Cameron Siler and art professor Dr. Peter Froslie have teamed up to create a fantastic new course entitled “Brunei – At the Intersection of Science and Art: Understanding Biodiversity and Conservation” in Summer 2017 (BIO 4970/ART 4823).  Brunei is on the island of Borneo, which cnontains a unique tropical rainforest that is home to 6% of the total world biodiversity, and includes such...

Joey Brown has recently joined the Siler Lab as a Masters student at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and University of Oklahoma. After growing up flippin’ rocks and chasing snakes throughout Kansas and Missouri, Joey attended the University of Kansas (KU) as an undergraduate student, and transformed his childhood fascination into a passionate pursuit for a career in the...

Graduate student Kai Wang has completed the Tibetan portion of his field work and has now crossed the Tibet-Yunnan Province border.  He collected many Japalura (the focal genus for his masters thesis) along the Mekong River in Tibet as well as cool vipers and frogs.  Be sure to also review his previous field update.  Kai is now in NW Yunnan and will continue the survey along...

We have just gotten an update from Kai Wang, who has been at the China-Myanmar border in southwestern Yunnan Province from May 28-31. He and his colleagues surveyed one of the major natural reserves in the area, Tongbiguan, and found several cool herps, including the first juvenile specimen of Bengal Monitor Lizard from China, and a Big-headed Turtle! All photos credited to Kai...

As field work continues in Oklahoma through early June, under the leadership of field assistant Aaron Geheber, and undergrads Elyse Ellsworth, Brendan Heitz,and Claire Winfrey, the remainder of the Siler Lab prepares for serious international travel for May, June and beyond!  See their research summaries below. Jessa Watters (mid-late May): Jessa joins her undergraduate herpetology mentor, Dr. John Iverson of Earlham College...

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...

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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...

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...

A new species of the agamid genus Japalura is described based on 15 specimens from the upper Lancang (Mekong) Valley of eastern Tibet, PR China. Populations of the new species, Japalura vela sp. nov., were previously recognized as J. flaviceps. The new species is morphologically most similar to J. batangensis, J. micangshanensis, J. variegata, and J. zhaoermii, but is distinguished from the...

We present a near comprehensive, densely sampled, multilocus phylogenetic estimate of species relationships within the anuran family Ceratobatrachidae, a morphologically and ecologically diverse group of frogs from the island archi- pelagos of Southeast Asia and the South-West Pacific. Ceratobatrachid frogs consist of three clades: a small clade of enigmatic, primarily high-elevation, semi-aquatic Sundaland species currently assigned to Ingerana (for which we erect...