By Herp News
British scientists identify a new species of a huge pre-historic reptile and name it after fossil hunter .
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Extinct reptile named for 'lizard king' Jim Morrison
By Herp News
Named for the Doors baritone, B. Morrisoni was one of the largest lizards that ever walked the Earth.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Saving the Tenkile: an expedition to protect one of the most endangered animals you’ve never heard of
By Herp News
The tenkile, or the Scott’s tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus scottae) could be a cross between a koala bear and a puppy. With it’s fuzzy dark fur, long tail and snout, and tiny ears, it’s difficult to imagine a more adorable animal. It’s also difficult to imagine that the tenkile is one of the most endangered species on Earth: only an estimated 300 remain. According to the Tenkile Conservation Alliance (TCA), the tenkile’s trouble stems from a sharp increase of human settlements in the Torricelli mountain range. Once relatively isolated, the tenkile now struggles to avoid hunters and towns while still having sufficient range to live in.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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African militias trading elephant ivory for weapons
By Herp News
The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is using lucrative elephant poaching for ivory to fund its activities, according to a report published on Tuesday. Eyewitness accounts from park rangers, Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) escapees and recent senior defectors report that the fugitive warlord Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, ordered African forest elephants to be killed in Garamba national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the tusks sent to him.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Lizard King: Giant reptile named after Jim Morrison
By Herp News
A giant lizard that lived 40 million years ago at a time when Earth was a hothouse has been named in honour of rock singer Jim Morrison, palaeontologists said on Wednesday.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Lizard King: Extinct lizard named after The Doors' Jim Morrison
By Herp News
KRISTEN BUTLER, UPI.com Giant extinct lizard named after singer Jim “The Lizard King” Morrison of The Doors, called Bearded King Morrison.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Giant lizard named for Jim Morrison tells tale of climate change
By Herp News
When Jason Head happened upon one of the biggest lizards that ever walked on land, he found it fitting to name it after The Doors frontman, Jim Morrison — the original Lizard King.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Extinct giant lizard named after Jim Morrison
By Herp News
A giant lizard that lived 40 million years ago at a time when Earth was a hothouse has been named in honour of rock singer Jim Morrison.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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6ft lizard named after Doors singer
By Herp News
A 6ft-long lizard species that roamed South East Asia some 36-40 million years ago is named after The Doors singer Jim Morrison.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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'Lizard King' fossil shows giant reptiles coexisted with mammals during globally warm past
By Herp News
At nearly six feet long and weighing upwards of 60 pounds, “Morrison's Bearded King” provides new clues on the evolution of plant-eating reptiles and their relationship to global climate and with mammals.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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'Lizard King' Fossil Shows Giant Reptiles Coexisted with Mammals in Globally Warm Past
By Herp News
U.S. paleontologists led by Jason Head of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln announced fossils of giant lizard Barbaturex morrisoni this week. Their analysis shows that it is one of the biggest known lizards ever to have lived on land. They've named the creature after Doors lead singer Jim Morrison.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Real-life 'Lizard King' named for Doors' Jim Morrison
By Herp News
A lizard the size of a German shepherd once roamed Myanmar, a new fossil analysis reveals.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Giant 'lizard king' that roamed the Earth 40 million years ago has been named after The Doors' frontman Jim Morrison
By Herp News
A six-foot long lizard that lived 40 million years ago has been named Barbaturex morrisoni by scientists in Nebraska. It was named after The Doors' singer Jim Morrison who had the nickname the 'Lizard King'.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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'Lizard King' fossil named for dead rock singer, poet
By Herp News
Jim Morrison was a king of sorts, at least in his own mind. The lead singer of the Doors sang in one cover song that he was “a king bee.” In another, he said, “I’m the crawlin’ king snake.” But Morrison most famously wrote in a poem that he was “the Lizard King,” a name that stuck. So naturally, when a paleontologist who happens to be a Doors fan came across the fossil of a giant lizard, one of …
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Blue Turtle Takes on FrontRange
By Herp News
FrontRange, the only provider of Hybrid IT Service Management solutions, today announced that it has selected Blue Turtle Technologies as its Master VAR for the African region.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Cage furniture: A tale of romance and seduction
Years ago, when I first moved to Florida, my then-boyfriend took me out to look for cage furniture. We needed pieces of dead wood, curled tubes of bark, odd bits of driftwood, clumps of moss, the sort of item that helps turn a cage from “pathetic” to “that’ll do.”
The boyfriend was living in north Tampa, not too far from wooded areas and the Hillsborough River, and he was a herper (required) so I was pretty sure he’d know good areas to look.
On that day, we parked by SR 301 (then a tiny two lane) and walked into the woods. We had really good luck and within a few hours our arms were laden with exactly the right sort of stuff. I said OK, let’s head back. My boyfriend looked at me as if I suddenly was speaking German. “Head back?” he said. “Which direction?” A short silence followed while I just l looked at him. He gave a short embarrassed laugh. “The last time I did this, I had to spend the night and then find my way out by the sound of traffic.”
I thought, this was the all-time clumsiest effort at seduction I have ever seen. Spend the night in the woods indeed, and there’s not even a tent? Was this guy for real?
Continue reading “Cage furniture: A tale of romance and seduction” …read more
Read more here: King Snake
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Monitor lizards under threat in Southeast Asia
Pressures from the pet and fashion industries are straining monitor lizards in Southeast Asia.
From Live Science:
Some laws are in place to protect the dragon-like creatures from unsustainable hunting and harvesting for the exotic pet trade. But a new study warns that dealers may be overexploiting the reptiles, taking advantage of the scant information conservations have on many of these species in the wild.
In a report in the journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology, researchers assessed the distribution, threats and conservation status of species of monitor lizards that live in Southeast Asia and New Guinea.
[…]
Study researcher Mark Auliya, of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Conservation (UFZ) in Leipzig, explained in a statement that the lizards draw high profits because of their looks and rarity.
“Quite often four-digit amounts are paid, for pairs occasionally even five-digit sums,” Auliya said. “Even the large Komodo dragons are illegally traded, although international trade regulations under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) do not permit commercial trade of wild specimens of this species.”
Read more here.
Photo: André Koch/Live Science
…read more
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Real-Life 'Lizard King' Named for Doors' Jim Morrison
By Herp News
A lizard the size of a German shepherd once roamed Myanmar, a new fossil analysis reveals.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Reptile show at Weston
By Herp News
Get up close and personal to a reptile at Baytree Garden Centre at Weston on Saturday.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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A diamond by any other name is… ?
This “little project,” or more accurately long term fact-finding mission, started out years ago after several seasons of seeing my diamond pythons breed but not having my females ovulate. Why was this happening? What was I doing incorrectly? Well, I still don’t have the answer to these two questions, but while I was meditating on them I started the current project.
Diamonds are the southeastern most race of carpet pythons or, more correctly, carpets are more northerly and westerly races of the diamond python. It is well documented that diamond pythons at the northerly end of their range intergrade with the southernmost coastal carpet pythons. And, unlike the difficult diamond pythons, the southern carpets are easily bred. How about the diamond-coastal intergrades? Time to find out.
Pure diamond male
So I enlisted the help of Will Bird, owner and cage slave to a wonderfully varied collection of herps at Extraordinary Ectotherms. Will bred diamond and carpet pythons of varying lineages. To give the project a head start I borrowed a couple of first generation diamond-carpet babies and we were on our way.
Female 75 percent pure diamond
The babies matured and were successfully bred to one of my full blooded diamond males. She laid a few eggs amd voila, I had babies that carried 75 percent diamond genes. They matured and were bred to another diamond male and this year I have hatchlings with 87.5 percent diamond genes.
Newly hatched 87.5 percent diamonds, 2013
If continued, when these babies mature, the project will produce snakes having 93.75 percent diamond genes followed next generation by babies that are 96.865 percent diamonds. I’m hoping that these higher percentage diamonds remain easily bred, and I know they will look like pure diamonds. Ease of breeding added to the beauty of the diamond python should interest many hobbyists, old and new alike.
Continue reading “A diamond by any other name is… ?” …read more
Read more here: King Snake
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Veterinarian performs surgery on rattlesnake
It’s not every veterinarian who can say he’s performed surgery on a rattlesnake. Dr. Scott MacLachlan in Poultney, VT, can, however.
From Vermont NPR’s Ted Levin:
During the spring of 2011, the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife in collaboration with the Orianne Society and The Nature Conservancy began a two-year study of the summer range of the timber rattlesnake in western Rutland County.
To that end, transmitters were implanted in the body cavity of twenty-two adult snakes. From late spring through early autumn, the snakes were radio tracked across rough terrain west of Otter Creek. Now that that phase of the project has ended, and Dr. MacLachlan, who had inserted the transmitters, is removing them, as well as taking skin and blood samples from each rattlesnake to check for pathogens.
The day I observed the procedure, the operating room was well lit , with a sink in one corner flanked on both sides by a pink linoleum countertop. The floor was a soft white and textured like the back of a snake. There were cupboards, tanks, computers, glass-fronted cabinets filled with a diversity of surgical instruments, and an aluminum operating table situated beneath a hose descending from the ceiling. The hose, called a gas scavenger, delivers both anesthesia to put the snake to sleep and oxygen to bring it back. There’s a heating pad covered by a blue terry-cloth towel on the operating table to keep the snakes warm.
Read more here; watch video here. …read more
Read more here: King Snake
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Tortoise Energy Capital Corp. Provides Unaudited Balance Sheet Information and Asset Coverage Ratio Update as of May …
By Herp News
Tortoise Energy Capital Corp. today announced that as of May 31, 2013, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $1.0 billion and its unaudited net asset
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Tortoise North American Energy Corp. Provides Unaudited Balance Sheet Information and Asset Coverage Ratio Update as …
By Herp News
Tortoise North American Energy Corp. today announced that as of May 31, 2013, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $252.1 million and its unaudited n
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Tortoise Pipeline & Energy Fund, Inc. Provides Unaudited Balance Sheet Information and Asset Coverage Ratio Update as …
By Herp News
Tortoise Pipeline & Energy Fund, Inc. today announced that as of May 31, 2013, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $372.5 million and its unaudi
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Tortoise Power and Energy Infrastructure Fund, Inc. Provides Unaudited Balance Sheet Information and Asset Coverage …
By Herp News
Tortoise Power and Energy Infrastructure Fund, Inc. today announced that as of May 31, 2013, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $228.9 million and
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Tortoise Energy Independence Fund, Inc. Provides Unaudited Balance Sheet Information and Asset Coverage Ratio Update …
By Herp News
Tortoise Energy Independence Fund, Inc. today announced that as of May 31, 2013, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $412.7 million and its unaudite
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Tortoise MLP Fund, Inc. Provides Unaudited Balance Sheet Information and Asset Coverage Ratio Update as of May 31, 2013
By Herp News
Tortoise MLP Fund, Inc. today announced that as of May 31, 2013, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $1.9 billion and its unaudited net asset value
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Tortoise Energy Infrastructure Corp. Provides Unaudited Balance Sheet Information and Asset Coverage Ratio Update as …
By Herp News
Tortoise Energy Infrastructure Corp. today announced that as of May 31, 2013, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $2.0 billion and its unaudited net
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Threatened frogs palmed off as forests disappear
By Herp News
The study describes how forests converted to palm oil plantations are causing threatened forest dwelling frogs to vanish, resulting in an overall loss of habitat that is important for the conservation of threatened frog species in the region.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Scientists describe over 100 new beetles from New Guinea
By Herp News
In a single paper, a team of researchers have succinctly described 101 new species of weevils from New Guinea, more than doubling the known species in the beetle genus, Trigonopterus. Since describing new species is hugely laborious and time-intensive, the researchers turned to a new method of species description known as ‘turbo-taxonomy,’ which employs a mix of DNA-sequencing and taxonomic expertise to describe species more rapidly.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Scientists describe over 100 new beetles from New Guinea
By Herp News
In a single paper, a team of researchers have succinctly described 101 new species of weevils from New Guinea, more than doubling the known species in the beetle genus, Trigonopterus. Since describing new species is hugely laborious and time-intensive, the researchers turned to a new method of species description known as ‘turbo-taxonomy,’ which employs a mix of DNA-sequencing and taxonomic expertise to describe species more rapidly.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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'Reptile Guy' scheduled to appear in court
By Herp News
A man accused of animal neglect is scheduled to appear before a judge on Monday.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Why numbers matter when it comes to saving frogs
Want to do something about declining amphibian populations? It’s as easy as 1-2-3.
Karen Lips is an amphibian ecologist and tropical biologist. She recently wrote a Live Science op-ed about her experience tracking frog populations in Panama, and those of other scientists doing the same thing around the world, showing devastating declines in frog numbers.
She wrote:
What was most concerning was that even widespread species we thought were relatively stable were declining. This matches with the many stories I hear from concerned citizens who say that they don’t see or hear as many frogs in their backyards as they used to. Because those scientists spent the time to count amphibians, they were they able to detect the slow loss in those populations.
We need more studies like these that can go beyond the distribution of threats and can show us how amphibian populations respond to disease so that we can design appropriate conservation and management actions to protect those species.
For example, if population declines are slow and steady, we might have time to experiment with different management practices; but if populations are declining quickly, we might need to establish captive assurance colonies or take tissues for cryopreservation to protect evolutionary lineages.
Likewise, we need to know which age class, sex or subpopulation might be the limiting step in population recovery. If the problem is in the tadpole stage and none survive to become adults, then we might want to design a reintroduction program that adds more adults to the system. If adults are very rare, we might do better to add hundreds of eggs, tadpoles or juveniles to jumpstart recovery.
Numbers are also critical, she said, because the “IUCN Redlist makes decisions on the level of species endangerment based on the number of individuals and the number of populations, and how quickly those numbers are going up or down. The official listing of species is the first step in prioritizing research and conservation efforts to address those threats, and is used to dedicate funding and other resources.”
What can you do as an individual? Contribute data to online databases like http://www.inaturalist.org, or get involved in other citizen scientist projects, she advised.
“Whether the frogs are increasing or decreasing,” Lips wrote, “we need to know: Just how many frogs are there?”
Read the full story here.
Photo: Conservation International-Colombia/Marco Rada …read more
Read more here: King Snake
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Reptile had power to block economic progress
By Herp News
You know how some issues and things have legs?
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Herp Video of the Week: Perfect Bearded Dragon
Check out this video “The Perfect Bearded Dragon,” submitted by kingsnake.com user oregonsnakes.
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! …read more
Read more here: King Snake
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Turtle Beach Announces Acton As Distribution Partner In China
By Herp News
– Acton will help Turtle Beach meet the growing Chinese consumer demand for video game accessories VALHALLA, New York, June 3, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Turtle Beach( http://www.turtlebeach.com ), leading audio …
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Turtle Beach Announces Acton As Distribution Partner In China
By Herp News
– Acton will help Turtle Beach meet the growing Chinese consumer demand for video game accessories VALHALLA, New York, June 3, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Turtle Beach( http://www.turtlebeach.com ), leading audio …
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Turtle Beach Announces Acton As Distribution Partner In China
By Herp News
VALHALLA, N.Y., June 2, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – Turtle Beach , leading audio brand in games, today announced the appointment of Acton as the exclusive distributor of Turtle Beach gaming headsets in China. …
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Turtle nesting season off to slow start in most of Collier, south Lee
By Herp News
Turtle nesting season took a hit in 2012 at the start of hurrcane season but ended up as a good year. This year, there is a low start.
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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Tortoise Power and Energy Infrastructure Fund, Inc. Provides Section 19(a) Notice
By Herp News
This notice provides stockholders of Tortoise Power and Energy Infrastructure Fund, Inc. with information regarding the distribution paid on May 31, 2013 and cumulative
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