It's a specialized culvert built in Germany, which has small holes at roadway level to allow sunlight to get into the tunnel.

The location was picked after the MN Herpetological Society documented a large number of turtle crossings which were deemed hazardous to both turtles and motorists, who were stopping on the two-lane highway to avoid hitting them.

The $50,000 price is paid for with a $10,000 grant from the University of Minnesota, a $37,000 grant from the DNR's Legacy funding, and $3,000 from the Herpetological Society.

Stephen Loman and William Sargent know more than most just how closely we live with snakes. Although the pair balk at the term snake hunter, they have been rescuing, photographing and releasing snakes in the wild in Hong Kong for decades.Stephen Loman and William Sargent

In that time, Loman, a finance professional, and Sargent, a race organiser, have caught and released more than 1,000 snakes and suffered hundreds of bites.

Even so, both argue - and experts agree - that the fear of snakes is often misplaced. "Snakes get a bad reputation," says Sargent. "A lot of people don't know much about snakes. That fear or ignorance leads to killing snakes for no real reason."

In his experience, it is humans who are a menace to snakes, not the other way around. According to the Hospital Authority there hasn't been any death attributed to a snake bite in more than 20 years although Hong Kong has some particularly venomous species such as the banded krait, Chinese cobra, coral snake and the red-necked keelback.

Dying from a snake bite, even from the most poisonous species, is "very rare" in Hong Kong for several reasons, Lau explains. The city is small, has good infrastructure, and a high standard of medical care. No matter where someone is bitten in Hong Kong, they are never more than an hour away from hospital, and all major hospitals carry antivenom.

What happens when you throw bones to a group of American alligators? This isn’t a question for late night horror movies, but for science.

Standing behind a safety barrier at Florida’s St. Augustine Alligator Farm, University of Tennessee paleontologist Stephanie Drumheller tossed skeletonized cow legs to a crush of curious alligators. Over and over again, the armored archosaurs rushed in to snap at the morsels, and with every bite they left the predatory hallmarks in the form of punctures and scrapes. These traces were what Drumheller was after. Through understanding the damage modern alligators leave on bones, Drumheller and other paleontologists can follow the depredations of alligators and their croc cousins through time.

This process is rarely found in mammalian cells and this has been suggested as the basis for their poor regenerative abilities. But clearly, unraveling the mechanisms underlying this reprogramming is central to understanding why certain vertebrates can regenerate their limbs while others can’t, and how to repeat this process in humans.

If we were able to crack this puzzle, it could lead to strategies to enhance the reprogramming of cells from patients, and to better understand their disease and design appropriate cures.

We recently found a critical component of the reprogramming mechanism. In our study, published in Stem Cell Reports, we demonstrated that the sustained activation of a molecular pathway (a group of molecules in a cell that work together to control a particular function or functions) – called the ERK pathway – plays a key role during the natural reprogramming of salamander muscle cells. Only when the ERK pathway is constantly switched “on” are the cells able to re-enter the cell cycle, which is key to their regenerative potential.

The best way to prevent a disease from turning into an epidemic is to closely monitor its development and put systems in place before it starts spreading rapidly through populations. This requires surveillance and monitoring of the disease and disease populations. This is fine for populations of livestock, or humans, but tends to be a neglected area when it comes to animals in the wild. There are plenty of examples of devastating diseases that have ranged through wild-animal populations relatively unchecked until the later stages as they were simply not caught early enough.

An example is the fungal skin infection of frogs (chytridiomycosis) which absolutely decimated amphibians, wiping out about 200 frog species world wide. Yet investigations into the disease didn’t start until 15 years after its initial appearance.

The scientists said in a new study, published in the journal Nature Communications on Wednesday, that during the Mesozoic era, about 252 to 66 million years ago, the seas were full of reptiles like the nothosaur. While scientists knew that these creatures were predators with long bodies and paddle-like limbs, exactly how they used their limbs to propel themselves through water was unknown. Now, recently discovered trackways on an ancient seabed in Yunnan province in southwestern China, have helped scientists find an answer.

Like several of the state's recognized symbols, the beginnings of the wood frog push came in an elementary school classroom. Sen. John DeFrancisco, R-Syracuse, first introduced the bill last year after 9-year-old Lili Winkelman, a Skaneateles fourth-grader, wrote to him with the idea.

"You probably don't know this, but the wood frog is already the unofficial amphibian of the state," DeFrancisco said on the Senate floor. "A young girl in that class, Lili Winkelman, thought, why is that? She loves frogs. Why should it be unofficial?"

Winkelman followed up the letter with a 4 -1/2-minute YouTube video in January, in which she spoke about the unique qualities of the amphibian as photos of the frog float above her right shoulder — not unlike a television news anchor. Each of her classmates at Skaneateles' State Street Intermediate School followed up with a letter, DeFrancisco said.

Even with unlimited cash, it seems impossible to eradicate certain intruders without also harming native species. Small but pervasive species, like rats, are extremely difficult to target without catching resident wildlife in the crossfire. In 2012, 22 tons of rat bait were dropped by helicopter on Pinzon island, blanketing 7 square miles with little blue poisonous cubes. Several organizations, including the Galapagos National Park and CDF, supported the move because the rats had been devouring the eggs of native giant tortoises and lava lizards. But the “raticide” sparked significant controversy, imperiling neighboring native species like the Galapagos hawks. While pesticides are often the best available option (biological interventions are technically challenging to develop), they cannot suppress invasive species without causing side effects.

The final piece of the puzzle, after thwarting new invasive species and removing existing ones, is actively helping endemic species recover. Some local fauna, like the tortoise and the mangrove finch, have been so decimated that they may be destined for extinction without significant help. On the other hand, Giant Tortoise rehabilitation is one example of seemingly productive human intervention. When tortoise populations had dwindled from thousands to dozens on some islands in the 1960s, they were taken in by humans and bred in captivity. Repatriation projects on Santa Cruz, Isabela, and Espanola have increased total tortoise populations to 26,000, but the current dependence on human assistance sparks questions about whether the intervention itself is unnatural, or unsustainable. Although the repatriated tortoises have begun to mate by themselves in the wild, it is unclear if they can maintain their numbers once captive breeding stops.

The venomous species is thought to be a primitive viper species because it has an elliptically shaped, flattened head; enlarged head plates; smooth dorsal scales; folding front fangs; the absence of heat-sensing pits; and a coiled venom gland duct in adults.

The species can be found in dense bamboo and tree-fern groves interspersed with open, sun-lit zones, and usually inhabits deep leaf litter that accumulates near fallen trees. Its diet consists mostly of rodents that are associated with quick-flowing mountain streams. The genus is known to inhabit cooler mountainous areas at altitudes of up to 1000 m, as well as disturbed areas, including agricultural lands and secondary forests.

It was 16 feet (4.8 meters) long and tipped the scales at 900 lbs. (408 kilograms). With a blunt snout and powerful bite, it ate turtles and battled monster snakes. Now this extinct dyrosaur, a type of crocodilian, which roamed an ancient rainforest a few million years after the dinosaurs died, has a scientific name.

It's called Anthracosuchus balrogus after the fiery Balrog that lurked deep in the Middle-Earth mines of Moria in J.R.R. Tolkien's novel "The Lord of the Rings."

Dozens of nearly complete skeletons of prehistoric marine reptiles have been uncovered near a melting glacier in southern Chile.

Scientists found 46 specimens from four different species of extinct ichthyosaurs. These creatures, whose Greek name means "fish lizards," were a group of large, fast-swimming marine reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era, about 245 million to 90 million years ago.

The newly discovered skeletons are from both embryos and adults. The creatures, likely killed during a series of catastrophic mudslides, were preserved in deep-sea sediments that were later exposed by the melting glacier, the researchers said in the study, published May 22 in the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin.

Curtin University’s Dr Bill Bateman and Murdoch University’s A/Professor Trish Fleming say their findings support the hypothesis that while increasing the frequency of attack, brightly-coloured tails divert predatory attention away from the head and body, ultimately increasing a lizard’s chance of survival.

To test the theory, they created 48 models of a scincid lizard, half of which were coloured all brown, and half given blue tails.

Pairs of blue-tailed and all-brown lizards were placed in 24 locations, with pairs 300 metres apart, and individuals 25 metres apart, in semi-open conditions on white sand or leaf litter.

Over a week, the researchers assessed damage and damage location daily, recording attacks at 23 of 24 locations, with 65 incidences in total, 60 of which were attributed to birds.

The researchers found that all-brown models suffered an attack to the tail only twice, while blue-tailed models lost their tails on 11 occasions.

The all-brown models were also more frequently attacked on the head and body, which would likely be fatal for a real lizard.

Years ago, Reptile Gardens Public Relations Director Johnny Brockelsby, son of the founder, sent documentation to Guinness of the more than 200 species housed at the attraction. But he never heard a word.

This month, someone mentioned that the 260-page 2014 edition of the venerable record book featured Reptile Gardens and Brockelsby immediately ran out and bought a copy.

“I was shocked but absolutely thrilled,” Brockelsby said Thursday. “We have always claimed we were the world’s largest, but everybody claims they are the biggest this or the biggest that. But when the new book came out naming us the largest reptile collection in the world, it immediately gave us credibility.”

The existing dead sample was assumed to be a labelling error and the snake was largely struck from taxonomic registries.

But Daniel Mulcahy, a researcher for the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, suspected it might still exist. He and Juan Martinez Gomez of Mexico's Ecology Institute set out to find it.

Martinez Gomez, an expert on the Revillagigedo Islands, noted the islands change a lot from season to season, so they timed the expedition last May to replicate Beebe's steps as they looked for the snake, which blends in with the island's rock formations and is largely active at night. And they used Beebe's original field notes as a guide.

"Basically, following those directions, we essentially put ourselves in his place," Martinez Gomez said.

One of his graduate students, Juan Alberto Cervantes, was the first to spot one of the snakes for the first time since 1936.

The researchers performed DNA analysis to establish the long, dark spotted snake as its own species and see where it had come from.