Check out this video "Egyptian Uromastyx," submitted by kingsnake.com user stingray.
Submit your own reptile & amphibian videos at http://www.kingsnake.com/video/ and you could see them featured here or check out all the videos submitted by other users!

We're always happy to see the media grasping that "venomous" and "poisonous" don't mean the same thing. For your Friday viewing pleasure, stop by io9.com and check out some of the world's coolest venomous crittters!



Photo from the kingsnake.com photo gallery: BakerReptiles

Before the age of the dinosaurs, a mass extinction event occurred that destroyed 70 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate species and almost all aquatic species. It took as long as 10 million years for life on earth to recover from what is now known as the end-Permian extinction event.

After that recovery but before the rise of the dinosaurs, the ancestors of modern lizards and snakes emerged.

From the University College London:

Two new fossil jaws discovered in Vellberg, Germany provide the first direct evidence that the ancestors of lizards, snakes and tuatara (known collectively as lepidosaurs), were alive during the Middle Triassic period – around 240 million years ago.

The new fossil finds predate all other lepidosaur records by 12 million years. The findings are published in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

The international team of scientists who dated the fossil jaws have provided evidence that lepidosaurs first appeared after the end-Permian mass extinction event, a period when fauna began to recover and thrive in the more humid climate.



Lead author Dr Marc Jones, who conducted the research at UCL, explained: "The Middle Triassic represents a time when the world has recovered from the Permian mass extinction but is not yet dominated by dinosaurs. This is also when familiar groups, such as frogs and lizards, may have first appeared."

The small teeth and lightly built jaws suggest that the extinct animal preyed on small insects. The new fossils are most closely related to the tuatara, a lizard-like reptile.

[...]

The new fossil jaws can improve molecular dating estimates of when reptiles began to diversify into snakes, lizard and tuatara, and when the first modern lizards inhabited the earth. Previous estimates have varied over a range of 64 million years and the team are keen to help narrow this down.

"Some previous estimates based on molecular data suggested that lizards first evolved 290 million years ago," said second author Cajsa Lisa Anderson, University of Gothenburg. "To a palaeontologist this seems way too old and our revised molecular analysis agrees with the fossils."

Revised molecular dating in light of this new fossil find now suggests lizards began to diversify into most of the modern groups we recognise today, such as geckos and skinks, less than 150 million years ago in the Cretaceous period, following continental fragmentation.

Read more here.

Photos: Marc Jones/UCL

Some programs to help troubled young people have seen improvement in school and interpersonal relationships after the children and teens have worked with dogs or horses. Now snakes and other "misunderstood animals" can be added to that list.

From Trails Carolina:

Studies have shown that animal assisted therapy and relationships with animal companions in general provide an improvement in physical, emotional and psychological well-being. Trails advanced this research by building a curriculum where students interact and engage with misunderstood animals and parallel this experience to their own.

“We learned as children to hate snakes, turtles, possums and the like and we’ve been taught that they’re bad,” says Steve O’Neil, Trails’ Ecology Expert. “Most of our students come in with a lot of fear and within minutes they’re holding a snake. Overcoming their fear and misconceptions about these animals also helps our students see themselves in a different light.”

Similar to these animals, the troubled youth of Trails are facing their own misunderstandings of the world and how people perceive them. By gaining a better understanding of the ecological value of these misunderstood animals students gain a better understanding of their own value and how their behaviors and actions are often misunderstood. This curriculum helps students build confidence in themselves and better understand how to communicate with others.

Read more here.

A teeny tiny little Mandarin rat snake grounded a Qantas Boeing 747 in Sydney last weekend.

From ABC News:

Staff found the 20-centimeter (8-inch) Mandarin Rat Snake in the passenger cabin near the door late Sunday before passengers were due to board the flight bound for Tokyo from Sydney International Airport, Qantas said in a statement.

Australia's flagship airline said passengers were given hotel rooms overnight and left Sydney on a replacement plane Monday morning. Qantas said the original jet would be fumigated before returning to service in case there were other snakes on board.

The snake was taken by quarantine officials for analysis.

The Agriculture Department said the snake, a species that grows to an average 1.2 meters (4 feet), had been euthanized, "as exotic reptiles of this kind can harbor pests and diseases not present in Australia."

Read the full story here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user mattroconnor

Check out this video "Anoles in My Garden," submitted by kingsnake.com user clintg.
Submit your own reptile & amphibian videos at http://www.kingsnake.com/video/ and you could see them featured here or check out all the videos submitted by other users!

It's not often a veterinarian who writes about pets for a mainstream newspaper devotes an entire column not just to a pet snake, but a species that's not kept as a pet all that often. But Modesto, Calif., veterinarian Dr. Jeff Kahler did just that in a recent piece in the Modesto Bee, where he recounted the story of a wart snake brought to his practice because his eyes had clouded over.

From the article:

Bando is a 3-year-old, 6 1/2-foot snake - and not just any kind of snake. He is a wart snake or sometimes called elephant trunk snake. Bando's caretaker, Randy, has had Bando for two years, having purchased him from a California reptile dealer.

He is housed in an aquarium that is temperature-controlled and aquatic. Bando spends almost all of his time in the water, including feeding time. His diet consists of goldfish and he is feed once a week. Randy reports that Bando has had no problems in the past two years but recently appears to have developed an issue with his eyes.

Over the past few weeks, Bando's eyes have become more and more opaque. They are now to the point where Randy suspects Bando cannot see.

Initially Randy thought Bando's eyes were clouding over as they normally do right before he sheds his skin but even after a shed occurred, the opacity in Bando's eyes remained. Randy has yet to find a veterinarian to examine Bando so he took to the internet and eventually got me involved.

To understand what might be going on with Bando's eyes, it helps to understand a bit about the natural history of his species. For you aficionados, wart snakes belong to the genus Acrochordus, which includes three species of snakes. I suspect Bando is a Java wart snake because of his large size.

These snakes are native to parts of southeast Asia and spend most of their time in water. Their diet consists of aquatic life --- especially fish --- and they have a rough scale pattern, which aids in gripping fish as they coil around them when eating. In my clinical experience, these are very rare snakes in captivity. I personally have only worked with them in zoo collections.

There are many possibilities that could cause Bando's eye issues. But it is my suspicion that Bando's eye problem is directly related to his captive environment and, more specifically, the water he is kept in.

Click here to find out what's wrong with Bando!

Photo: Smacdonald at en.wikipedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Four new species of legless lizards have been added to the one previously known member of the group Anniella, reports the journal Breviora.

From the LA Times:

Anniella are pretty small animals, about as thick as a pencil and rarely more than 8 inches long. They spend their lives wiggling beneath loose, sandy soil, snacking on bugs and larvae.

They don't move fast or far, and the researchers say they may spend their whole lives in an area about the size of your dining room table.

Aside from that, scientists still don't know much about them.

"They are one of the most poorly studied reptiles in California," [Cal State Fullerton researcher James] Parham said. "Because they live under the sand, you can't see what they are doing, and you can't even do a mark-and-recapture because you can't reliably capture these things."

Parham and his coauthor Theodore Papenfuss, a herpetologist with the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, have been scouring the state for legless lizards for 15 years. When they began their research, only one type of legless lizard was known to live in California.

One of the four newly identified species of Anniella, the Southern California legless lizard, was found under some dead leaves in dunes at the west end of Los Angeles International Airport.

The Bakersfield legless lizard was found in three vacant lots in downtown Bakersfield.

The southern Sierra legless lizard was spotted in three dry canyons on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and the Temblor legless lizard was found in the oil fields around the city of Taft, on the southwestern edge of the San Joaquin Valley.

To find these lizards, the scientists scattered 2,000 pieces of cardboard and plywood throughout the state to create moist, cool areas, which appeal to the lizards. Then they returned months later to see if any of the lizards had shown up.

Read the full story here.

The Eastern Pacific hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata), thought to be all but extinct, is making a comeback to Central America's Gulf of Fonseca. How did it happen? No one knows.

From Fox News Latino:

The Eastern Pacific Hawksbill sea turtle was considered critically endangered until about seven years ago, with many scientists considering the species extinct.

Scientists have now discovered that the turtles are once again arriving in the Gulf of Fonseca, a large body of water in western Central America that is shared by Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

"We know the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill turtle is arriving in the Gulf of Fonseca, but we do not know why, nor do we know if its life cycle has changed - if a large number stay in the gulf - or if it is due to food, nesting or even why they live here," [Honduran Natural Resources and Environment Secretariat director of biodiversity Rafael Amaro] Garcia said.

Climate change is one possible cause of the resurgence of the sea turtle population. Read more here.

Photo: An Indo-Pacific hawksbill sea turtle.

Fungal threats to honeybees and bats have been in the news lately, but they're not the only species at risk from these human-spread diseases. Snakes and amphibians, too, are facing catastrophic effects from these emerging pathogens.

From the Washington Post:

They are fungi, and they arrived in the United States from overseas with an assist from humans — through travel and trade. They prefer cold conditions and kill with precision, so efficiently that they’re creating a crisis in the wild.

The death toll on amphibians, bats and snakes from fungi represents “potential extinction events,” said [Dr. Jeremy] Coleman, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife research biologist who coordinates the government’s response to the bat-killing infection known as white-nose syndrome. It’s so large, he said, that it can’t be measured “as far as numbers of dead organisms,” and is “decimating populations as we know them.”

Read more here.

Photo: USFWS

Check out this video "Female Nosy Faly Delivery," submitted by kingsnake.com user 1Sun.
Submit your own reptile & amphibian videos at http://www.kingsnake.com/video/ and you could see them featured here or check out all the videos submitted by other users!

In what has to be the dreamiest, most romantic reptile-related news story, ever, scientists report that Amazonian butterlifes drink the tears of turtles.

From LiveScience.com:

The sight of butterflies flocking onto the heads of yellow-spotted river turtles in the western Amazon rain forest is not uncommon, at least if one is able to sneak up on the skittish reptiles. But the reason why butterflies congregate onto the turtles may be stranger than you think: to drink their tears.

The butterflies are likely attracted to the turtles' tears because the liquid drops contain salt, specifically sodium, an important mineral that is scant in the western Amazon, said Phil Torres, a scientist who does much of his research at the Tambopata Research Center in Peru and is associated with Rice University.

Unlike butterflies, turtles get plenty of sodium through their largely carnivorous diet.

Read the rest here.

Photo: Jeff Cremer / Perunature.com

Is the Prairie rattlesnake (Crotalus Viridis) losing his rattle?

Terry Phillip, a naturalist at Reptile Gardens in Rapid City, thinks so. Check out this audio clip and transcript of an NPR story and tell us if you agree.



Photo by kingsnake.com user DKT.

Congratulations to the Houston Zoo for their third clutch of Madagascar big-headed turtle babies to hatch -- another landmark in the first time this species has reproduced in an institution accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.



Check out more photos of the babies on the Houston Zoo's blog!

No matter how much you love snakes, this homeowner's plight might be too much for you.

From the Carroll County News:

Sometime after July 23, property owner Jess Christensen started noticing a lot of snake activity in the evening around his house, located on County Road 717 just north of Metalton.

"Really what really hit me was how close they were to the house," Christensen said. "I just looked at the statistics and knew that one day I will be bitten if I don't do anything, so I thought to get a professional opinion about it."

So he called Dale Ertel, who runs the educational exhibit Snake World and helps people remove dangerous snakes from their property. Ertel has been collecting snakes for over 50 years, he said. He got his first venomous snake when he was 15 and has been bitten by nonpoisonous snakes countless times. He has been bitten only once by a venomous snake, a diamond back that he still owns.

"The first time he called, he said he'd seen over a dozen in his yard," Ertel said. "So a friend of mine and I went out there the following night and we found over 12 that first night, and we have been back several times since, and it seems like every time we have gone back we are finding at least 12 [copperheads]."

Ertel's friend counted more than 118 snakes collected from Christensen's property.

Read the full story here.

Photo by kingsnake.com user cochran.

No matter how much you love snakes, finding one in the toilet at Starbucks is gonna give you a shock.

From Fox4kc.com:

Snakes in unexpected places can startle anyone. For Bruce Ahlswede the unexpected place was a San Antonio Starbucks bathroom, where he had stopped on Tuesday after a business presentation.

He froze for a moment thinking the snake, lying across the toilet, was a toy left by a prankster.

Then it started to move. He backed out of the room and found a store employee.
"I said "Hey you've got a snake in your bathroom and she’s kind of freaking out,'" Ahlswede told CNN affiliate KSAT. Bruce, his wife and store employees all crowded into the bathroom and watched as the snake, perhaps just as surprised as the rest, slithered around the toilet bowl and disappeared, the station reported.

While originally identified as a python (of course), knowledgeable experts believe it was a rat snake. Read more here.

When it comes to snakes, "protection" apparently equals "death."

Check out the final paragraph of a news story out of Norway today, about just under 200 pythons who were seized in a police raid in Oslo:

The snakes and other reptiles were turned over to animal protection authorities at state agency Mattilsynet, but were expected to be put to death.

Setting aside the blistering ignorance about snakes evident from the rest of the police statements, and the massive over-reaction to the mere existence of these snakes, and even setting aside the culpability of anyone who smuggles and keeps illegal animals, what exactly did the snakes do to deserve death?

Will Norwegian officials attempt to find some non-lethal solution? Will they appeal to the international reptile community for help?

And if not, could they at least stop pretending these animals were being "protected"?

A mysterious disease wiped out nearly all fire salamanders in the Netherlands, even those taken into captivity to protect them. Now scientists have identified the fungus responsible, and warned it could spread to amphibians around the world.

From Scientific American:

But now the cause of the fire salamanders’ rapid decline has been revealed. According to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fire salamanders in the Netherlands contracted a previously unknown fungus related to Bd, the fungus that causes chytridiomycosis. The paper dubs the new fungus Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans spec. nov. It causes superficial erosions on the salamanders’ skin, followed by deep ulcerations and microscopic skin necrosis. Captive-bred amphibians which the scientists exposed to the fungus died in as little as seven days.

"At this moment we don’t know the origin of the fungus," says the paper’s lead author, An Martel of the Department of Pathology, Bacteriology and Avian Diseases at Ghent University. "It can be an endemic species that became virulent or it can be an invasive species that was introduced in the Netherlands. Worldwide monitoring can give us an answer to this question. But still, if the fungus would spread a lot of amphibian populations are at risk."

Read more here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user caecilianman02

If you want a Gardiner’s Seychelles frog to hear what you have to say, tell him to forget his ears and open his mouth.

From NatGeo:

Scientists had thought that the Gardiner’s Seychelles frog—at 11 millimeters among the tiniest in the world—was deaf because it doesn’t have a middle ear, a critical component of hearing that’s found most land animals.

[...]

So the scientists x-rayed one of the tiny frogs. The images revealed that the frogs’ pulmonary system is poorly developed, suggesting that the lungs aren’t contributing to hearing, according to the study, published September 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So the scientists refocused their experiments on the frogs’ heads. By making various 3-D simulations of how sound travels through the frogs’ heads, the scientists found that the bones in their mouths act as an amplifier for sound waves.

Read the rest here.
Photo: R. Boistel/CNRS