herpetology
tetrapodzoology | November 11, 2008I would not like to be bitten by an African rock python Python sebae. Here's why.
Had previously seen this photo on TV but only recently found a version on the web. Apparently, the 4-m-long snake - which had recently eaten a female impala - is dead and died after trying to pass through the electric fence it is 'attacking'. This all happened on Silent Valley Ranch in the Waterberg mountains of South Africa. A few photos exist showing people touching the dead snake, and it was cut open to reveal the impala inside [go here], so despite my initial scepticism I currently think all of this is…
tetrapodzoology | October 31, 2008
During the breeding season male frogs are compelled to grab moving objects and engage them in amplexus, the tight 'breeding clasp' that occurs either under the forelimbs (axillary amplexus) or around the waist (inguinal amplexus), depending on the species. Amplexus is assisted by roughened pads of tubercles or even small spikes on the male hand, wrist and/or forearm. If it's obvious that the moving object is not a female of the same species (because it feels wrong or makes an objectionable noise [as male frogs do when grabbed by other males]), the male lets go.
Nevertheless, male Eurasian…
tetrapodzoology | October 20, 2008
Within recent years, the Palaearctic tortoise fauna has undergone a radical change. If you're interested in the recognition and discovery of new species, in controversy and argument about the status of species, in neat evolutionary stuff such as resource polymorphism and resource-mediated dwarfism, and, least of all, in tortoises, then you should find this a fascinating area. I shall point out to start with that I'm referring specifically to the testudinid tortoises of the genus Testudo, an Old World taxon most closely related to the Asian tortoises (Indotestudo) and the Pancake tortoise…
tetrapodzoology | October 14, 2008
You might not believe me if I told you how much stuff I have going on right now. In, as ever, an effort to put at least something new on the blog, here's a pretty picture taken from a talk I give (or gave) on marine reptiles. Alas, I have yet to finish the Tet Zoo series on sea snakes: part I was here, part II here, I suppose I might republish them here at ver 2 some time. Aipysurus-group hydrophiids also made a brief appearance here. Finally, the 'Rasmussen 2002' alluded to in the picture is...
Rasmussen, A. R. 2002. Phylogenetic analysis of the "true" aquatic elapid snakes Hydrophiinae (…
tetrapodzoology | September 29, 2008No time for anything new, unfortunately. But I have a lot of old stuff kicking around: here, I've recycled text from my undergrad thesis on ichthyosaurs. I hope you get something out of it. Ichthyosaurs are famous for preserving impressions of soft tissue; these are preserved as black, carbonaceous films, and are known for specimens that come from Solnhofen and Holzmaden in Germany, from Barrow-upon-Soar in England, and from the Wapiti Lake area of British Columbia. Martill (1993) reviewed occurrences of ichthyosaur soft tissue preservation, citing records from the Hettangian, Sinemurian,…
tetrapodzoology | September 13, 2008
Helveticosaurus zollingeri is an unusual and poorly known diapsid from the Middle Triassic rocks of Monte san Giorgio, Switzerland. First described in 1955, it was initially identified as a primitive placodont and regarded as the only representative of the basal placodont group Helveticosauroidea. But this isn't correct and Helveticosaurus lacks the features unique to both Placodontia and to Sauropterygia (Rieppel 1989).
Helveticosaurus was long-bodied and it had a long, flexible tail and - like mesosaurs, claudiosaurs, thalattosaurs and hupehsuchians - it was probably an axial undulatory…
tetrapodzoology | September 10, 2008
For my shame, I had never been to Ireland prior to last week. That's so crap that I became pretty determined to attend the 56th SVPCA, hosted by the National Museum of Ireland at Dublin, and I'm glad I did. You know, because of the giant deer, hornbills and pliosaurs [montage here shows specimens from the (currently closed) National Museum of Ireland (Natural History). The middle skeleton is a Notoryctes]...
Here I'm going to do a very speedy review of most (but far from all) of the presentations given at the meeting. There was a reasonable amount of non-tetrapod stuff that I won't, of…
tetrapodzoology | August 25, 2008
I have not forgotten that 2008 is Year of the Frog: if you have, or if you didn't know this, please go back to December 2007 and read the explanatory article here. Some of you will also recall the EDGE project (EDGE = Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered), and here we look at an anuran that's one of many on the EDGE list.
Myobatrachids, or southern frogs, or Australo-Papuan frogs, include some of the most incredible and bizarre of anurans. The Turtle frog Myobatrachus gouldii looks like a toy, is apparently sometimes mistaken for a baby turtle, and is one of just a few anuran…
tetrapodzoology | July 26, 2008Very late to the party here (the story was first published waaaaaay back on the 18th), but it just seems wrong not to cover this at Tet Zoo. Sincere apologies to the Bleiman brothers at Zooillogix and to John Lynch at Stranger Fruit, both of whom covered the following several days ago, but what the hey, there still might be some people who haven't seen the amazing photos...
Taken by American wildlife photographer Hal Brindley in Kruger National Park, they show that leopards can kill crocodiles when they want to. The leopard tackled the crocodile in the water, pulled it on to land, and…
tetrapodzoology | June 21, 2008
You wouldn't know it from Tet Zoo's content, but for many, many months now I've been working continually on ichthyosaurs, the 'fish lizards' of the Mesozoic. I'm not ready to talk about the project yet, but will do at some stage. An awful lot has happened on ichthyosaurs since the late 1990s, mostly thanks to the research of Ryosuke* Motani and Michael Maisch and their collagues, but to be honest things have become quieter in the last few years and we certainly are not in any sort of 'ichthyosaur research renaissance' as we are with plesiosaurs, dinosaurs, pterosaurs and Mesozoic…
tetrapodzoology | June 12, 2008
Contrary to plans (you know how it is), I haven't had time to finish the phorusrhacid theme I started on Tuesday. Because it's important to keep it in mind, I feel we need a reminder about the fact that 2008 is Year of the Frog, and hats off to Carel for discussing this recently, and of course to Jeff Davis of Frog Matters for continuing to fight the fight...
Among the latest froggy news is the auctioning of the name of a new species of Mannophryne (go here): you have until July 1 2009 to get an aromobatid species named after you (aromobatids are a recently recognised clade of dendrobatoid…
grrlscientist | June 11, 2008tags: Mean and Lowly Things, herpetology, reptiles, venomous snakes, amphibians, field research, Congo Brazzaville, Kate Jackson, book review
Are you familiar with the aphorism, "Do what you love and the money will follow"? Well, the money part of that equation is probably questionable, but I think you will be convinced that a person who pursues her passions will never live a boring life, especially after you've finished reading Kate Jackson's book, Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; 2008). This book tells the…
tetrapodzoology | June 7, 2008
One of the greatest fallacies held about evolutionary theory is that fossils are essential in demonstrating the existence of change (don't believe me? Look at 'creation science' books like Duane Gish's Evolution: the Challenge of the Fossil Record and Evolution: the Fossils Say No!). Of course, fossils do indeed show how characters were accrued and modified over time, and it's that 'time' aspect of the data that they shed crucial information on. But we most certainly do not need fossils to demonstrate the fact of evolution, as we are surrounded by evolutionary intermediates right here in the…
tetrapodzoology | June 1, 2008
The silence must have been deafening. As - hopefully - everybody knows, during 2007 Spencer Lucas and colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were charged with intellectual theft, of pre-empting the writings of colleagues, and of publishing on material without getting an OK from those based at the repository where the relevant specimens were held (all of this is documented in painstaking detail here). In particular, they apparently pre-empted Bill Parker's in-press paper on a new aetosaur genus, and appeared to take credit for Jeff Martz's re-…
tetrapodzoology | May 26, 2008
It goes without saying that most predatory animals need to open their mouths when they want to stab or bite potential prey items. But, get this, there's a group of snakes that can erect their teeth and stab prey with a closed mouth. And that's not all that's interesting about these snakes. Yes, time for more weird snakes. There are lots and lots and lots of weird snakes, and one of my favourite groups of weird snakes are the atractaspidids (or atractaspids), and in particular the atractaspidid genus Atractaspis. If you haven't heard of these snakes before it might give you some idea of what…
tetrapodzoology | May 15, 2008
Despite efforts, there just hasn't been enough time (yet) to get Tet Zoo to properly reflect the balance of diversity within Tetrapoda (I blame the charismatic megafauna). And among the many groups that have been totally under-represented here are the snakes: one of the most speciose (over 2700 species) and abundant tetrapod clades. It'll take a long time before snakes are fairly represented at Tet Zoo, and what I'd like to do here is talk briefly (relatively speaking) about a very obscure and poorly known group of really weird little burrowing snakes, the scolecophidians. The... what?
Three…
tetrapodzoology | May 11, 2008
So, was it really 'the best conference of all time'? Hmm, maybe, but it was excellent and all went well (more or less). On May 6th and 7th I attended 'Dinosaurs (and other extinct saurians) - A Historical Perspective', a meeting featuring a packed schedule of talks and posters devoted to Mesozoic fossil reptiles and how they've been discovered and interpreted. Ably abetted by John Conway yet again, I made it to London on time for the field trip on the 5th to the Crystal Palace animals, and on the 8th and 9th went on a trip to the Isle of Wight (going both into the field and to Dinosaur Isle…
tetrapodzoology | May 10, 2008Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you'll know that 2008 is Year of the Frog (more here), and that several projects - including Amphibian Ark and EDGE - are working to try and save endangered frog and toad species before they become extinct. We need to do all we can to continue to drum up interest in the conservation effort that many of us are now involved in. Quest, a science show at KQED (the PBS station in San Francisco), has just produced a new video concentrating on the decline of Californian Yellow-legged frogs R. boylii (aka Foothill yellow-legged frog, and it's - apparently -…
tetrapodzoology | May 4, 2008
Ok, signing off for a while now. Among other things, the above will get discussed when I get back: the image on the right (from here) might look somewhat, err, 'inspired' if you're familiar with the original produced by Mark Witton (see here and here). So long for now. Oh, actually, one last thing...
You all know that 2008 is Year of the Frog. As I discussed back in December 2007, tiny sums of money (relatively speaking) are all that are needed to get individuals of many endangered amphibians into captivity, and hence away from the chytrid fungus that is making them extinct in the wild. And…
tetrapodzoology | May 2, 2008
Yesterday, my colleague Anthony Butcher (who shares my office at UoP.. but, alas, works on Palaeozoic microfossils called chitinozoans) was driving out of our carpark when he realised that the grey object he had driven past on the pavement was a sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus, plucking the pigeon it had just killed. He reversed, held his phone out of the window, and took several photos. The hawk - less than a metre away - couldn't care less and carried on. The photos aren't brilliant, but for me they bring home the point that we are surrounded by extraordinary animals doing extraordinary things…