During 2019’s Big Bike Ride, roadrunners were a constant companion. Here’s a resident of Terligua, TX; the photo was taken the morning after our epic “Chisos Mtns. by Supermoonlight” night ride.

Sometime during the ride I had a revelation.

Way back, maybe the mid-aughts? – there were a smattering of news stories about getting chickens to express teeth . Looking back, it seems to have been the result of a particular mutation that unsupresses a gene. Always fatal, alas. But then in 2015 there was another mini-storm of stories, this time focusing on a couple facial development genes.

The researchers focused on two genes that help control the development of the middle of the face. The activity of these genes differed from that of reptiles early in embryonic development. They developed molecules that suppressed the activity of the proteins that these genes produced, which led to the embryos developing snouts that resembled their ancestral dinosaur state.*

From there, coverage jumped to Chickenosauruses – not a new idea (see this Jack Horner TED talk from 2011), but hey, clicks are clicks.

The revelation should be obvious: a better candidate for doing the throwback thing on would be everyone’s favorite ground cuckoo, Geococcyx!

Around the time of the bike ride, Andy Frazer/DragonsofWales kickstarted his book, Novosaurs. I jumped on the opportunity to support his work and when Novosaurs arrived, it did not disappoint. I contacted Andy about doing a commission, he was happy to do it, and so I give you the novosaur roadrunner, a feathered companion I’d seriously love to have.

Since my last post I’ve done a bit more riding: up the California coast to Monterey and back to Los Angeles. I’ll post the travelogue in a bit; right now I’m going to focus on the reason for my ride, namely, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Everyone I know who’s visited the Aquarium has raved about it and seeing what all the talk was about was  a priority. I spent 2 ‘rest’ days in Monterey at the aquarium – I knew that I’d be overwhelmed after 4 or 5 hours and knew there was more that 4 hours worth of things to see.

Wednesday was ‘get acquainted’ day. I dropped Lotte at doggy day care, cycled back to the motel, dropped the bike and walked through Cannery Row to the aquarium. It was fantastic. Multiple large tanks, each focusing on a specific habitat, great exhibits on cephalopods and Baja California, just great stuff.

The kelp forest tank.

The deep reef from above.

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The top of the kelp forest tank.

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A tank full of Lookdowns.

Not all the action was indoors. From the sea-side balconies I saw sea otters in the kelp and a sea lion preying on what an Aquarium volunteer guessed was a young adult Mola mola. As I expected, I was used up about four and a half hours in, so I walked back to my room, mounted up and retrieved the pup.

The next day started the same way, but a little bit later, because I was scheduled to take a behind the scenes tour at 2:30. Going behind the scenes was great – we saw the food prep area, the veterinary suite and the top of one of the large tanks.

Just like my fridge!

Service balcony at the top of the deep reef.

One of the coolest things I learned on the tour, though, has to do with the orange buoy shaped object in the photo below. It’s a pig.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium uses seawater from the bay for many of the tanks (all of the big tanks, I think?). The water is filtered during the day to ensure good visibility in the displays, but gets pumped in raw at night. As a result, there’s been a lot of colonization – algae, sea stars, etc, coming in as plankton and growing out in the tanks. What folks didn’t anticipate was that the same thing would happen in the seawater intake pipes; it did. The Aquarium needs to pig the pipes every couple weeks to keep them flowing freely! I don’t know why I find the whole thing delightful, but I do.

An excellent visit to a great aquarium! It moved ‘learn to dive’ way up on my priority list – I want to swim through the kelp forest!

I’m using iNaturalist both to document interesting living things and to help ID stuff, especially wildflowers. Here’s a map of my observations; the Michigan dots are from a trip a few years ago to see the Hippie Modernism show at Cranbrook.

The live map is here – you can make it go fullscreen.

Hippie Moderism 4evah.

I wanted to say a little more about the Chiricahua Mountains; when I met Drew in El Paso he told the that the Chiricahuas were an absolute must-experience and he was right. They’re an ecological Four Corners: Rockies from the north, Sierra Madre from the south, Chihuahuan desert from the east and Sonoran desert from the west. Add in the effects of altitude – a change in vegetation, etc. every thousand feet – and you have one of those meeting places in the landscape with incredible diversity. The part of the ride that took me through Cave Creek Canyon was my favorite – I’m a sucker for bosque dells.

I’d mentioned that hummingbirds woke me up in Portal; “In fact, thirteen species of hummingbirds are know to occur in the Chiricahua Mountains, and many of these are Mexican species that are rarely seen in the United States.”*

One of the big draws is the Elegant Trogon* – I was told I was a week too early to see one, but B’s feed on Strava indicates it was more like 4 days. Ah, well – a good excuse to return with birding as a focus. I did see a Gould’s turkey, so that’s 2 new wild turkey subspecies this trip (the other is the Rio Grande turkey). Merriam’s wild turkey is a possibility in a week; I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

One last reason to dig the area – Portal has very dark skies. The stars at night are amazing!

*pronunciation note – I’ve always said ‘trogon’ with a hard G, but I heard someone say trojawn in Portal. Google search says hard G is correct; maybe the J person was from Philly – or maybe Google is wrong?

Via Tetzoo, a critter that I would love to see on the the Big Bike Ride! Dr. Naish’s post is on speculative, “could yet be discovered” animals that are not already cryptozoological cliches – so no Nessie. The whole thing is a lot of fun but the entry for “A gigantic, predatory, limbed amphisbaenian” really caught my attention.

Among the weirdest of amphisbaenians are the ajolotes (or bipedids), the only extant group to possess limbs. These limbs are not small stumps or flaps (as they are in some other near-limbless, serpentine squamates) but well-developed, clawed forelimbs. According to some phylogenetic models, ajolotes are not the sister-group to limbless amphisbaenians but deeply nested within the limbless clade (Conrad 2008, Videl et al. 2008), in which case their limbedness – if you will – perhaps evolved from limbless ancestors. Add to this the fact that some amphisbaenians are robust-jawed, short-faced predators of vertebrates that ambush prey from beneath the surface and bite chunks from the bodies of surface-dwelling mammals and reptiles.

[…]

So then… where oh where are the giant, limbed, robust-skulled, vertebrate-eating amphisbaenians? By ‘giant’, I am not talking about a graboid-sized monster of several metres (though that would be nice), but a more reasonable animal of a mere 1.5 metres or so. Easily the stuff of nightmares. They could inhabit warm regions of any continent.

So what’re these ajolores? The word references 2 very different animals: the axolotl of Lake Xochimilco (endangered in the wild) and the Mexican mole lizard of Baja California – obv it’s the latter we’re interested in.

Bipes biporus is a small pink worm-like lizard with forellimbs only – no hind legs. Their scalation is segmented and used. peristaltically, to move through burrows. The big digger feet move sand out of the way (see the illustration in the Tetzoo post) and the blunt head helps in their fossorial fun.

I wanna see one!

By marlin harms, CC BY 2.0, Link

And in case ‘graboid‘ doesn’t ring a bell: