Lepidosaurophilia

A celebration of Lepidosauria (Haeckel, 1866) through pictures and words.

[exotic-venom]

A white-lipped island pit viper from Komodo Island. (Trimeresurus albolabris insularis)

[biomorphosis]

This is a ghostly web-footed gecko, they can be found and perfectly camouflage among the powdery reddish sands of the Namib Desert, their primary habitat.These geckos have adapted their webbed feet not only to help them stay atop, but to bury beneath the dunes of the Namib Desert. Strictly nocturnal lizards, they spend the day in self-dug burrows and emerge at night to feed.

Their bloodshot-looking eyes are massively oversized to help them detect prey, which includes crickets, grasshoppers, and small spiders. They move surprisingly quickly across the sand, and adhesive pads on their toes make them excellent climbers.

People sometimes hunt these tiny lizards for food, and human encroachment is destroying some of its habitat. Their estimated lifespan in the wild is about five years.

[252mya]

Varanus sp.

Artwork by Lucas Lima

Before the Pleistocene glaciation happened, komodo dragon’s relatives lived as far north as Europe. Multiple monitor fossils from the early Miocene to late Pleistocene have been discovered from various sites in Greece.

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252MYA creates custom-made artwork for private collections and editorial, scientific, or educational project.

[superbnature]

Chinese moccasin by mgelric http://ift.tt/2rAZ9f3

[exotic-venom]

Naja haje - Egyptian cobra

[exotic-venom]

(Crotalus mitchellii mitchellii) - San Lucan speckled rattlesnake

Endemic to Mexico, in Baja California Sur and on the islands of Santa Margarita, Cerralvo, Espíritu Santo, San José, Monserrate, and Carmen

[kaijutegu]

Galapagos Conservancy Newsroom

GNPD monitors rare pink iguanas of Wolf Volcano

Super exciting news if you like iguanas, the color pink, or both! The pink iguanas have a very limited range and in the past there hasn’t been a full-scale study of them or their habits. There’s been some monitoring trips to get counts of the population, but this study hopes to get some information about things like nesting sites and movements. This is the first step in establishing a captive breeding program for this rare species- there’s only about 300 of them, and they live on one mountain, so any catastrophe could cause a massive genetic bottleneck. But by taking the steps to create a captive refugium population, the Galapagos Conservancy can preserve this species’ genetic diversity as a contingency plan against threats to the species.

[amagard]

Anolis auratus by Wilmer Quiceno Via Flickr: Fotografía macro de una lagartija Anolis auratus, tomada en el Hotel Tinamú, Vereda San Peregrino, Manizales (Caldas) © Wilmer Quiceno Agradecimientos a nuestros amigos del Hotel Tinamú Birding Nature Reserve

[romkids]

The real palaeo diet. 

We have a few fossil ammonites on display at the Museum with mosasaur bite marks. 

#museumweek

[alphynix]

Unsolved Paleo Mysteries Month #12 – Muddled Mosasaurs

Numerous groups of reptiles have “returned to the water” and become aquatic over the last three hundred million years, but tracing their direct ancestry can be surprisingly difficult. Highly modified and specialized anatomy, lack of transitional forms, and similar features convergently evolving multiple times can all obscure relationships, making it hard to properly classify them.

We’re only just starting to figure out the true origin of turtles (they’re probably archosauromorphs), and they’re a marine reptile group with living members.

Some of the extinct ones are even more uncertain. For example: mosasaurs. (Represented here by the eponymous Mosasaurus.)

While some semi-aquatic early mosasaurs are known, and they seem to be closely related to aigialosaurs and dolichosaurs, their exact placement within the squamates is a lot less clear. Traditionally they were regarded as the sister group to snakes, but some studies have found them to be closer to monitor lizards instead, and others have even placed them as much more basal scleroglossans. Their classification in phylogenetic analyses is “highly unstable”, changing depending on what other reptile groups are included, so there’s no real current consensus.

(And even if they are most closely related to snakes, that doesn’t necessarily help much – the exact origin and evolution of snakes is still very poorly known, too!)

[reptilefacts]

Insect-mimicking snakes?

New Guinea has quite a few venomous, really dangerous snakes. Death adders (Acanthophis), taipan (Oxyuranus scutellatus), or Papuan blacksnake (Pseudechis papuanus) are elapid snakes that have caus…

[lepidosaurophilia]

Blue Tree Monitor (Varanus macraei)

Pic source: Greg Hume at Wikimedia Commons

[lepidosaurophilia]

Frozen in time! This unfortunate Eocene gecko (Yantarogekko balticus) was trapped in Baltic amber 54 million years ago, preserving the delicate patterns of its scales and eyes for modern scientists.

(Photo by Wolfgang Weitschat, Universität Hamburg)

[pbsnature]

Unlike terrestrial snakes, the sea krait’s tail is paddle-shaped, allowing it to swim through the water. 

[herplove]

Corucia zebrata, Soloman Island Monkey Tailed Skink

[sdzoo]

They don’t fly or breathe fire, but Fiji iguanas do look like tiny “neon-colored dragons,“ and they need our help. 

[orifice-torture]