Reptiles
laelaps | October 27, 2009A restoration of Archelon in the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 20, 2009A lizard (perhaps the common side-blotched lizard, Uta stansburiana?), photographed at Antelope Island, Utah.
edyong | September 8, 2009When danger threatens many lizards can detach their tails, leaving them behind as decoys in the hope that the predator will attack it rather than the lizard itself. But the tail doesn't just lie there as bait. For half an hour after they've been severed, the disembodied tails perform a complex dance, flipping, lunging and jumping up to an inch in the air. These acrobatics serve to distract the predator even further.
For the first time, Timothy Higham and Anthony Russell have studied the movements of severed gecko tails to understand how they can move in such complex ways without any input…
laelaps | August 1, 2009The skeleton of a black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), photographed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. [H/T to Thomas Holtz for the correction.]
laelaps | July 28, 2009
When I was a kid the movie Alligator seemed to be on television almost every other weekend. It was one of the first movies I can remember seeing, although truth be told I probably should not have been allowed to watch it. The pool scene alone was enough to give me nightmares.
For those who have not seen it, the film features an enormous, marauding alligator that grew to such prodigious size by feeding on test animals a biomedical corporation dumped in the sewer. It was a pretty clever explanation for how an ordinary alligator could become so gigantic, but long before Hollywood screenwriters…
laelaps | July 23, 2009The incomplete skull of Nicrosaurus (formerly "Belodon"), one of the earliest-recognized phytosaurs. It is missing teeth and it did not have an extended downward extension of the palate (the outline that extends below the upper jaw marked by the dotted line) like modern crocodiles. From A guide to the fossil reptiles and fishes in the Department of Geology and Palaeontology in the British Museum (Natural History).On the occasion of our third anniversary my wife bought me one of my most favorite works of paleo-art; a scene from the late Triassic set in what is now Arizona's Petrified Forest…
laelaps | July 23, 2009A Northern water snake (Nerodia sipedon) at the edge of a pond, photographed in Mount Kisco, NY. Many thanks to everyone in the comments who helped with the identification!
edyong | July 19, 2009It seems like an uneven match. In one corner, the unassuming California ground squirrel (Spermophilus beechyi), 30cm in length. In the other, the northern Pacific rattlesnake (Crotalus oreganos), more than twice the length of the squirrel, and armed with hinged fangs that pack a lethal venom. But thanks to a cunning adaptation, the squirrel often gets an unexpected upper hand in this bout.
Ground squirrels live in a series of burrows that keep them out of reach of most predators. Snakes, however, have exactly the right body plan for infiltrating long sinuous tunnels, and it's not surprising…
edyong | July 18, 2009We think of spiders as fearsome hunters, spinners of webs and treacherous mates, but construction workers? Yes, that too. Some groups of spiders - trapdoor and wolf spiders - dig tunnels that they use to ambush passing insects. But these tunnels can also provide shelter and accommodation for other animals, including one of the rarest of Australia's lizards - the pygmy blue-tongue lizard. It seems that the lizard's survival depends entirely on the spiders.
The pygmy blue-tongue is a native of South Australia. It's so rare that zoologists thought it extinct for over 30 years and it re-emerged…
edyong | July 9, 2009The turtle's shell provides it with a formidable defence and one that is unique in the animal world. No other animal has a structure quite like it, and the bizarre nature of the turtle's anatomy also applies to the skeleton and muscles lying inside its bony armour.
The shell itself is made from broadened and flattened ribs, fused to parts of the turtle's backbone (so that unlike in cartoons, you couldn't pull a turtle out of its shell). The shoulder blades sit underneath this bony case, effectively lying within the turtle's ribcage. In all other back-boned animals, whose shoulder blades sit…
grrlscientist | June 18, 2009tags: TEDTalks, biomimetics, biomutualism, biology, engineering, origin of flight, Robert Full, streaming video
Biologist Robert Full studies the amazing gecko, with its supersticky feet and tenacious climbing skill. But high-speed footage reveals that the gecko's tail harbors perhaps the most surprising talents of all. [12:27]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on…
edyong | June 16, 2009Underwater, fish make very difficult prey. When they sense sudden disturbances in the water around them, they respond within five thousandths of a second with a defensive reflex called the C-start. Their body contorts into a C-shape and with a flick of the tail, they rapidly zoom away from the potential threat. But one predator has a way of turning the fish's defence against it, persuading the fish to swim towards danger. It's the tentacled snake.
The tentacled snake (Erpeton tentaculatum) is a bizarre species, easily recognised by the pair of short "tentacles" on the front of its head.…
laelaps | June 8, 2009An eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina), photographed at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
edyong | June 5, 2009For humans, sex is a simple matter of chromosomes: two Xs and we become female; one X and a Y and we develop into males. But things aren't so straightforward for many lizards - many studies have found that the temperature of the nest also has a say, even overriding the influence of the chromosomes. But the full story of how the lizard got its sex is even more complicated. For at least one species, the size of its egg also plays a role, with larger eggs producing females, and smaller ones yielding males.
The discovery comes from Richard Shine's group at the University of Sydney. In earlier…
edyong | May 18, 2009For the longest time, people believed that the world's largest lizard, the Komodo dragon, killed its prey with a dirty mouth. Strands of rotting flesh trapped in its teeth harbour thriving colonies of bacteria and when the dragon bites an animal, these microbes flood into the wound and eventually cause blood poisoning.
But that theory was contested in 2005 when Bryan Fry from the University of Melbourne discovered that a close relative, the lace monitor, has venom glands in its mouth. The discovery made Fry suspect that Komodo dragons also poison their prey and he has just confirmed that in…
laelaps | April 20, 2009A garter snake (Thamnophis sp.) getting away through the undergrowth. It was sunning itself on the middle of the trail but my camera battery was too low for me to take a picture. By the time I changed it the snake was getting away.
grrlscientist | April 8, 2009tags: Planet Earth, David Attenborough, BBC, biodiversity, streaming video
This streaming video shows our planet by looking at our planet as a whole. There is a lot of gorgeous bird footage in this part [10:00]