Warm spring weather brings out many critters, including some that homeowners may not like to see in their yards — snakes. While there is no 100-percent effective snake deterrent, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Wildlife Specialist Rebecca Christoffel offers some tips on making a home landscape as “snake-free” as possible. Leer más.

Here’s an anatomical packing list for making that historic trip from water to land circa 370 million years ago: Lungs? Check. Legs? Check. Patches of highly vascular bone in the skin? In a new paper, scientists propose why many of the earliest four-legged creatures that dared breathe on land carried bony skin features. Leer más.

The fungal infection that has killed a record number of amphibians worldwide leads to deadly dehydration in frogs in the wild, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University researchers. Leer más.

Un equipo de biólogos ha descubierto una nueva especie de reptil durante una expedición por los bosques de Papúa Nueva Guinea en marzo del año pasado. Es un geco, un pequeño reptil de unos 13 centímetros de largo que ostenta unas llamativas bandas doradas y negras. Leer más.

Few people have ever heard of the Socotra Archipelago even though, biologically-speaking, it is among the world’s most wondrous set of islands. Over one third of Socotra’s plants are found no-where else on Earth, i.e. endemic, while 90 percent of its reptiles are also endemic. Adding to its list of unique life-forms, researchers have recently uncovered a new skink species that is found only on the island of Abd al Kuri, which is slightly smaller than New York City’s Staten Island. Dubbed the «the other Galapagos,» the four Socotra islands are under the jurisdiction of Yemen, although geographically speaking the islands are actually closer to Somalia. Leer más.