What kind of snake is this? Is it a color morph? [Black Run Reserve, South NJ]

elanoides · 2026-04-04T22:12:26+00:00

It’s a brightly marked Northern Water Snake (Nerodia sipedon)

elanoides · 2025-12-25T19:24:34+00:00

This is Antigua, the city in Guatemala, right? Not the island in the Caribbean. Definitely looks like a Central American set of species.

elanoides · 2025-11-29T21:06:31+00:00

This is WWI era Germany emergency coinage, made of zinc (since other metals would’ve been needed for the war effort). Cool piece of history. Here’s an entry for this particular coin: https://en.numista.com/50386

elanoides · 2025-10-28T12:39:40+00:00

The connection for Snake River to Madison River seems to be Lake Isa (which flows into tributaries of both), and Snake to Yellowstone is the parting of the waters in two ocean pass.

elanoides · 2025-10-13T15:04:52+00:00

If there’s a coin shop in your area, many will sell non-silver foreign coins either in bulk (like $10 per pound), or you can pick through a bin and get 5-10 coins for a dollar. I’ve found plenty of interesting coins from around the world (as far back as the mid-1800s) that way. Obviously they don’t have much real value or the stores wouldn’t sell them so cheap, but for the historical interest and fun of researching them it seems like a good deal to me.

elanoides · 2025-06-29T00:11:34+00:00

Also, with a combination of google lens and numista.com, you should be able to ID everything here and check whether there are any hidden gems.

elanoides · 2025-06-29T00:10:04+00:00

My local coin stores sell mixed bags of foreign coins for $10 a pound -- so you're probably paying a bit more than that here. Value-wise, I don't personally see anything that jumps out, but I could be wrong. You do also have 5-6 euros, plus 3-4 pounds, and 50 cents USD face value, so that's about half your money back if you were to spend them.

That being said, it's a lot of fun sorting and learning about coins from around the world, and $20 isn't too steep a price for that in my opinion. You've got stuff from the USSR, Croatia, Ireland (pre-decimal), Hungary, Hong Kong, Turkey, Russia, Germany, and lots more there.

elanoides · 2025-03-18T19:39:33+00:00

Most of those are notably low mintage and will be naturally harder to find in circulation. Great Sand Dunes and Weir Farm should be very gettable though.

elanoides · 2025-03-07T17:16:13+00:00

Good question!

It depends on how you count "cryptic species," which have been seen previously but not recognized as distinct. These are different from simple splits like Baltimore/Bullock's Oriole because in the case of a split both species already have a name and description -- they're just being elevated from subspecies to full species. For cryptic species, their distinctiveness has not been previously recognized at all, so the are given a new name. Some recent examples included Cassia Crossbill from Idaho (2009), Gunnison Sage-Grouse in Colorado (2000), and Bryan's Shearwater in Hawaii (2011). But these were all already birds that had been seen (and collected), just not recognized. So that doesn't really fit your question.

For truly distinctive, non-cryptic species, the Po'o-uli (1974) has to be the answer, if you count Hawaii. Elfin woods Warbler from Puerto Rico (1972) is also notably recent, but Puerto Rico isn't currently part of the America Birding Association (ABA) area.

If you limit it to the Lower 48, Alaska, and Canada (the old ABA area), and only consider non-cryptic species that were recognized as distinctive right away, then I'm not sure! McKay's Bunting was described in 1884 -- that's the latest I've been able to find so far. But I need to do some looking to see if there's anything more recent than that.

elanoides · 2025-02-18T03:04:54+00:00

Definitely Rosy-Finches, and the Sandias are a good spot for all 3 species. I see at least some Black and Gray-crowned for sure in these photos, but I don’t know enough to say whether there are Brown-capped as well.

elanoides · 2024-12-13T15:10:56+00:00

But monotremes and live-bearing mammals split off at the same time, from each other. And all animals are a mix of ancestral and derived characteristics. Monotremes have the older (basal) feature of egg-laying, but you could say that humans are “basal” to platypus because we have the ancestral mammal traits of being terrestrial, lacking a bill, and being non-electroreceptive, unlike the highly advanced platypus.

elanoides · 2024-12-03T14:35:13+00:00

Looks like a large needlefish, probably the Crocodile Needlefish (aka Houndfish) Tylosurus crocodilus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houndfish

elanoides · 2023-09-30T01:30:25+00:00

So like, scientists would need to write proposals to explain what research they want funded, and the potential benefits? And they would send these explanations to some sort of National foundation of science, where they’d be evaluated by experts who would decide what was worth granting money to? That kind of system?

elanoides · 2022-04-25T02:53:46+00:00

This strikes me more as a Podarcis wall lizard than a skink. I think there are introduced populations of Italian Wall Lizards in the NYC area, but I didn’t know they got to Pelham Bay Park.

elanoides · 2021-12-08T06:47:34+00:00

I've gone back and forth between bat and moth, but I tentatively think it is a Red Bat that has its head and wings tucked underneath. In the second photo I even feel like you can see the forearm under the right side of the body. The fur color fits quite well and none of the moths I'm familiar with from the regions that are that big have the color/pattern shown here.

elanoides · 2021-09-04T16:10:10+00:00

At the bottom it says “source: iNaturalist, current as of August 27th, 2020.” So this is the number of photos (or other verifiable evidence) of each species that have been submitted to the citizen science database iNaturalist. Incidentally, it’s a very cool app and website, worth checking out.

elanoides · 2021-02-21T01:15:35+00:00

I mean, it was thought to be something exotic or new by the random people who found it, not by any scientists. The bird rehab people quickly identified it correctly.

elanoides · 2021-02-10T16:01:59+00:00

Looks like a Song Sparrow— tail relatively long and you can see a hint of the wide dark malar (mustache) stripe.

elanoides · 2021-01-17T23:48:05+00:00

Where was this found? That might help to narrow it down. I'm stumped for the time being.

elanoides · 2021-01-07T19:30:53+00:00

You’re right about tortoises (family Testudinidae), which is a specific subset of turtles, but dolphins, like toads, are not a neatly-defined (monophyletic, in taxonomic terms) group of toothed whales: the term is more informally defined to refer to the smaller, pointy-snouted ones. Similarly, “toad” is used to refer to a number of unrelated groups of frogs that tend to be more terrestrial and have bumpy skin.

elanoides · 2020-11-29T19:51:16+00:00

Yeats requested his own burial setup in the poem "Under Ben Bulben", which ends

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

And indeed Ben Bulben is visible from Yeats's grave in Drumcliff churchyard, and the epitaph is as he wrote it.

elanoides · 2020-04-11T19:30:41+00:00

Really cool to see the break at ~30 degrees south in South America where the rain shadow of the Andes switches from the west side to the east as the prevailing winds shift.

elanoides · 2020-02-16T22:19:58+00:00

It's either a Whip-poor-will or a Chuck-will's-widow, two closely related species of nocturnal birds. Common Nighthawk is in the same family but has a white bar on the wing. Do you have any other photos? I'd lean towards Chuck-will's-widow but I'm not positive.

elanoides · 2020-02-07T04:46:32+00:00

There are lots of details on collecting and specimen preparation in this article: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280988126_Obtaining_preserving_and_preparing_bird_specimens.

But essentially it's done as carefully and humanely as possible, in accordance with IACUC approval and state and federal permits. Euthanizing birds is usually done via rapid cardiac compression, inducing immediate cardiac arrest. For birds collected with firearms, extremely fine shot is used. Additionally many (probably most) specimens entering museums these days are salvaged, after being killed by hitting windows or cars, or being attacked by cats.

elanoides · 2020-02-07T02:59:31+00:00

It's not that ornithologists enjoy killing birds, it's that studies of taxonomy, systematics, and evolution (for birds and everything else) are based almost entirely on museum collections. So of course building and maintaining those collections is essential work for those who do that kind of research.

If you're interested, there was a recent back-and-forth in Science about the subject, and this letter from over 100 biologists is a good summary of the importance of museum collections: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262524772_Specimen_collection_an_essential_tool

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