The Mary River Turtle
(Elusor macrurus), seen in this marvelous photo by Chris Van Wyk, calls Queensland, Australia its home. It's a fantastic creature with a green mohwawk of algae strands. The Mary River Turtle can stay underwater for up to 72 hours as it breathes through glands in its reproductive organs. Unfortunately, it's also one of the latest animals that the Zoological Society of London's EDGE conservation group added to its
list of endangered species. From
National Geographic:
The Mary river turtle waddled its way on the list for a number of reasons: it's the only member of its genius, and according to EGDE's website, it became evolutionarily distinct 40 million years ago. Forty million years of Earth's changes, however, wasn't enough to prepare them for 100 years of human intervention.
Their habitat... has been disrupted from dam construction, and the species was widely bought and sold in the pet trade.
Today it's protected by the Australian government, and conservation groups are working to make sure its habitat is preserved.
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Turtles were at the center of a hundred-year evolutionary controversy since the 1887 discovery of a Proganochelys fossil in Germany. AS PBS Eons explains, the question of how turtles got their shells led scientists "to rethink the entire history of reptile evolution." Read the rest
Looks like the worm at the bottom of a mezcal bottle just isn't enough for some folks. Boas and iguanas stuffed into mezcal bottles are now the thing, at least in Oaxaca, Mexico.
So far, environmental inspectors have seized 15 bottles of “artisanal, wild agave” mezcal that also contained entire reptiles such as "a blood snake, ridge head snake, yellowbelly snake and a whip snake," according to APNews.
Although some adventurous drinkers dare to swallow the worm, these larger critters would require a lot of chewing before swallowing. Good thing that mezcal can reach an alcohol content as high as 55%.
Selling wildlife in Mexico is strictly regulated, so this trend might not last long, at least not on store shelves.
Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE - Western Whip Snake (Hierophis viridiflavus) male close-up (Found by Jean NICOLAS), CC BY-SA 2.0, Link Read the rest
After going down a rabbit hole of watching snakes drinking water, I can say this is the best one: a two-headed albino snake, with one head fighting with the other on getting some water. NEED SNEK DRINX PLS BRO. Read the rest
From BBC's Planet Earth II, intense footage (with an intense soundtrack) from the Galapagos Islands of a newly-hatched iguana chased by racer snakes.
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The Texas Park and Wildlife Department recently posted this photo of a particularly stylish Western rat snake.
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Why would Alcott Smith, at the time nearly seventy, affable and supposedly of sound mind, a blue-eyed veterinarian with a whittled-down woodman’s frame and lupine stamina, abruptly change his plans (and clothes) for a quiet Memorial Day dinner with his companion, Lou-Anne, and drive from his home in New Hampshire to New York State, north along the western rim of a wild lake, to a cabin on a corrugated dirt lane called Porcupine Hollow? Inside the cabin fifteen men quaffed beer, while outside a twenty-five- inch rattlesnake with a mouth full of porcupine quills idled in a homemade rabbit hutch. It was the snake that had interrupted Smith’s holiday dinner.
Excerpted from Ted Levin's America's Snake. Available from Amazon.
Because of a cascade of consequences there aren’t many left in the Northeast: timber rattlesnakes are classified as a threatened species in New York and an endangered species everywhere in New England except Maine and Rhode Island where they’re already extinct. They could be gone from New Hampshire before the next presidential primary. Among the cognoscenti it’s speculated whether timber rattlesnakes ever lived in Quebec; they definitely did in Ontario, where rattlesnakes inhabited the sedimentary shelves of the Niagara Gorge but eventually died off like so many failed honeymoons consummated in the vicinity of the falls.
That rattlesnakes still survive in the Northeast may come as a big surprise to you, but that they have such an impassioned advocate might come as an even bigger surprise. Actually, rattlesnakes have more than a few advocates, both the affiliated and the unaffiliated, and as is so often the case, this is a source of emotional and political misunderstandings, turf battles and bruised egos. Read the rest
National Geograph explores the magic and mystery. Read the rest
In the winter, tens of thousands of red-sided garter snakes gather in the Narcisse Snake Pits of Manitoba, Candada to mate. Read the rest
This handsome devil is Bunostegos akokanensis, a large reptile that lived in northern Niger 266-252 million years ago. “Imagine a cow-sized, plant-eating reptile with a knobby skull and bony armor down its back,” writes University of Washington biologist Linda A. Tsuji. The image is an artist's rendering based on fossils recently unearthed by Tsuji and her colleagues. (National Geographic) Read the rest
The good news: A recent study of preserved museum specimens revealed that the Caribbean is home to 39 different species of skink, rather than the previously-accepted six. The bad news: Turns out that 16 of those species are already extinct. (Via Tim Heffernan) Read the rest
I spent most of my childhood with books about dinosaurs that played up the ancient beasties as overgrown lizards. The connection between dinosaurs and birds, while kind of flipping obvious once somebody points it out, was not much discussed among laypeople until I was in my teens. (That would be the 1990s, FYI.)
But, among scientists, the idea of a dinosaur-bird relationship is nothing new. In fact, Thomas Henry Huxley was making that connection back in the 1860s. On the Dinosaur Tracking blog, Brian Switek tells the fascinating story of how Huxley started to realize that dinosaurs and birds were related—a discovery that's all the more impressive because he figured it out without the help of some of the key transitional fossils we have access to today.
Huxley did not suggest that birds were the direct descendants of dinosaurs. So much geologic time was unaccounted for, and so few dinosaurs were known, that Huxley could not point to any known fossil creature as the forerunner of birds. Instead he made his argument on anatomical grounds and removed the issue of time. Dinosaurs were proxies for what the actual bird ancestor would have been like, and flightless birds (such as the ostrich and emu) stood in for what Huxley thought was the most archaic bird type. (We now know that Huxley got this backwards—the earliest birds could fly, and flightless birds represent a secondary loss of that ability.) As Huxley went about collecting evidence for his case, though, he also gave dinosaurs an overhaul.
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At the Thoughtomics blog, Lucas Brouwers has a really nifty post on a recent discovery about the biology of pentastomes. What's a pentastome? Oh, I am SO glad that you asked.
Every animal has its own parasites to worry about, but canivorous reptiles and amphibians have to deal with particularly gruesome ones. They can become infected with small, worm-like creatures called pentastomes that live inside their lungs, where they suck blood from ruptured blood vessels. Reptiles pick up the parasite when they eat infected prey.
Pentastomes are true escape artists. Once they realize they’ve entered a reptile stomach, they use their sharp hooks to claw themselves a way to the victim’s lungs. In an experiment where pentastomes were implanted in a gecko’s stomach, the parasites invaded the lungs in as little as four hours.
Fun!
BTW: The image above, of a pentastome called Kiricephalus coarctatus, comes from a student page on the life and pests of the Western Cottonmouth snake. It's worth poking around that site, too. Read the rest
