Lizards restricted to rocky habitats often comprise numerous deeply divergent lineages, reflecting the disjunct nature of their preferred habitat and the capacity of rocky habitats to function as evolutionary refugia. Leer más.

V. Deepak and his colleagues from five different institutions in India have published a revision of the systematics of fan-throated lizards in India. This work nicely expands on the project of figuring out the diversity of this clade of magnificent lizards, following the description of two new species from Sri Lanka last year. Leer más.

Despite their profound adaptations to the aquatic realm and their apparent success throughout the Triassic and the Jurassic, ichthyosaurs became extinct roughly 30 million years before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Current hypotheses for this early demise involve relatively minor biotic events, but are at odds with recent understanding of the ichthyosaur fossil record. Leer más.

In recent times, several new species of amphibians have been described from India. Many of these discoveries are from biodiversity hotspots or from within protected areas. We undertook amphibian surveys in human dominated landscapes outside of protected areas in south western region of India between years 2013–2015. We encountered a new species of Microhyla which is described here as Microhyla laterite sp. nov. Leer más.

During an exploratory field trip, made to identify possible study areas in one of the isolated paramos north of the Arcabuco region (Boyacá, Colombia), a species of terrestrial frog assignable to the unistrigatus species group of the genus Pristimantis was discovered. Leer más.