Famous Reptiles

In their natural Australian desert habitats, bearded dragons love to climb, bask in the sun, cool off underground, and forage for veggies. By contrast, in the pet trade, these reptiles are often crammed into bins, deprived of water, denied veterinary care, treated as breeding machines, and killed when they can no longer reproduce (sometimes by being gassed in plastic bags). The bearded dragons who do make it to pet stores alive and are purchased by humans often languish in too-small enclosures where their extremely complex (and expensive to accommodate) needs go unmet. Discover why the answer to "Are bearded dragons good 'pets'?" is "no"—they, like all other reptiles , aren't "pets" at all. Bearded Dragon Facts Did you know that even though Australia banned the export of wild bearded dragons, humans began breeding the lizards in the U.S. for the pet trade in the 1990s? Or that they're cold-blooded animals who rely on externa...

Every faculty member has to set up their lab when they join a new campus. But Professor Danielle Edwards literally built a key component of hers from the ground up. The outdoor component of El Huevo — the Edwards Lab of Herpetology Uta Evolution Vivarium and Ovipositorium — is set on 1.2 acres adjacent to campus and the Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve. Edwards designed the facility and built 12 enclosures, with the help of students and local vendors, to house experimental populations of side-blotched lizards. The field site is partnered with a lab space for captive lizards. She and her students released dozens of lizards into the enclosures in September and will study the color-polymorphic reptiles for behavior and mating system. Edwards, a conservation and evolutionary biologist, studies how different traits evolve in various environments within and among species and through time. She began building the outdoor lab in 2016, and after a lengthy permitting and approva...

The Oklahoma City (OKC) Zoo and Botanical Garden has publicized that its 14-year-old female chimpanzee, Nia, is pregnant with her baby anticipated to be born in the fall of 2022. This will mark Nia's second offspring. "Any birth is exciting at the Zoo, but one for an endangered species is significant and thrilling for us," expressed Pace Frank, the OKC Zoo's assistant curator of primates, in an organizational release. 1 "The Zoo is committed to the conservation of chimpanzees. In partnership with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and their Species Survival Plan for chimpanzees, we continue to positively impact their population while raising awareness for the protection of their habitat." In 2020, Nia came to the OKC Zoo from the Sunset Zoo in Manhattan, Kansas on a recommendation with the AZA's Species Survival Plan (SSP) for chimpanzees. At the time of her arrival, she was about 8 months pregnant with her first offspring, but following the bab...

OutdoorHub Reporters   04.13.15 Well, now you have. Card Albino tortoises and turtles are unique among albino animals in that they are not relatively rare, and are able to survive pretty well in the wild due to their tough shells. Unlike other species, albino tortoises and turtles also seem to cope better with any health problems associated with their albinism, making them popular among breeders in captivity. Keep in mind though, this cute sulcuta tortoise can live up to 150 years and is one of the largest of its kind, with the heaviest specimens weighing more than 200 pounds. This is one pet that you'll have to prepare long in advance for. [embedded content] OutdoorHub Reporters The OutdoorHub Reporters are a team of talented journalists and outdoorsmen and women who work around the clock to follow and report on the biggest stories in the outdoors.

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Photography #animals #conservation May 17, 2022 Grace Ebert All images © Dhritiman Mukherjee, shared with permission The gharial, a large crocodile with a distinctive bulge on its snout, is critically endangered in the wild, with researchers counting only a few hundred individuals in 2017. Living primarily in the rivers of Nepal and India, the scaly reptiles saw a rapid decline since the 1930s due to overfishing and loss of habitats from sand mining and dams, and biologists estimate the population has dwindled to only two percent. Thanks to the National Chambal Sanctuary, though, which is home to a substantial group of gharial, the species is growing. Photographer and conservationist Dhritiman Mu...

Nearly 130 years ago, Italian explorer Elio Modigliani arrived at a natural history museum in Genoa with a lizard he had reportedly collected from the forests of Indonesia. Based on Modigliani's specimen, the striking lizard — notable for a horn that protrudes from its nose — got its official taxonomic description and name, Harpesaurus modiglianii , in 1933. But no accounts of anyone finding another such lizard were ever recorded, until now. In June 2018, Chairunas Adha Putra, an independent wildlife biologist conducting a bird survey in a mountainous region surrounding Lake Toba in Indonesia's North Sumatra, called herpetologist Thasun Amarasinghe. Near the lake, which fills the caldera of a supervolcano, Putra had found "a dead lizard with interesting morphological features, but he wasn't sure what it was," says Amarasinghe, who later asked the biologist to send the specimen to Jakarta. It took only a look at the lizard's nose-horn for Amarasinghe to su...

This year world turtle day is celebrated on May 23. World Turtle Day is observed to recognize the value of these reptiles on the planet. Turtles and tortoises are important for the earth and to maintain its ecological balance. Though these creatures have survived in a variety of environments and habitats around the world, today, they are disappearing fast. We all need to come together to save this endangered species and maintain the earth's ecological balance. History of World Turtle Day World Turtle Day was started by a non-profit organization called American Tortoise Rescue (ATR). This organization was founded in 1990. And World Turtle Day was observed in 2001 for the first time. This year, they are commemorating the 22nd International World Turtle Day. Susan Tellem and Marshall Thompson founded ATR. Together, this couple has rescued more than 4,000 turtles and tortoises. They have re-sheltered these creatures in a natural habitat. The Theme for World Turtle Day This...

Skip to content Top Navigation Close this dialog window Explore Southern Living Profile Menu Close Sign in Close this dialog window View image Fort Worth Zoo Celebrates Release of 1,000th Texas Horned Lizard Into the Wild this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines.

Things may be getting a bit "hairy" for those with pet bearded dragons. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Disease Prevention (CDC), bearded dragons appear to be the source of a new Salmonella  outbreak that's already left at least 44 people sick and 15 hospitalized across 25 states. Bearded dragons, of course, aren't actual dragons. They are instead the common name for the reptile genus  Pogona, which encompasses six lizard species. Bearded dragons, don't actually have beards of facial hair like NBA guard James Harden either. No, their beards consist of masses of spiny scales under their throats that resemble beards. These scales can darken and puff out when the bearded dragon gets stressed in some way, such as the cancellation of the TV series NCIS: New Orleans. The scale of this Salmonella  outbreak has gotten the CDC's attention though: As you can see in tweet above, the CDC warned against ea...

image: Blue whale in Cangas del Morrazo factory (Spain) in 1979. view more  Credit: Manuel Hermelo/Jesús Cancelas, Massó Museum The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever existed, weighting as much as two thousand people together. This is why this cetacean was the most chased species in the world due to its size and economic yield when whaling started, around mid-19th century. The first captures, in northern Norway, expanded to other marine areas, and in only a few decades, in the North Atlantic, more than 15,000 blue whales were caught. By early 20th century, the populations of the blue whale, which were already small, decreased in many areas of the North Atlantic Ocean, and the species was replaced by the ror...

Herpetophobia is a fear of reptiles. People with herpetophobia are most often afraid of reptiles like snakes and lizards. However, they may also be afraid of other reptiles, such as turtles, alligators, and crocodiles. Herpetophobia is a specific phobia, which is a kind of anxiety disorder. If you have a specific phobia, you feel an overwhelming sense of fear or anxiety about something. There are many different types of specific phobia. How common are phobias of lizards and snakes? Specific phobias are a relatively common anxiety disorder. It's likely that many people will experience one at some stage of their life. According to information collected by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), approximately 12.5 percent of adults in the United States will experience a specific phobia at some point in time. Out of all of the reptiles, fear of snakes is the most common. It's estimated that 2 to 3 percent of people meet the clinical criteria for a phobia of snakes (ophidi...

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...