A species of chameleon that spends most of its short life as an egg has been discovered by conservationists in Madagascar. The unusual reptile, known as Labord’s chameleon, develops inside an egg for up to nine months, but after hatching lives only a few months longer, during which it rapidly matures, mates and dies.
Because the chameleons all hatch at the same time, the entire population is the same age, apart from a very brief period when adults are still alive after laying their eggs. The life cycle is more akin to that of insects than reptiles or any other four-legged vertebrate, researchers said.
In ancient Egypt, various animals played a role in people’s lives, including in religion.
Just after leaving for the museum, I see a non mummified, still very much alive animal: a holly blue butterfly.
The museum has not only the animal mummy special exhibition, but also animals depicted in paint, sculpture, amulets, etc. in its permanent collection. I decide to look at these today and to come back for the mummy exhibition on some later day.
The first room in the permanent Egyptian exhibition is about prehistoric and early dynastic times.
One of the objects there is a Neolithic pot, with ostriches painted on it. That is special, according to the museum, as ostriches disappeared from Egypt about 5,000 years ago.
Also from Old Kingdom times, a coiled snake, as a board for the mehen game.
After the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom, the Asian Hyksos invaders ruled Egypt. From their epoch, fish-shaped and goose-shaped vases.
The Hyksos brought horses to Egypt for the first time. These were depicted in the tomb for General Horemheb. The Egyptian sculptors still were not really used to depicting these new animals then.
From the times of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, animal pictures from the tomb of Paatenemheb.
One of the largest known dinosaurs, a titanosaurid, once roamed New Zealand about 80 million years ago, it has been revealed.
A Havelock North fossil hunter, Joan Wiffen, discovered a vertebra bone in a stream bed in Hawke’s Bay in 1999 but the find has only recently been published in a science journal and scientific protocol was to publicise work only when it has been peer reviewed and published.
The bone has been identified as coming from the giant plant-eating sauropod group known as the Titanosauroidea.
Wiffen found the bone during a routine fossil-hunting trip in a tributary of the Te Hoe River west of Mohaka in northern Hawke’s Bay. It was not known if the fossil was from a juvenile or an adult.
Titanosaurids were widespread globally and lived during the Cretaceous period, between 83 and 65 million years ago. They had small heads, a long neck and tail, and a large body. They were up to 45 metres in length and weighed up to 50 tonnes.
She said fossil-hunters liked to explore streams after heavy rain as water could expose previously hidden fossil-bearing boulders.
“I saw a partly exposed concretion (sedimentary rock) about the size of a rugby ball in the stream bank. I dug it out and asked a colleague to break it open with a hammer.
“I immediately saw a bone structure inside that looked different from the bone of a marine reptile.
“To be honest it’s a fairly non-descript and incomplete bone. It is heavily eroded and that’s because it must have been transported in a riverbed for some time before it was buried.'’
Storms would have carried the bone down stream to what would have been a coastal lagoon or estuary 80 million years ago. …
Wiffen and her team have now discovered fossil bones and bone fragments from six dinosaur species that lived in New Zealand. Three were meat eaters and three were herbivores.
They have also discovered fossils of marine reptiles, notably mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, and the flying reptile - the pterosaur.
The government of Kenya, through the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), has approved a proposal to turn 20,000 hectares of the pristine Tana Delta into irrigated sugarcane plantations. Conservationists and villagers living in the Delta, which provides refuge for 350 species of bird, lions, elephants, rare sharks and reptiles [see also here] including the Tana writhing skink, believe the decision is illegal and are determined to block the development. The groups are considering what action they might take.
A snake measuring over 1.83m (6ft) was today found curled up in a toilet bowl in a 10th floor flat, in northern Australia.
It is not known how long the black-headed python had been traveling through the sewage pipes before deciding to take a break in an apartment block in Darwin, Northern Territory.
In three weeks of excavating the preserved river channel near Hanksville, a team from the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Ill., found four long-necked sauropods, two carnivorous dinosaurs and a possible herbivorous Stegosaurus. …
The sandstone quarry has kept the fossils “exceptionally well preserved,” he said. Some fossils have had to be put back together, but many were preserved as complete pieces.
In Hanksville, local officials knew the site contained bones when the Burpee team began excavating last year, Foss said. “When they got out there, it was bigger than they anticipated.”
No new species have been discovered, and Foss said he doesn’t expect to find any at the Hanksville site.
Last Friday, staff conducting a beach patrol found turtle tracks and a few exposed eggs. They were thought at first to be those of a green turtle. But the eggs and the width of the tracks, more than six feet across, were later determined by a park biologist, Cynthia Rubio, to be from a leatherback. The giant, ancient, endangered turtles, some the size of a Smart Car, have until now only been known to nest in four spots in the United States – with about three dozen females a year laying eggs on beaches along the east coast of Florida and slightly larger nesting populations in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. There is evidence of nesting in North Carolina as well.
For the first time paleontologists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods – any land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages – in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million years ago.
The fossils were created when fine sand from an overflowing river poured into the animals’ burrows and hardened into casts of the open spaces. The largest preserved piece is about 14 inches long, 6 inches wide and 3 inches deep. No animal remains were found inside the burrow casts, but the hardened sediment in each burrow preserved a track made as the animals entered and exited.
In addition, scratch marks from the animals’ initial excavation were apparent in some places, said Christian Sidor, a University of Washington assistant professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the UW.
“We’ve got good evidence that these burrows were made by land-dwelling animals rather than crayfish,” said Sidor, who is lead author of a paper describing the find, which is being published in the June edition of The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Co-authors are Molly Miller, a geology professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Isbell, a geosciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.
The fossilized burrows were collected in 2003 and 2005-06 from the Fremouw Formation at Wahl Glacier and from the Lashly Formation at Allan Hills, both toward the outer edges of Antarctica.
Despite the absence of fossil bones, the burrows’ relatively small size prompted Sidor to speculate that their owners might have been small lizardlike reptiles called Procolophonids or an early mammal relative called Thrinaxodon.
Burrows, some containing tetrapod bones, have previously been excavated in South Africa, which is considered to be perhaps the world’s richest fossil depository, and those burrows are nearly identical to the fossils unearthed in Antarctica. During the Triassic period, Antarctica and South Africa were connected as part of a supercontinent called Pangea.
Because even at that time Antarctica was substantially colder than South Africa, and because sea levels likely were higher than today, it is much rarer to find fossils there that date from as far back as the Early Triassic.
“Everywhere has a spotty fossil record, but Antarctica has an extremely spotty fossil record because it is difficult finding exposed rocks amid all the ice,” Sidor said.
At the time the burrows were dug, Antarctica would have been ice free. However temperatures still would have been quite cold, since both areas where the burrows were found are within the Antarctic Circle and so experience at least one day a year of complete darkness.
“We have documented that tetrapods were burrowing, making dens in Antarctica, back in the Triassic,” Sidor said. “There are lots of good reasons for burrowing at high latitudes, not the least of which is protection from the elements.”
A 70-metre rope bridge strung across a busy highway in Victoria is helping locals cross over safely - only the locals in this case are wild animals.
Yes, researchers have reported that endangered local species have indeed started using what has been dubbed the world’s first “wildlife rope-bridge”, thus avoiding accidents that were killing and maiming many.
“We have early proof that our native animals are regularly crossing the rope bridge over the Hume Highway near Benalla and many other animals are investigating the bridge,” said Rodney van der Ree of the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology (Arcue).
“Native animals have acclimatised to the 70-metre bridge and are using it to cross the highway to find food, shelter and mates,” van der Ree was quoted as saying in a statement.
Since June last year, researchers have observed 50 crossings of ringtail possums and almost as many partial crossings, seven partial crossings of brushtail possums and four partial crossings by squirrel gliders.
Van der Ree said the results for the squirrel glider are particularly encouraging as they are faced with the threat of extinction in the provinces of Victoria and New South Wales.
“The animal moves by gliding from tree to tree so where there are large gaps in tree cover, such as roads, it is unable to cross,” said van der Ree.
Relying on specially installed cameras at both ends of the rope-bridge which record the time and date on each photograph, the researchers established which animals were making an attempt and which are making it all the way across the bridge.
“We have also gathered information on other species, for which the rope bridge wasn’t originally intended, such as cockatoos, magpies and ravens, the occasional gecko, and large spiders, so this is a bonus,” said Kylie Soanes of the University of Melbourne.
The rope construction differs from nature bridges elsewhere, like in Crailo in the Netherlands. The basic idea is the same, however.
This video from the University of Melbourne in Australia is called African Pathways and Rope Bridge Revisited. The item about the rope bridge is the second item, starting after about 2:20 minutes.
Right now, there is an open air exhibition of work by Zimbabwean sculptor 
