejections, he eventually succeeds and reaps his reward: brutal harassment as the clan's nadir, one of the last in line for food and sex. This probation, which biologists call "endurance rivalry," is a test, Holekamp explains: "The guy who can stick it out the longest wins." The trial lasts about two years, after which some females may grant him access. "You do not want to be a male hyena," Holekamp says.

-From an article in Smithsonian Magazine, Who's Laughing Now? Professor Holekamp's hyena site. Also, hyena pictures and The Hyena Pages, a fine site about this fascinating animal.
posted on May 7, 2008 - View this thread

Tetrapod Zoology just celebrated Ankylosaur Week. Days 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 1.
posted on Feb 25, 2008 - View this thread

Microorganisms as eye candy: A gallery of illustrations from the marvelous Artforms in Nature, Kunstformen der Natur 1899-1904 by Ernst Haeckel, an eminent, prolific and very controversial German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist, who named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny and ecology.
posted on Nov 8, 2007 - View this thread

Taking care of an incredibly alien-looking, yet impossibly cute anteater isn't easy — in fact, it's a lot of aard verk!
posted on Oct 31, 2007 - View this thread

A virtual copy of Historiae Animalium, the first pictorial catalogue of the animal world (lots of pretty pictures, but the text is all in latin). It was compiled in the 16th century by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner, who is considered the father of zoology (and, incidentally, also the father of bibliography [Word Document]).
posted on Mar 6, 2007 - View this thread

"Lost World" found in Indonesian Papua (with audio)
posted on Feb 7, 2006 - View this thread

California Condors, including basic condor, condors in history, population history, and condor behavior.
posted on May 27, 2005 - View this thread

Fantastic Zoology: A graphical interpretation of Jorge Luis Borges' "Book of Imaginary Beings".
posted on Jul 31, 2004 - View this thread

The Zoology Dragon. "Rather than, as has previously been thought, a slow process of evolution, we now know that all animals were created by the Zoology Dragon. Unfortunately, we also know that the current Zoology Dragon is a bit shit." [Flash.]
posted on Feb 9, 2004 - View this thread

Walton Ford, 1,2,3: Nature Boy.
posted on May 7, 2003 - View this thread

Zoological Bloopers and Practical Jokes. Strange Science is a great little page of missteps in the classification and illustration of exotic and extinct animals. It's hard to classify all the links; some are dinosaur screwups, some are just poor depictions of animals from the time before photographs. Most are fascinating. Although, they skip over one of my favorite examples, Michelangelo's Jonah and the Whale.
posted on Nov 7, 2002 - View this thread

The iTunes article reminds me of an important lesson in computer work: always mount a scratch monkey.
posted on Nov 6, 2001 - View this thread