Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP Great reads this week! [...]

A deadly but critically endangered snake, one of the world’s rarest birds and a heavily guarded flower are among the endangered species in the news this week. A New Snake with a Sad Story: A gorgeous but extremely dangerous new snake species has been discovered in Honduras. The new palm pit viper has been named [...]

In 2008 biologists studying the eastern massasauga rattlesnake (Sistrurus catenatus catenatus) made a gruesome discovery: three sick snakes suffering from disfiguring lesions on their heads. All three died within the next three weeks. A fourth snake, found in 2010, also died from the mysterious growths and ulcers. Necropsies uncovered the source of the lesions: a [...]

The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson and the Center for Snake Conservation in Louisville, Colo., have put up a $500 reward for evidence that the South Florida rainbow snake (Farancia erytrogramma seminola) is not extinct, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared in October [pdf]. The organizations are hoping that professional and amateur [...]

I have had two encounters with rattlesnakes over the years. Each time, the snake shook its tail, made some noise, and let me know it didn’t much care for me being so close. I eased my way around, gave the snake some respect, and kept on moving. No problem. Neither of those encounters were with [...]

Every few months, I try to point out that the news about endangered species isn’t all doom and gloom. Oh sure, most of the stories I cover are pretty depressing, but then I come across the success stories that make it all worthwhile. Recovered First up, we have this week’s announcement that the Lake Erie [...]

Fifteen years ago, the future looked bleak for the Antiguan racer (Alsophis antiguae), the world’s rarest snake. In 1995 just 50 of the creatures survived on the isolated 8.4-hectare Great Bird Island off of Antigua in the Caribbean. Introduced mongooses had wiped out the species on Antigua itself; invasive rats almost did the same trick [...]

It seems this is a week of venom here at the Guest Blog! First it was Rachel Nuwer on Monday who looked at the U.S. death statistics at the hands (Okay, fangs and stingers) of venomous animals. Then yesterday David Manly explained how snakes bite and how their venom evolved (and still evolves). So, I [...]

"Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?"—Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark Let’s face it. Snakes are not most people’s favorite animals. They slink and slither without making much noise, have a forked tongue with unblinking eyes, and fangs that bite or coils that wrap. Some snakes are so dangerous that people [...]

A bite from the black mamba snake (Dendroaspis polylepis) can kill an adult human within 20 minutes. But mixed in with that toxic venom is a new natural class of compound that could be used to help develop new painkillers. Named “mambalgins,” these peptides block acute and inflammatory pain in mice as well as morphine [...]

In 2009, some of the snakes at the California Academy of Sciences’ Steinhart Aquarium were acting sort of s-s-s-s-strange. Scientists suspected a sickness whose cause was mysterious. Now researchers think they’ve found an unlikely origin, as they watch the disease play out in strange and terrible fashion. “Some of the symptoms are pretty bizarre,” said [...]

Sorry, sea serpents. Snakes, it seems, slithered off their lizard legs on land. A new analysis of a primitive snake fossil suggests that these animals emerged from a line of burrowing reptiles. Snakes are in the same reptilian order that includes lizards, but just how and where they split off to live their legless lives [...]

Snakes aren’t just lizards without any legs. But a curious group of long, legless lizards look suspiciously like snakes themselves. Also known as "worm lizards" (aka amphisbaenians), these small serpentine reptiles have evolved a limb-free body plan and strong heads that are handy for their burrowing lifestyle. So are they the snake’s closest lizard relatives? [...]

Some snakes don’t need to be on a plane to take flight. The "flying" snake (or paradise tree snake, Chrysopelea paradisi) launches its sleek frame into the ether from precipitously tall trees in Asia and sails downward. This seemingly strange behavior—particularly for an animal that has no limbs or skin flaps itself—has been long known, [...]

Even cobras need to defend themselves sometimes. These venomous snakes keep adversaries at bay by spitting a neurotoxin or other substance into their perceived enemy’s eyes, causing severe pain and sometimes blindness. And they are incredibly accurate in hitting their target—even though it is often moving and more than a meter away. But how can [...]

A new, weirdly proportioned species of snake called Imantodes chocoensis has been discovered in the tropical region of Chocó, which lies on the Pacific coast of northern Ecuador, Colombia and Panama. It belongs to the Imantodes genera of snakes, of which there are only six other known species. Otherwise known as blunt-headed vine snakes, Imantodes [...]

When the Mesozoic ended, it was inevitable that the lizards, snakes and amphisbaenians – the squamates – would inherit the Earth. For the last 65 million years, the world has been so dominated by squamates that we term this stage in the planet’s history the Squamozoic. What is life like, today, on Squamozoic Earth? Purely [...]

We’re all excited by, and interested in, ‘new’ species; that is, those that have been discovered and named within recent years, with “recent years” variously being considered synonymous with “since 2000”, “since the 1970s”, or “since 1899/1900”. In the modern age, species discovered within the 20th century are generally considered ‘surprising’ and ‘recent’, and we [...]

Back in May this year I visited the New Forest Reptile Centre (Holidays Hill, near Lyndhurst, New Forest National Park, Hampshire, UK). I’ve been meaning to visit for a long time – I think I last went there some time during the late 1990s – and the very hot and sunny weather meant that it [...]

I’m feeling on a roll with the obscure colubrid snakes, so here are some more (see the previous article if you feel like you need an introduction). Again, the photos are used with kind permission of Bangor University’s Wolfgang Wüster unless stated otherwise. Mastigodryas bifossatus (photographed here at Sao Paulo in Brazil) is a slender-bodied, [...]

I really like finding out about, and writing about, obscure tetrapods. And that’s not a difficult thing to do, since there are some pretty big, pretty diverse tetrapod groups out there that contain huge numbers of poorly known, little-mentioned species. I’ve come back to obscure snakes on a few occasions, and here’s another article where [...]

I’ve recently been reading Stephen Spawls’s Sun, Sand & Snakes, a 1979 volume that charts Spawls’s childhood interest in snakes and other reptiles and recounts his numerous japes and scrapes with local, east African herpetofauna. Today, Spawls is a well-known herpetologist, co-author of the excellent The Dangerous Snakes of Africa (Spawls & Branch 1995) and [...]

This past weekend, I was searching around the interwebz looking for something interesting to write about for Monday Pets. Lately, Monday Pets has been somewhat cat- and dog-heavy, so I was looking for something a bit different. I asked on twitter if there were any requests or recommendations. Friend of the blog Dave Munger responded: [...]