Lizard in Biological News

Three-way mating game of North American lizard found in distant European relative

SANTA CRUZ, CA--An intricate three-way mating struggle first observed in a species of North American lizard has been discovered in a distant relative, the European common lizard. The two species are separated by 5,000 miles and 175 million years of evolution, yet they share behavioral and reproduc...

Study shows lizard moms dress their children for success

Mothers know best when it comes to dressing their children, at least among side-blotched lizards, a common species in the western United States. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have found that female side-blotched lizards are able to induce different color patterns in thei...

Naming evolution's winners and losers

...contrast, there are more than 9,000 bird species, more than 5,400 mammal species, approximately 5,500 frog species, some 3,000 snake species and 5,200 lizard species, Alfaro said. The number of frog species, although it sounds high, is about what Alfaro would expect, given how old they are approximat...

Beaked, bird-like dinosaur tells story of finger evolution

...id Xu. "It also brings conciliation between the data from million-year-old bones and molecules of living birds." Limusaurus inextricabilis ("mire lizard who could not escape") was found in 159 million-year-old deposits located in the Junggar Basin of Xinjiang, northwestern China. The dinosaur earned it...

A combined tooth-venom arsenal revealed as key to Komodo dragon's hunting strategy

...ssils of the Dragon's giant extinct relative Megalania ( Varanus priscus ). From similarities in skull anatomy they determined that this seven metre lizard would have used a similar venom and bite system, making it the largest venomous animal to have ever lived. ...

Komodo even more deadly than thought: Research

...agon relative Varanus megalania and determined that this seven-metre-long lizard was one of the largest venomous animals to have ever lived. A member of ...ore than 100 million years, the Komodo dragon is the world's largest living lizard and inhabits the central Indonesian islands of Komodo, Rinca, Flores, Gili ...

Australia's most endangered snake might need burning

...n that broad-headed snakes require sunny, hot-rocks for shelter. Shaded rocks do not reach sufficiently high temperatures for the snakes to hunt their lizard prey effectively in the evenings," he said. "The trend is clear as the vegetation cover increases, the snakes' available habitat decreases. Our re...

'Freaks' help scientist unravel nature and nurture

...factors -- or both. Take, for example, two-headed animals. In one case, a genetic mutation may cause a cat to be born with two heads. In another, a lizard ends up with two heads because its mother laid her eggs in a compost heap that was too warm; the defect was caused by an incubation temperature that w...

Tree lizard’s quick release escape system makes jumpers turn somersaults

...According to Gary Gillis from Mount Holyoke College, USA, up to 50% of some lizard populations seem to have traded some part of their tails in exchange for es...ng up with undergraduate student Lauren Bonvini, the pair began encouraging lizard leaps to see how well the reptiles coped without their tails and publish th...

10 new amphibian species discovered in Colombia

...the first time in the northern area of South America, including a salamander ( Bolitoglossa taylori ), a rain frog ( Pristimantis pirrensis ), a small lizard ( Ptychoglossus myersi ) and a snake not yet identified. "Once more we confirm we are leaders in natural diversity and not only in our region but in ...

Great white's mighty bite revealed

... prey by biting off their tail and flippers before feeding at will. A comparison of Tyrannosaurus rex with megalodon suggests that the great Tyrant lizard was no match for the giant shark. " Estimates of maximum bite force for T. rex are around 3.1 tonnes, greater than for a living white shark, but puny ...

World's smallest snake found in Barbados

...covered by Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State. Hedges and his colleagues also are the discoverers of the world's smallest frog and lizard species, which too were found on Caribbean islands. The most recent discovery will be published on 4 August 2008 in the journal Zootaxa . Hedges ...

Unheard of life history for a vertebrate

...mber, and, once emerged, the chameleons develop rapidly, growing up to 2.6 mm (0.1 inches) a dayup to two orders of magnitude greater than other known lizard growth rate. In less than 60 days, for example, there can be a 300%-400% increase in body size for males to reach adulthood. After reaching maturity, ...

New family of gecko discovered by researchers from the U of Minnesota and Villanova University

... of Minnesotas Bell Museum of Natural History and Pennsylvanias Villanova University have discovered a new family of gecko, the charismatic large-eyed lizard popularized by car insurance commercials. Scientists have long been interested in geckos and their evolution because they are key biodiversity indi...

Plague of kangaroos threatens one of Australia's last remaining original native grasslands

... the most exciting moments of my life. To this day I don't know how I managed to lift my young son down from my shoulders so quickly to leap after the lizard and to catch it." The earless dragons had been considered lost for thirty years. "It's difficult to make plans to conserve a species when so littl...

Duck-billed platypus genome sequence published

...at produce the casein proteins that make up milk. A good sense of smell is something mammals have in common. Compared to most mammals, chicken and lizard have a relatively poor complement of odorant receptor genes responsible for their ability to detect smells. Interestingly, platypus has about half as ...

New species discovered in Brazil

... Arlington, Virginia (April 29, 2008) Researchers discovered a legless lizard and a tiny woodpecker along with 12 other suspected new species in Brazils Cerrado, one of the worlds 34 biodiversity conservation hotspots. The Ce...

Medical College researchers find dinosaur clues in fat

...ty to generate heat was lost in the group that gave rise to birds and lizards after it separated from the mammalian lineage (the researchers found the lizard genome similarly lacks a UCP1 gene). This strongly implies that dinosaurs, which diverged from birds even later than lizards, also lacked brown fat. ...

Variety is the spice of life: too many males, too little time...

...on does an excellent job of removing inferior versions of an organism out of the ensuing population, ensuring its ultimate demise. With painted dragon lizard males however, both versions persist in the population, suggesting that each type of male somehow manages to acquire a mate and successfully reproduce...

Lizard hunting styles impact ability to walk, run

... percent of the time, said Reilly, co-author of a recent book on the topic, lizard Ecology, published by the Cambridge University Press. While all lizards...d data from the force plate and analyzed the video to determine whether the lizard was using running or walking mechanics. The study used a large, represen...

Elephant engineers

...ence here is that the potential new homeowner is a lizard and the renovations come -- not from a sophisticat...ephants (Loxodontia africana). In fact, the local lizard population increased proportionally with the numbe... compared to the pristine trees, which helps boost lizard densities, says Pringle. This may be because the...

How baby fish find a home

...ossibilities for research in the field of larval ecology. Working at the lizard Island Research Station, a satellite-facility of the Australian Museum on t...arrier Reef, Paris will directly compare her research methods with those of lizard Island researcher, Dr. J.M. Leis, who published his results diving and foll...

Acoustics World Wide press room now open

...e the animals populations in their own environment. Joseph D. Warren, Stony Brook University http://www.acoustics.org/press/154th/warren.html lizard EARS AND ANCESTRAL HEARING Learning how geckos hear as the sound travels not only from outside to in, but across their mouth cavities. Catherine Ca...

LSU professor studies army-ant-following birds

...ion, flocks of birds track army-ant swarms through the forest. When millions of these army ants are on the move, they consume every insect, spider and lizard they come across, said Brumfield. Naturally, any animal that hears them coming and theyre very, very loud runs the other way. The army-ant-following...

Global survey of lizards reveals greater abundance of animals on islands than on mainland ecosystems

...a result of global warming. Jetz and Buckley gathered 643 estimates of lizard abundance from around the world for their survey, the first extensive globa... confirmed that reduced numbers of predators and competitors accompany high lizard densities on islands across the world. The two biologists concluded that a...

UBC researchers reveal dwarf aquatic plants' hidden ancestry

...nt heritage makes us re-evaluate our understanding of early flowering-plant evolution. For botanists, this is like finding something you thought was a lizard is actually a living dinosaur." Graham led the project with researchers from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, Australia, the University of Z...

Lizards 'shout' against a noisy background

...nership of their territory by sitting up on a tree trunk, bobbing their heads up and down and extending a colorful throat pouch. They can spot a rival lizard up to 25 meters away, said Terry Ord, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis who is working with Judy Stamps, professor of evolution and ecology. ...

LSU professor discovers new species

...cal sciences, recently discovered a new species of lizard while conducting field research in Borneo. Aus...mbined to confirm the original hypothesis that the lizard was, in fact, an entirely new species. Austin ... think is a new species of snake, a new species of lizard and probably two or three new species of frogs," h...

Pressured by predators, lizards see rapid shift in natural selection

...opulation of lizards." Losos and colleagues studied populations of the lizard Anolis sagrei on minuscule islands, or cays, in the Bahamas. They introduced to six of these cays a larger, predatory lizard (Leiocephalus carinatus) commonly found on nearby islands and known as a na...

Coral reefs are increasingly vulnerable to angry oceans

...ral grows on the front, crest, flat or the back of the reef, where the force of the waves progressively dies away. The team ran a field test at lizard Island, in the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef, taking digital photographs of corals, and calculating their vulnerability. They found that the...

Stormy days ahead for coral reefs

...l grows on the front, crest, flat or the back of the reef, where the force of the waves progressively dies away. The team ran a field test at lizard Island, in the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef, taking digital photographs of corals, and calculating their vulnerability. They fou...

Nice guys do finish first in lizards' evolutionary race

...undation. Males break down into three throat colors, flagging different behaviors, which Sinervo has discovered follow "rock-paper-scissors" cycles of lizard lust. Orange-throated lizards are the big bullies, roaming far from home to raid female territories and mate. They generally beat blue-throated li...

Lizard 'third eye' sheds light on evolution of color vision

... Published in the March 17 issue of Science, their lizard study describes how the "side-blotched" lizard's so-called third, or parie...a molecule found in human photoreceptors as well as the lateral eyes of the lizard - those on the sides of its head. But when the lizard's third eye sees gree...

Missing fossil link 'Dallasaurus' found

...thodist University paleontologist Michael Polcyn and Gordon Bell Jr. of Guadalupe National Park in Texas. They describe Dallasaurus, a three-foot long lizard who lived 92 million years ago in the shallow seas and shores of what was then a stretch of Texas mostly under water, and also used the fossil to bett...

Weapon performance determines mating success in the collared lizard

...ty) and Jerry F. Husak (Oklahoma State University) use the eastern collared lizard (Crotaphytus collaris ), a sexually dimorphic lizard in which the jaws of males function as a weapon in fights, to test the hypo...

Geckos: It's not always about sex

... lizards through their paces on a state-of-the-art lizard treadmill. As the geckos walked in the lab at Lewi...a similar study of another kind of parthenogenetic lizard from the deserts of the United States showed the o...cent. They are the 'Xena: Warrior Princess' of the lizard world." Article: "Increased Capacity for Sustai...

Venom doc tracks down snake bioweapons

...va. Both of these toxin types, CRISP and kallikrein, are closely related to toxins called helothermine and gilatoxin, which are produced by the Beaded lizard and the Gila Monster, respectively. One of the toxins in this study (called the waglerin peptide) did not exhibit any similarity to known proteins....

Falling ants glide back to trunk to avoid dangers of forest floor

...o the same tree. "To me, one of the most intriguing elements of the story is that so many ants jump voluntarily," Kaspari said. "The last view of a lizard chasing a Cephalotes ant may be that ant dropping toward the ground and spiraling back to the tree, safe from both the litter below and the predator a...