
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.
Despite the bad rap snakes often get, they are more central to ecology than most people realize. New research reveals that snakes might even play a key role in dispersing plant seeds. A Western…
Read the discussion of snakes’ handling prey and invariably the author will make a statement about snakes swallow their prey whole. Also, there is often a statement about that the size of the prey…
The Agumbe Rainforest Research Station (ARRS) is currently recruiting volunteers for the radio telemetry part of the King Cobra Ecology and Conservation project (KCEC). This project consists of implanting king cobras with transmitters and…
The discovery that snakes have an XY chromosome system For over 50 years, biologists have accepted that all extant snakes share the same ZW sex chromosomes derived from a common ancestor, with different species…
Neotropical region and ecoregion limits adopted here (sensu Olson et al., 2001), together with representative snakes species recorded for Central America Montane Forests: 1.1 Boa constrictor, 1.2 Oxybelis aeneus; Amazonia Most Forests: 1.3 Philodryas…
Extant Turtles described in 2017 (n=1) FAMILY Trachemys medemi Vargas-Ramírez, Valle, Ceballos & Fritz 2017 Emydidae Extant Lizards described in 2017 (n=70) Gymnophthalmus marconaterai García-Pérez & Schargel 2017 Acanthodactylus margaritae Tamar, Geniez, Brito & Crochet 2017…
The following list is based upon data from AmphibiaWeb. This list was put together in mid-December 2017 so it probably does not represent all of the species that will be described in the calendar…
Dibamus floweri. Photo Credit Evan Quah. The lizards of the genus Dibamus are a poorly known clade of 22 species found at scattered locations across Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo, and Indonesia. The…
Yellow-spotted goanna on Wreck Rock Beach, Queensland. Photo Credit: David Booth Goannas (AKA Monitor Lizards) have overtaken foxes as the number one predator of the endangered loggerhead turtle at its second largest Queensland nesting beach.…