The young woman has been pushing the bill for five years now, and last year, it passed the Senate on a 33-2 vote. But it never got a committee hearing in the House. “In all fairness to her, we were really at the end of the session last year, and we had an awful lot to do,” Loertscher said. “It doesn’t mean that I’m going to vote for it, but in fairness to her, I thought it should be heard.” He said he’s expecting to set a hearing on the bill for early next week.

“I think that the Idaho giant salamander is the best candidate to represent our state,” Ilah told the State Affairs Committee this morning. “It has ‘Idaho’ in its name. The pattern on its skin looks like a topographical map of the Bitterroot Mountains. And it makes its home almost exclusively in Idaho.” She called the salamander an “intriguing animal” and said its designation as a state symbol could help engage students, like her, in learning about Idaho.

The new species is named Kurixalus motokawai to honor Dr. Masaharu Motokawa from Kyoto University. He is a researcher of mammals and has made many contributions to the study and conservation of biodiversity in Vietnam.

This is the second species of Kurixalus tree frog discovered in the Central Highlands in 2014, bringing the total number of species of tree frog in Vietnam to 73, accounting for 20% of all species of tree frogs of the world.

"This specimen is really rare," said Modesto, who was the principal investigator of the project. "It's the only specimen we know of from this particular part of the Carboniferous and it's the only reptile from that slice of time."

The research will be published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Wednesday.

Modesto said the fossil was discovered by a boy and his family on their farmland in Prince County, P.E.I., more than 14 years ago. It was taken to the Royal Ontario Museum in 2004 and about four years ago, Modesto and his team started their research.

The fossil, erpetonyx arsenaultorum, was named after the Arsenault family who made the discovery.

Dean thinks the snake may have been curled up in a pair of thick socks which he had also bought on Saturday’s shopping trip.

He added: “I think it’s maybe been keeping warm in them before coming out once I arrived back.”

Wayne Mailer, who runs Dragons Den Exotic Pets in Newcastle, said: “Looking at the picture, this appears to be an Amery Corn Snake.

“I think it’s probably only a hatchling maybe only a few weeks old . At the minute it doesn’t appear to be in the best of health, probably due to the cold weather.

“More than likely, it is an escapee pet.”

Using four different species of leaf litter frogs, they replicated and sampled 10 plots per year, using a plot survey technique of total leaf litter removal within each plot. They measured and sampled annual species diversity and community composition once a year during March, during the dry season, at the Organization of Tropical Studies Las Cruces Biological Station in southern Costa Rica.

Their findings were surprising in that strictly terrestrial frog species (i.e., they do not breed in water) can be influenced by extreme rainfall events much like their aquatic-breeding counterparts. The researchers discovered that species diversity and the community structure changed negatively in dramatic fashion from the two pre-La Niña years compared to the onset of the La Niña event in 2010.

The altered community structure due to extreme rainfall lasted for over 20 months. During that time, all four leaf litter frog species declined in number and several measures revealed marked changes in the community structure in terms of both plot diversity and occupancy.

Some scientists are raising concerns about the practice. Little is known about the region's sea snakes, including what species and how many live there, so it's not clear whether the harvest is sustainable.

An overharvest, these researchers worry, could jeopardize potential medicinal discoveries. Compounds in venom, once processed and administered in controlled amounts, can be beneficial in treating human ailments like heart disease.

The sea snake catch—a side job for the region's Vietnamese squid fishers—takes in over 80 tons (73 metric tons) of the marine reptile annually. That's roughly 225,500 individual sea snakes per year, valued at over $3 million.

"The I.cardamomensis species is only the second caecilian species ever discovered in Cambodia. The other is the striped Koa Tao Island caecilian, I. kohtaoensis, which is also found in, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.

These discoveries are important to demonstrate that much of Cambodia's biodiversity remains unknown and unstudied by science, and many more areas need to be searched," Thy said.

The forested Cardamom Mountains Range represents some of the largest remaining areas of habitat for more than 80 threatened species, including Asian elephant and gaur.

Thy said in recent years the Cardamom region had revealed its extensive reptile and amphibian diversity, including frogs, turtles, lizards and crocodiles.

Scientists from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) are working toward the development of a universal anti-venom that can be used for the bite of all of the snakes in sub-Saharan Africa with the aid of a new technique dubbed antivenomics.

The technique can help improve the potency of extracting snake venom and thus the potency of the antidote. Scientists hope that this breakthrough could help save thousands of lives per year.

In sub-Saharan Africa, snake bites cause the death of 32,000 people per year. Some of those who manage to survive likewise suffer from serious effects with snake bites permanently disabling 96,000 people in the region annually.

A new species of frog (Limnonectes larvaepartus) has been discovered in the rain forest of Sulawesi island in Indonesia. This species challenges the grade-school wisdom that taught us: ‘frogs lay eggs’. It looks like textbooks will need to be revised as this is the only known exception to that rule. Study author Dr. Jimmy McGuire (University of California, Berkeley) said the following as quoted in Reuters, “Reproduction in most frogs could not be more different from human reproduction. In this case, what is most interesting, ironically, is that the reproductive mode is more similar to our own.”

The rare reptile species are known as "radiated tortoises" and found only in Madagascar, customs officials said. The one-of-a-kind pattern on their shell case makes them precious for collectors.

The baby reptiles, 15 of which had died, were discovered in a crate carrying sea cucumbers on December 14. The officials added that "particularly unsuitable conditions of transport," was the cause of their death.

Those that have survived have been transported to Tortoise Village in France's southeastern Var region.

If she and Cherkiss are correct, then the Lower Keys have joined the Everglades as home to breeding populations of alligators and crocodiles.

Unlike the Upper and Middle Keys, the Lower Keys have long been home to a small community of alligators. The famed Everglades denizen is one of the main draws at Blue Hole, an old railroad quarry in the Key Deer refuge that has evolved into a rainfall-fueled freshwater lake. Alligators also make homes on other parts of Big Pine, as well as surrounding Lower Keys islands, where the limestone bedrock is of a less porous variety than the keystone bedrock of the northern island chain. As a result, those islands retain enough freshwater during the dry season to provide acceptable, if not especially good, habitat for freshwater-dependent alligators.

Lower Keys promoters now can decide whether to follow the path of Everglades backers by promoting the fact the area harbors both alligators and crocodiles. After all, the area already focuses much of its marketing resources around its attributes as an ecotourist destination.

Lizards don’t get much bigger than the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), which can reach three meters in length and may weigh as much as 70 kilograms. But not every member of the Varanus genus is a giant. Scientists in Australia last month unveiled the newest Varanus species and it’s as small as the Komodo is large. The newly discovered Dampier Peninsula goanna (V. sparnus) is just 23 centimeters long and 16 grams in weight. That’s about the size of a human hand, which would barely count as a nibble for a hungry Komodo dragon.

“We are trying to develop a university-based nonprofit that’s a global leader for reptilian and amphibian conservation and herpetology,” said Chris Jenkins, chief executive officer of The Orianne Society and an adjunct faculty member at The Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. “If you look at different types of mammals and birds you’ll find that the entities working to provide conservation and manage those populations is numerous, but there’s nowhere near as many working for reptiles and amphibians.”

The Orianne Society approaches conservation in three ways — research, conservation and boots-on-the-ground work such as purchasing land, managing and restoring habitats, conducting inventories of animals and reintroducing rare reptiles and amphibians into habitats where they have become extinct.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 200 of the lizards died within a few weeks of being seized due to the "inhumane methods used to ship the animals and the conditions they were held in prior to their arrival in the United States..."

The Detroit Zoological society said in a statement that the lizards are representations of a global wildlife trafficking crisis.

"Many individual animals die in situations like this, and the impacts on wild populations can be catastrophic," Scott Carter, Detroit Zoological Society chief life sciences officer, said in a release. "We are happy to be able to provide great care and permanent sanctuary for these lizards, and to help bring attention to this important wildlife issue."

“It’s a surprising finding,” Dr. Vogel told mongabay.com, “as [the new species] is a large viper, very colorful and superficially different.” It inhabits forested areas between 1,500 and 2,000 meters (5,000 to 6,500 feet) in elevation. This is an important difference from T. sumatranus, which lives on lower, hilly areas rarely above 950 meters (3,000 feet).The difficulty in accessing these high mountain areas, as well as lack of economic interest in developing them, has preserved them from deforestation, according to a 2011 study in Global Change Biology.

“This is a highland species and in Sumatra there is little infrastructure in the higher mountain areas, so I feel it might be safe in the near future,” Vogel said. However, he cautioned its safety is far from secure, saying that its distribution should be more thoroughly studied to help further understanding of the species and its long-term prognosis. He added the region itself deserves more attention, with more endemics possibly awaiting scientific discovery. Vogel, who has discovered other reptile species, is a freelance herpetologist as well as a chemist whose research is self-funded and not tied to any particular institution. For their study, the researchers inspected 53 specimens of T. sumatranus and Trimeresurus hageni, with the primary objective of establishing the differences between them and amend the historical confusion of these two species.

With so much of the fresh water lost to evaporation, what's left is highly concentrated with minerals and very salty. And that has left the turtles in bad shape.

The USGS researchers called Shaffer when they noticed that not only were the turtles lethargic, but some of their heads, feet and shells were coated in a thick white crust of mineral deposits.

"Some of them looked like ceramic turtles," Shaffer said. "Between the biologists who were out there and me, we have a hundred years of turtle experience and we had never seen turtles look like this."

So they mobilized, collecting 60 turtles from the arid lakebed and transporting half to the Turtle Conservancy's captive breeding facility in Ojai, and the other half to UCLA, where Shaffer and his team set up a reptile refugee camp on the roof of the botany building.