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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 04/01/2010 : 19:14:18
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Terapod Zoology has the details on these creatures:Minxy Cottonsocks and the evolution of dropgorgons and other winged cats
Category: mammalogy
Posted on: April 1, 2010 4:18 AM, by Darren Naish
If anything should be clear from the range of creatures that I write about at Tet Zoo - think caecilians, borhyaenoids, imaginary giant owls and rhynchosaurs - it's that there's an almost infinite amount of technical information on obscure creatures 'locked away' in the technical literature. Among the most remarkable of mammals are, without doubt, the winged cats or pantheropterygines, yet for all their fame and notoriety, most of the information on these creatures has remained widely scattered in the literature and a good synthesis is absent.
Winged cats were first brought to scientific attention in 1891 when Richard Lydekker named Pantheropteryx anglicus for the famous London Zoo specimen. Known to her keepers as Minxy Cottonsocks, she'd been discovered in the Banister, Walton & Co. builder's yard in Trafford Park, Manchester, in 1880, and then sent to London Zoo [Minxy is shown above]. Though Minxy became a popular attraction (well known for her fantastic 15-metre leaps), the deaths of several keepers at her vicious claws made the zoo keen to dispense with her. In 1882 she was purchased by P. T. Barnum at the same time as Barnum obtained Jumbo the elephant; Jumbo and Minxy were actually close friends, and when Jumbo was killed by a train on arrival in New York, Minxy went into mourning and hid for weeks in a pigeon loft. After the sale of Barnum's exotic cat collection in 1889 (Cherrio the famous cherry-coloured cat, Manglox the five-legged leopard and Parsley the vegetarian lion were also included in the lot), Minxy ended up back at London Zoo, and here she lived until her suspicious death in 1890. |
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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The evolution of dropgorgons and other winged cats
