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The American crocodile in Portete Bay, Colombia
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The American crocodile, Crocodylus acutus, has undergone population declines over much of its distribution due to human persecution, overexploitation and habitat loss. The species remains critically endangered in some countries such as Colombia where the lack of detailed surveys on its ecology and distribution constitutes a major barrier to the development of effective conservation strategies.Espinoza…
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Riparian reptiles & dams
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Regina septemivatta Regulating water flow through dams can be detrimental to riparian habitat. In the United States over 75,000 large dams disrupt the flow of rivers. Damming changes the water quality of a river system by reducing the sediment load downstream and increasing sediment load upstream, and by lowering dissolved oxygen levels in impoundments. Damming…
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Bone histology in fossil aquatic reptiles
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Extant aquatic reptiles are rather scarce – only about 0.8% of the living fauna but, they are much more diverse and abundant in the fossil record, especially during the Mesozoic. And some of the ancient reptiles show distinct morphologies and degrees of adaptation to aquatic life styles were secondarily adapted to aquatic environments. Bone histology…
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Ancient Aquatic Snakes from the Middle Eocene of Crimea
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Photo by Jim Craig The superfamily Acrochordoidea includes the extant file snake family Acrochordidae and fossil Cretaceous-Paleogene families Nigerophiidae and Palaeophiidae. All are aquatic snakes, according to their vertebral morphology. The genus Palaeophis has the largest number of species of the Acrochordoidea genera, and includes 13 species and unidentified remains to the species level from the…
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Homalopsids & Salt Tolerance
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Originally published on the Serpent Research Blog A. The Chinese mud snake, Myrrophis chinensis. B. The Kerala mud snake,Dieurostus dussumierii Photo credit A. You Chugwei; B. A. B. Kumar. Salt tolerance has evolved a limited number of times in extant snakes: once in the file snakes (acrochordids); at least twice in the front-fanged sea snakes (once in…
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Sonoran Desert Reptiles & Garbage
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WDR, Crotalus atrox. JCM Ocean garbage patches get a lot of attention, but a lot of trash is blowing across some of the most treasured and remote parts of America’s desert wilderness, according to a new study out of the University of Arizona. Biologist Erin Zylstra mapped and added up all the wind-dispersed plastic trash…
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Clues to the evolution of salt tolerance in mud snakes
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A. The Chinese mud snake, Myrrophis chinensis. B. The Kerala mud snake, Dieurostus dussumieriiPhoto credit A. You Chugwei; B. A. B. Kumar. Salt tolerance has evolved a limited number of times in extant snakes: once in the file snakes (acrochordids); at least twice in the front-fanged sea snakes (once in the egg-laying sea kraits and…
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The backbone of Ichthyostega
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Scientists have been able to reconstruct, for the first time, the intricate three-dimensional structure of the backbone of early tetrapods, the earliest four-legged animals. High-energy X-rays and a new data extraction protocol allowed the researchers to reconstruct the backbones of the 360 million year old fossils in exceptional detail and shed new light on how…
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Limb Regeneration in Tadpoles
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Tadpoles. Photo Credit: Manchester University. It is generally appreciated that frogs and salamanders have remarkable regenerative capacities, in contrast to mammals, including humans. For example, if a tadpole loses its tail a new one will regenerate within a week. For several years Professor Enrique Amaya and his team at The Healing Foundation Centre in the…
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Suizo Report — Speedbump and Gus
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Howdy Herpers, 10 January 2013 As I’m sure none of you remember, back in January of 2010 I sent out some images of a desert tortoise with some carapace damage–as if it had been run over by an ATV or other vehicle. I have been faithfully visiting its burrow ever since. It did not appear…
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Rat Snakes & Global Warming
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URBANA – Speculation about how animals will respond to climate change due to global warming led University of Illinois researcher Patrick Weatherhead and his students to conduct a study of ratsnakes at three different latitudes—Ontario, Illinois, and Texas. His findings suggest that ratsnakes will be able to adapt to the higher temperatures by becoming more…
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Controlling Python bivittatus: the 2013 Python Challenge
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The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and its partners (including Wildlife Foundation of Florida, The Future of Hunting in Florida, University of Florida, Zoo Miami, and The Nature Conservancy) are initiating the 2013 Python Challenge in an attempt to enlist both the general public and python permit holders in a month-long harvest of Burmese pythons. The…
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A Global Assessment of Reptiles
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The first global overview of reptile extinction risk has been published in the journal Biological Conservation (Böhm et al. 2013). 220 species assessed on the IUCN Red List and another 1280 species with revised or new assessments provided by a global network of herpetologists formed the basis for the study. Thus, the sample included about 16%…
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Feathers and Courting Dinosaurs
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Above: Artist’s conception of the feathered dinosaur Similicaudipteryx using its tail feathers in a mating display. (Illustration: Sydney Mohr) A University of Alberta researcher’s examination of fossilized dinosaur tail bones has led to a breakthrough finding: some feathered dinosaurs used tail plumage to attract mates, much like modern-day peacocks and turkeys. U of A paleontology researcher…
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The amphibian & reptile extinction crisis
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Alligator Snapping Turtle The following is from the Center for Biological Diversity. Amphibians and reptiles are amazing creatures with clever adaptations that have allowed them to brave the millennia. Consider the Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard’s scaly hind toes, which resemble snowshoes and keep the lizard from sinking into sand as it sprints away from predators;…
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An insular, high elevation population of the semi-aquatic dice snake in Macedonia
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The dice snake and its distribution. The semi-aquatic dice snake (Natrix tessellata) ranges from Italy to China, an east-west axis of more than 5500 km and it uses a very wide variety of habitats. Current ecological information on this species is limited to the most western parts of the species’ range, notably Italy, Switzerland, and…
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Forest management & the salamander
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Plethodon albagula. Photo credit Stanley Trauth Lungless, woodland salamanders depend on forested habitats and are sensitive to changes in temperature and moisture associated with many forestry practices. Additionally, woodland salamanders are territorial and have relatively low vagility, making it unlikely that they can successfully migrate to more favorable habitat when the surrounding forest is harvested.…
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Two new Anomaloglossus frogs from Panama
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Anomaloglossus astralogaster. Photo credit: Marcos Guerra The Chagres Highlands may be a lower montane forest refuge for some rare amphibians and reptiles. In a recent paper, Meyers et al, (2012) documents the presence of the South American frog genus Anomaloglossus (Dendrobatoidea: Aromobatidae) based upon two new species from this area. The two species are described from a…
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