Famous Reptiles

Sometimes you go into a Florida swamp to study turtles and end up encountering a two-foot-long salamander previously undescribed by science. That's what happened to biologist David Steen back in 2009 when he pulled up one of his turtle traps from the swampy waters around Elgin Air Force Base. The trap didn't contain turtles, but he did find a giant, eel-like salamander resting comfortably inside. "It was just kind of sitting on the bottom of the trap, waiting patiently," Steen says. Steen was a lot more excited than the animal in front of him. He knew he was looking at an amphibian few people had ever seen before. Steen says he first started hearing rumors of a massive undiscovered salamander species during his graduate-student days at Alabama's Auburn University in early 2007. "My advisor, Craig Guyer, was showing me around their Museum of Natural History and he kind of tapped his knuckles on this big specimen jar," Steen recounts. The contents ...

Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more . (CNN) The fossils of giant, extinct marine reptiles have been found in an unlikely place: within the high altitudes of the Swiss Alps. The fossils belong to three ichthyosaurs, and they may have been some of the largest animals that ever lived on Earth, according to a new study. The ancient creatures could reach 80 tons and 65 feet (20 meters) in length, rivaling modern sperm whales. These "fish lizards" first appeared in the ocean about 250 million years ago, looking a bit like dolphins with elongated bodies and small heads. They emerged after the Permian mass extinction wiped out more than 95% of marine species. But by 200 million years ago, the giant ichthyosaurs were extinct and only the smaller, more dolphin-like ones lived until 90 million years ago. A study detailing the discovery published Thursday in the Journal of Ve...

Abstract Comprehensive assessments of species' extinction risks have documented the extinction crisis 1 and underpinned strategies for reducing those risks 2 . Global assessments reveal that, among tetrapods, 40.7% of amphibians, 25.4% of mammals and 13.6% of birds are threatened with extinction 3 . Because global assessments have been lacking, reptiles have been omitted from conservation-prioritization analyses that encompass other tetrapods 4,5,6,7 . Reptiles are unusually diverse in arid regions, suggesting that they may have different conservation needs 6 . Here we provide a comprehensive extinction-risk assessment of reptiles and show that at least 1,829 out of 10,196 species (21.1%) are threatened—confirming a previous extrapolation 8 and representing 15.6 billion years of phylogenetic diversity. Reptiles are threatened by the same major factors that threaten other tetrapods—agriculture, logging, urban development and invasive species—although the threat posed by climate ch...

Abstract Epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) and bluetongue (BT) are vector-borne viral diseases that affect wild and domestic ruminants. Clinical signs of EHD and BT are similar; thus, the syndrome is referred to as hemorrhagic disease (HD). Syndromic surveillance and virus detection in North America reveal a northern expansion of HD. High mortalities at northern latitudes suggest recent incursions of HD viruses into northern geographic areas. We evaluated the occurrence of HD in wild Illinois white-tailed deer from 1982 to 2019. Our retrospective space–time analysis identified high-rate clusters of HD cases from 2006 to 2019. The pattern of northward expansion indicates changes in virus-host-vector interactions. Serological evidence from harvested deer revealed prior infection with BTV. However, BTV was not detected from virus isolation in dead deer sampled during outbreaks. Our findings suggest the value of capturing the precise geographic location of outbreaks, the importa...