News & Views

Compiled by G. Valentine.

Featuring stories this month about remarkable insights into the colouration of tarantulas, the spread of a new snake disease, why the Komodo dragon - the world’s largest lizard - could be under threat, the discovery of a new butterfly in the Arctic Circle, how rattlesnakes adapt to differing climates, snake-keeping in ancient Egypt, the hope that a Korean wasp may help to pave the way for the development of new antibiotics, and starting here with radical new thoughts on how reptiles as a group evolved.

Challenging a theory which has lasted for three-quarters of a century about how and when reptiles evolved during the past 300 million or so years has involved a lot of camerawork, loads of CT (computer tomography) scanning, and, most of all, thousands of miles of travel. Just check the stamps in Tiago R. Simões’s passport!

Simões is the Alexander Agassiz Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Harvard University palaeontologist Stephanie Pierce in the USA. Over the course of five years, he has travelled to more than 20 countries and in excess of 50 different museums, in order to take CT scans and photos of nearly 1,000 reptilian fossils, some hundreds of millions of years old. It amounted to about 400 days of work, helping to create what is believed to be the largest available timeline on the evolution of major living and extinct reptile groups.