Have you ever wanted to be a scientist? Or help a scientist make new discoveries? Join the Herpetology Department of the Sam Noble Museum in a brand-new citizen science project, where YOU become the scientist collecting real-world data! What is Citizen Science? Citizen Science is an up and coming method of gathering scientific data collection by members of the general public, rather than traditional...

As part of the Spring 2015 Herpetology Course (BIOL 4083) taught by Dr. Cameron Siler at the University of Oklahoma, students took part in a semester long, small group writing assignment that formed a large basis of their final course grade. The class was broken up into three groups of seven or eight students, and each group was assigned a distinct lineage of...

Soon after the description of the Sail Mountain Dragon (Japalura vela) from eastern Tibet, China, two more new species of Japalura, namely J. laeviventris and J. iadina, were described from the approximate same region in the Hengduan Mountain Range of China. Despite the distinct scalation and coloration, the two new species have long been confused with a known congener, J. flaviceps. Like other...

The family of live-bearing fish, Poeciliidae, includes a wide variety of colors and body shapes, one interesting variation in shape is the elongated tail found on the males of a few species. The purpose of these extended tails, or swordtails, has long been debated by biologists. Scientists in the biology department at the University of Oklahoma decided to test a hypothesis that...

Despite the exceptionally high levels of vertebrate diversity in Southeast Asia, surprisingly little is known about the processes responsible for this occurrence. Recently, an increase in diversity of amphibians has been studied in the Philippines. One genus in particular, Sanguirana, a frog genus endemic to the Philippines, consists of seven species with distinct physical characteristics as well as one or two species...

A new species of dragon lizard was discovered from the valleys Eastern Tibet, PR China, which provides further information about the biogeography of the river system in the region. As the direct result of continental collision, the Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding regions provide an ideal system to investigate how complex geographic events affect the evolution of living organisms. However, because of...

In this paper, a new species of nematode helminth parasite is described: Cosmocerca leytensis. In addition, this paper represents the first descriptive list of parasites found in the gecko, Cytodactylus gubuaot, which is known to reside only on the Leyte Island of the Philippines. Although C. leytensis is the 30th species within the genus, it is the first to be found from...

Field work by the Siler Lab and sponsored by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation continued in April 2015, with visits to the following sites (see photos here).  A summary of the animals collected at each site are visible below (Table 1). April 10-12: McGee Creek WMA, Stringtown WMA, Hugo WMA (Jessa Watters, Elyse Freitas, Rachel Flanagan, Dylan Lindauer, Matt DeRuyter) April 17-19: Cookson Hills WMA and vicinity of...

The Siler Lab has completed two trips to Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) in SE Oklahoma in March, 2015; one with only 4 members of the Siler Lab and the second with members of Dr. Siler’s OU Herpetology course.  Check out the summary statistics below (Table 1) and the amazing compilation video created by a student in the Herpetology course.  The Siler Lab continues...

Museum specimen collecting and the allocation of funds for maintaining collections are a hot topic in today’s world.  Yet, natural history museums are a necessary part of documenting the history of life on earth, from historical through paleontological collections to and modern collections of living species on the planet. These specimens and their associated data are invaluable as sources of research on...

Gecko lizards in the Philippines are quite diverse covering multiple genera, body types, and sizes, yet much of that diversity has gone undocumented.  Pseudogekko is an example of a little known Philippine endemic genus, with only four representative species.  Recent field surveys by Dr. Siler and colleagues have resulted in new  data indicating that these four species should be split into multiple others, based...