#herpetology

#herpetology

Newly Discovered 'Zombie Frog' in the Amazon is Surprisingly CuteResearchers from the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Germany discovered a new species of small frogs in the Amazon, and nicknamed it the "zombie frog."Why you ask? It's because the frogs spend most of their lives buried in the soil (like dead bodies) and their existence was only discovered when the biologists noticed their mating calls after heavy rains. "We herpetologists have had to dig the animals out of the ground with our bare hands - usually while we were completely soaked ourselves - in order to identify them," said team leader Raffael Ernst as reported in Phys.org, "This somewhat eerie and muddy scenario also inspired us to use the name Synapturanus zombie for one of the newly discovered species from the narrow-mouthed frog genus Synapturanus in the Amazon region."#frog #zombie #Amazon #NewSpecies #herpetology

This Australian Lizard Has a Crazy Elaborate Nest Deep UndergroundMany animals dig burrows underground to lay eggs, but the yellow-spotted goanna in Australia took it to the next level: it dug a helical burrow 13 feet below the surface to lay its eggs.Herpetologist Sean Doody of the University of South Florida told Ed Yong of The Atlantic why the lizard went through all that trouble to bury its eggs so deep underground:A few animals also dig (or dug) helical burrows, including scorpions, pocket gophers, an extinct beaver called Palaeocastor, and a mammal-like reptile called Diictodon that lived 255 million years ago. But the yellow-spotted goanna’s nests are deeper than those of all these creatures—extending as far as 13 feet below the surface. “That’s a ridiculous depth,” Doody told [Yong]. He thinks that the yellow-spotted goanna faces a unique challenge. Its large eggs need to incubate for 8 months before hatching—a period that takes them through Australia’s brutal dry season, when several months might go by without any rain. At shallow depths, the eggs would cook and desiccate. Only in deeper soil, which is cooler and wetter, can they survive.#lizard #egg #burrow #Australia #yellowspottedgoanna #goanna #herpetologyImage: Sean Doody