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? [...]

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 [...]

Two weeks ago I and colleagues published a new paper in the august open-access online pages of PLoS ONE. Led by Aleksandra Birn-Jeffery of the Royal Veterinary College, and co-authored by Charlotte Miller, Emily Rayfield, Dave Hone and myself, the paper is titled ‘Pedal claw curvature in birds, lizards and Mesozoic dinosaurs – complicated categories [...]

This sequence of photos – taken by my good friend Markus Bühler – shows snail-crushing behaviour in a captive individual of the Australian scincid lizard Hemisphaeriodon (read on) gerrardii, popular known as the Pink-tongued skink. Unique to the coastal eastern strip of Queensland and New South Wales, it’s a predominantly terrestrial skink of damp sclerophyll [...]

It’s still not as well known as it should be that ‘complex’ or ‘sophisticated’ bits of social behaviour are far from limited to mammals and birds among the tetrapods. Lizards, snakes, crocodiles, alligators and even humble frogs, salamanders and caecilians engage in such things as pair-bonding, parental care and kin recognition. Play behaviour (Burghardt et [...]

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 [...]

It’s well known that monitor lizards (or varanids) sometimes practise cannibalism (that is, predation within their own species), and it should be no surprise to learn that big monitor species sometimes (or even often) prey on and eat smaller ones. The phenomenon whereby predators predate on other, typically smaller, predators is termed intraguild predation, and [...]

The Gila monster Heloderma suspectum and its close relative the Mexican Beaded lizard H. horridum are the only two extant members of Helodermatidae, the gila monster clade.  It’s been agreed for a considerable time that, among living lizards, helodermatids are most closely related to monitor lizards (varanids) and to the weird Bornean earless monitor Lanthanotus [...]

Long-time readers will know that I’ve been involved in a great long list of failed book projects. Once upon a time I made significant progress on a book about MESOZOIC MARINE REPTILES; alas, it exploded on the launch pad and everybody died. Unable to find time to do anything else (I’m working, when time allows, [...]