
Amphibians, Reptiles, & Natural History

Naturalist, Photographer , Zoologist
After retiring from a career teaching biology and anatomy & physiology and science administration, I study reptiles and amphibians (but focus mostly on squamates). My current interest are in snake phylogeny and diversity, highly aquatic snakes (that are non-sea snakes), the herpetofauna of Trinidad and Tobago, and giant snakes. I have been on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Herpetological Society, the Board of Directors of the Tucson Herpetological Society; a research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago. I have been a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Snake Specialists Group International Society for the History and Bibliography of Herpetology (ISHBH); and on the board of directors of Friends of Madera Canyon.
Cat Ba Tiger Gecko (Goniurosaurus catbaensis)  in its natural habitat. Photo Credit: Mona van Schingen. While proper information about the conservation status of tiger gecko species is largely missing, these Asian lizards are already particularly…
An international study led by The Australian National University (ANU) has found a fungal disease has caused dramatic population declines in more than 500 amphibian species, including 90 extinctions, over the past 50 years.…
Aesculapian snake, Zamenis longissimus. Photo credit: Felix Reimann. The adult sex ratio in all isolated populations of the Aesculapian Snake, Zamenis longissimus at the northern limit of its distribution was found to be male-biased; this did…
An adult male Miniscule resting on a fingertip. Photo credit by Sam Hyde Roberts. Scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology have named five new species of frogs…

A much-awaited scientific article on snake welfare, published this week in the prestigious Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research, concludes that snakes should not be confined to enclosures less than the length…

Google “python found” virtually any day and click on “news” and you will find stories about people finding pythons in unexpected places. Today I did this and found the story below. Most of the…
More than 80 years ago G. K. Noble demonstrated male snake locate females by pheromone trails left by the female’s skin as she, moves about and is detected by the male’s vomeronasal system. Since…
Lizards in the Gekkota clade made up a disproportionately large number of lizard species described in 2018. There were 55 species inthe family Gekkonidae, 4 species in the family Phyllodactylidae, and one Eublepharidae –…
The North American-Central America Green Rat Snake, Senticolis triaspis, represents an ancient lineage of Asian snakes that gave rise to the Western Hemisphere clade of snakes we now know as the Lampropeltini, the kingsnakes, gopher…