herpetology

This is not a world of reality TV, fashion, big-screen sport and daily newspapers, but one covered in seas, mountains, forests, ferns, beetles, frogs and birds - get out there and look at it. The good thing about living in a country with a depauperate herpetofauna is that you can go out on a day and see nearly everything. On Sunday I and other people from the Southampton Natural History Society went into the field with members of the Herpetological Conservation Trust to look at reptiles at Town Common, Christchurch (Hampshire)... Alas, we did not see Smooth snakes Coronella austriaca or…
Welcome to the third and final part of my write-up of the CEE functional anatomy meeting: for part I go here, and for part II here. Here's where we wrap things up, but let's get through the last of the talks: those on tuataras, and yet more on primates... Marc Jones discussed his work on skull shape and feeding behaviour in rhynchocephalians (the extant tuataras and their Mesozoic relatives: adjacent image, from Marc's UCL page, shows Marc with a live tuatara). It is generally agreed among herpetologists that Sphenodon is not, as used to be thought, an archaic relict; a sort of poor relation…
More recollections from the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting: part I is here. We looked in the previous article at Robin Crompton's overview of primate locomotor ecology and evolution, Renate Weller's overview of new technologies, John Hutchinson's work on dinosaur biomechanics, and Jenny Clack's new look at Ichthyostega [adjacent image is Jaime Chirinos's Thylacoleo restoration]. Still loads more to get through... Paul O'Higgins took us back to primates. His key message was that two distinct computational techniques used to study anatomy - geometric morphometrics and finite element analysis (…
At a vertebrate palaeontology workshop held in Maastricht in 1998, some colleagues and I sat in a bar, lamenting the fact that nobody cared about anatomy any more, and that funding bodies and academia in general were only interested in genetics. Given the poor to non-existent coverage that anatomy gets in many biology courses and textbooks, you might think that anatomy has had its day and that - as some molecular biologists told us in the 1980s and 90s - all the anatomical work worth doing had been published in the days of Owen and Huxley. Nothing could be further from the truth, and if you…
The unusual fossil mammal skull posted here yesterday was, of course, that of the astrapotheriid astrapothere Astrapotherium magnum, as many as you said. But I'm a bit surprised that more people didn't get it straight away, given that astrapotheres were covered and covered again at Tet Zoo only a couple of months ago. However, I suppose that reading about something doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to identify its fossils... I'm still planning to post a write-up of the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting here ASAP, but haven't had time to finish it yet. Meanwhile... ... the modern animal…
tags: Life in Cold Blood, amphibians, reptiles, David Attenborough, book review When asked why there are so few books about amphibians and reptiles -- collectively referred to as "herps" -- published for the general public, David Attenborough responds by pointing out that "reptiles and amphibians are sometimes thought of as slow, dim-witted and primitive. In fact they can be lethally fast, spectacularly beautiful, surprisingly affectionate and extremely sophisticated." Even though this is true for many herps, it takes a lot of dedication and skill to show those less-known qualities to a…
Well done everyone who had a go at identifying the lizards from yesterday. Dead easy, as both species are highly distinctive and easy to identify (and both were previously mentioned in the Tropiquaria article)... The armour-plated lizard shown with and without the effects of the flash was a Sudan plated lizard Gerrhosaurus major, also called the Rough-scaled plated lizard or Great plated lizard. It lives up to the last name, reaching 48 cm in total length. Plated lizards eat arthropods and molluscs, with the larger species (like G. major) eating smaller lizards as well as some plant…
It's going to be a busy month, what with the run-up to 'Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective', and other stuff. So I regret I haven't had time to knock up any new articles: but hey, I know you don't mind what with the recent 'mammals are amphisbaenians' article, and the panda stuff. So... I figured I might try and get the whole 'picture of the day' thing going again. So here we go with some lizards, and the game - if you want to play - is to identify the species. It's dead easy and I've provided the answers before anyway! The pictures above show the same animal photographed with and without…
Among the most controversial and remarkable of living tetrapods are the bizarre amphisbaenians: a group of fossorial, long-bodied carnivorous animals with reduced or absent limbs, spade-shaped or bullet-shaped skulls strongly modified for burrowing, and an annulated body where distinct, regularly arranged transverse segments give the animals a worm-like appearance. Until recently it was generally thought that amphisbaenians are reptiles, and part of Squamata (the reptile group that includes the snakes and lizards). But, in a fascinating case of multi-disciplinary co-operation involving…
I've mentioned on and off lately that Tet Zoo the book is now go. The manuscript is complete, and right now (when not working on other things) I'm dealing with the editorial tidying-up. The book won't, I'm sorry to say, be anything technically new: it's simply a compilation of the better articles from Tet Zoo ver 1, arranged chronologically. And, because of word-count, it only incorporates articles going up to September 2006, so there's still tons of stuff that can be used for later books (should book 1 prove popular enough that others are worthwhile)... Adapting Tet Zoo articles for a book…
It was Beelzebufo that finally made up my mind. Long-time readers will have noticed that I generally fail to discuss the exciting stuff that's being announced in the news, even when it's very much relevant to the Tet Zoo remit. Indeed some of you have even commented upon this fact. What's my excuse for this? Well there are a few actually... -- For starters, once I've decided to blog about something - say, initial bipedalism or European pumas or liolaemine lizards - I need to stick with it and get it out of the way. Because I have a long list of subjects that I plan to blog about, I am not…
Congratulations are in order: well done Dave Hughes, David Marjanović and Allen Hazen in particular. No, the creature shown yesterday is not a squabrat from The Dark Crystal (if there is such a thing), Romer's hellasaur, an old picture of a colugo, a proto-bat, proto-pterosaur, arboreal theropod, antiquated archaeopterygid, tree shrew, climbing duck-possum, arboreal gorgonopsian, proto-ropen, or one of Dougal Dixon's arbrosaurs: it is, instead, the hypothetical stem-haematotherm depicted in Philippe Janvier's 1984 article on the Haematothermia concept. It made an appearance both within the…
I spent much of my Saturday doing an interesting thing. Together with another 30 or so people, I went along to my local nature reserve (Chessel Bay Nature Reserve, Southampton) and took part in an effort to clear the shore of its tons upon tons of human crap. Unsatisfied with our constant use of resources, our epic, manic pollution, and our rampant annihilation of other species, we aim to cover as much of the planet's surface as possible in our waste: we are literally doing our very best to swamp natural environments with the discarded shit that we can't be bothered to deal with properly.…
Thank you and well done to everyone who had a bash at identifying Ermentrude. For the most part, you were correct: Ermentrude was indeed an iguanian, and within Iguania a tropidurid... or tropidurine... I mean liolaemid... or liolaemine, or liolaemin.. and, within that group, a species of the large South American taxon Liolaemus. What species? Well, that's a bit trickier to answer... An average of about four new Liolaemus species are described every year, and there are currently around 200 species*, so it can be difficult to keep track of them. Ermentrude was labelled as a 'spotted swift'…
This is Ermentrude, or Ermie, the best lizard I ever kept. Despite his name he was a male (I think). He got used to being handled but didn't like having his claws clipped. Strangely, he liked banana and once he ate a load of white butterfly chrysalises. Anyway... can you succeed where so many have failed. Can you identify the species that Ermentrude belonged to? The photos aren't great, but they're all I have...
Yet again I am going to have to go quiet-ish on Tet Zoo for a little while as I just cannot put the time into completing the many planned articles. Sigh. One thing approaching on the near horizon is eating up lots of my research time: the third Big Cats in Britain conference, happening in early March, and at which I'm speaking. I'll post details on it over the next few days. For now, I thought I'd enthuse a bit about lizards: like (I'm sure) everyone in the UK interested in zoology, I am watching David Attenborough's Life in Cold Blood series at the moment, and last night's episode (number 3…
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: as a life-long zoology nerd, one of my greatest frustrations has always been the fact that there are so many animals that get mentioned - only ever mentioned - but never elaborated upon. I've always liked Axolotls Ambystoma mexicanum, and among the world's unusual amphibians this has got to be one of the most familiar, thanks of course to its widespread use in the pet trade and as a laboratory animal [assortment of captive axolotls show above]. As everyone knows, the Axolotl is neotenous: it retains juvenile characters into sexual…
Long time readers will, I'm sure, recall Tet Zoo's role as whistle-blower back in April 2007. The article that started all the trouble - The armadillodile diaries, a story of science ethics - was posted here. Well, as you'll know if you've seen today's Nature, a new article by Rex Dalton brings this story to wider attention... For those who haven't read the original Tet Zoo article and can't be bothered to do so now, the story is - to put it very briefly - that Spencer Lucas and some of his colleagues (Andy Heckert, Justin Spielmann and Adrian Hunt) at the New Mexico Museum of Natural…
Will and I looked at some really awesome creatures on our recent visit to the Blue Reef Aquarium at Southsea (Portsmouth, UK)... but most of them weren't tetrapods so I won't be blogging about them. Sturgeons, wobbegongs, remoras, horseshoe crabs, four-eyed fish, Pacific giant octopus, moray eels. I actually spent ages trying to get a good photo of a wobbegong but couldn't. Anyway, I had better luck in photographing the Snapping turtle Chelydra serpentina shown here - though it took ages as it wouldn't keep still. I like my photos for several reasons. The adjacent one, for example, shows the…
2007 - Tet Zoo's second year of operation - has come and gone. The previous article was a brief personal review of the year, and here's more of the same (sort of) if you can handle it... As if Tet Zoo wasn't enough to deal with, in September my partners-in-crime Mike P. Taylor and Matt Wedel [shown here; Mike is the less big one] decided, with me, to start up a new zoological blog, but this time devoted to something a little more specific: namely, sauropod vertebrae (and nothing else, pretty much). So on October 1st, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, or SV-POW!, was born. Despite…