Najash is an extinct genus of basal snakes from the Late Cretaceous (Candeleros Formation) of Patagonia. Some modern snakes retain traces of hind legs - boas, pythons, leptotyphlopids, and others. Some Cretaceous snakes also had hindlimbs or remnant hindlimbs, but Najash is unusual in having well-developed legs that extend outside the rib cage as well as a pelvis connected to the vertebral column. Fossil Najash was first found by Sebastián Apesteguía at the Argentine Museum of Natural History and his team in a terrestrial deposit in the Río Negro province of northern Patagonia, Argentina, in ..read more

Arcanumophis problematicus from Santo Domingo, Peru. Photographs by A. Catenazzi. The snake Liophis problematicus was described as a new species by Myers in 1986. The holotype was collected at 1520 m on the Amazonian side of the Andes in the Department of Puno in extreme southeastern Peru. This is a very small snake, an adult male that had a total length of 275 mm total length. It has a bilobed hemipenis with nude apical discs, a condition defining the tribe Xenodontini with about six genera of Neotropical xenodontine colubrids. Like other Liophis is did have the ability to flatten the ant ..read more

Above: Seven species of anoles found on the islands in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP). Top row, left to right: Dactyloa agassizi (Isla Malpelo), Dactyloa gorgonae (Isla Gorgona), Norops townsendi (Isla Cocos). Bottom row: Norops medemi, Norops parvauritus, Dactyloa princeps, Dactyloa chocorum (all Isla Gorgona).      There are 435 species in the genus Anolis (sometimes divided into Norops and Dactyola) and while they are one of the most heavily studied lizard clades most of the work has been done on Caribbean species. However, there are seven eastern Pacific Islands species that remain ..read more

Imantodes cenchoaMany herpetologists who have done fieldwork over the last several decades have commented on declines in snake populations. Snakes, unlike frogs, don't vocalize, they usually don't congregate for reproduction, and they are quite secretive. Many roads that I use to drive in search of snakes at one time passed through grassland, forest, or desert but are now lined with agricultural fields, housing developments, and industrial parks. Field notes suggest snakes were common on some of those roads 30 or 40 years ago, but have mostly disappeared due to human activity. In a forthcomi ..read more

There's a species of poison frog called the "strawberry frog" or the "blue jeans frog," depending on who you ask. These frogs are smaller than a quarter, with bright red bodies and navy blue limbs, and they live in shady Costa Rican forests. Or, they did, until humans began cutting the forests to create farmland. These sunny fields and pastures are hotter and drier than the forests, and scientists wanted to know how the strawberry frogs were adapting to their new environment. To figure it out, the researchers built mini temperature-controlled frog habitats to see what temperatures the frogs g ..read more

SerpentResearch has been rated as one of the   Top 10 Herpetology Blogs  by  Feedspot.com ..read more

Elephant Trunk Snake, Acrochordus javanicus. JCMIn a recent paper Zaher et al. (2019) examine Caenophidian snake phylogeny. Caenophidian snakes include the file snake genus Acrochordus and advanced colubroidean snakes that radiated mainly during the Neogene. Although caenophidian snakes are a well-supported clade, their inferred affinities, based either on molecular or morphological data, remain poorly known or controversial. The authors provide an expanded molecular phylogenetic analysis of Caenophidia and use three non-parametric measures of support–Shimodaira-Hasegawa-Like test (SHL), Fels ..read more

Thamnophis gigas. By Photo: Dave Feliz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25541989Protecting the Giant Garter Snake Rose et al. (2019) present work that highlights how the implications of uncertainties and unknowns can be explored by building and analyzing alternative models. We constructed  Integral projection models (IPMs) for the threatened Giant Gartersnake (Thamnophis gigas) based on published studies to determine where management efforts could be targeted to have the greatest effect on population persistence and what unknowns remain for future research. Giv ..read more

Sometimes exceeding 100 kg in weight, the Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis is the largest species of lizard in the world (photo Ruchira Somaweera). (b) Large Komodo dragons in modern-day populations depend heavily upon introduced ungulates as prey. This Timor deer (Rusa timorensis) was actively hunted down by an adult Komodo dragon (photos W.K. Fletcher and Donna Baylis). (c) Komodo dragons frequently walk along the beaches at low tide scavenging beach-washed marine items (photo Richard Shine). A new paper by Shine and Somaweera (2019) seeks to understand why much of the world's terrestrial ..read more

The following is from the Guardian Authorities are considering banning tourists from Komodo, the island home of the ancient Komodo dragon, to allow for conservation efforts amid concerns over animal-smuggling. The island, in Manggarai Barat, Indonesia, is a major tourist destination, with many making the trip to see the lizard which has a venomous bite, can grow up to three meters long and weigh more than 150kg. Authorities are considering a temporary closure so they can plant native vegetation and help to restock the dragon’s food supply, thereby increasing the population, reported Tempo ..read more