Just a quick newsflash this time.
As you may know, the Furaha book sold out within three months of appearing on the market. Luckily, Crowood Press, the publisher, quickly ordered a new print run (printed in 2025, as opposed to 2025 for the first print run). That new print run is almsot here; this is what the editor told me today: "Your book will be restocked next week (because of Easter we will lose this Friday and Monday)."
That is good news! So, if you are tempted to be the book after reading favourable reviews, do not be put off by 'out of stock' messages.
Speaking of favourable reviews, Darren Naish just published
a review of 'Wildlife on the Planet Furaha' that can be found here: https://tetzoo.com/blog/2026/
In case you did not know, Darren is well known for his 'TetZoo' (Tetrapod Zoology) blog and tetZoo conferences, and for being a scientific advisor for Prehistoric Planet. He is also an organiser of DinoCon, a dinosaur-based fun conference (read about the first one in 2025 here); the next one will be in Birmingham, on the 25th and 26th of July 2026. I recommend going!
Mind you, I will get back to writing regular blog posts soon. I expect to write more on how many legs you may expect on alien animals (together with Biblaridion), as well as about a SpecBio journal. I have also been thinking about what would allow larger animals to change colour quickly (I am not yet certain whether that is possible, but as usual there are no ready answers in the literature).
Well, the Giant Squid can change color quickly, yes? So it may be mostly that large animals can change color if they inherit the ability from a smaller ancestor.
ReplyDelete(the Carnotaurus in Crichton's _Jurassic Park: the Lost World_ book could change color, but i don't know if that was likewise an inherited ability, an ability gained from gene modding, or something unique to the Carnotaurus genus after they'd gotten that big)
Given the observant nature of regular commenters, I should have known better that to make general remarks... ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe problem with size and colour change has to do with increasing thickness of the superficial skin layer that is almost always dead matter. Such layers scatter and absorb light, and usually increase in thickness with animal size. Large animals living in water may get away with a much thinner dead epidermis than terrestrial ones. Ad now I've given away part of that post before writing it...
I thought about this some years ago, one possible solution for big terrestrial animals (admittedly, only an approximation, not true colour change) could be something like the transparent hairs with hollow cores of the polar bear, with their light-scattering properties.
DeleteDavide: is what you mean something like this? I thought of embedded fibres (like glass fibre) running from the dead surface to colour-producing chromophore cells deeper in the skin? A problem would be that probably too little light would travel the entire path from the outside to deep layers with chromophore cells, and back again through the fibres to the outside. Reflective cells under the chromophores would help, but making those cells luminescent might work better. It all becomes very complex though...
ReplyDeleteHonestly I didn't envision anything that elaborate (that I will gladly leave to you), but polar bear fur only looks white, each hair is actually hollow, and it's thought to be an adaptation to allow camouflage while maintaining translucent insulation (see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292175809_Fibre-Optical_Light_Scattering_Technology_in_Polar_Bear_Hair_A_Re-Evaluation_and_New_Results for more details). Not only that, it's reported to become yellowish in Summer, probably as a result of oxidation by the sun (although here we're moving even further away from actual colour change and more towards more conventional seasonal pelt change), as mentioned here https://academic.oup.com/mspecies/article/doi/10.2307/3503828/2600231.
DeleteI could certainly envision some hexapods in Polar regions of Furaha having a similar mechanism.