The Backbone

Monograph on Amphibians and Reptiles of Guyana Just Published

Cole, C. J., C. R. Townsend, R. P. Reynolds, R. D. MacCulloch, and A. Lathrop. 2013. Amphibians and reptiles of Guyana, South America: illustrated keys, annotated species accounts, and a biogeographic synopsis. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. 125(4):317-620.

Bob Reynolds, Biological Survey Unit (USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center) at NMNH, Jay Cole and Carol Townsend, American Museum of Natural History, and Ross MacCulloch and Amy Lathrop, Royal Ontario Museum, are the coauthors of a new monograph on the amphibians and reptiles of Guyana, South America. The treatise is based largely on their collective field work in Guyana since the late 1980s.

 

Leptodactylus pentadactylus, USNM 320986. Photo by William W. Lamar.

Guyana, much of which is pristine and naturally beautiful, has a diverse tropical flora and fauna owing to its varied habitats and long geological history. Cool and moist isolated highlands on mountaintops of the Guiana Shield that have been above sea level for more than a billion years, hot and humid lowland Amazon rain forest, drier tropical savannas, major freshwater rivers, and Atlantic beaches are home to at least 324 species of amphibians and reptiles (137 frogs and toads; 11 caecilians; 4 crocodylians; 4 amphisbaenians; 56 lizards; 97 snakes; and 15 turtles). Many live nowhere else in the world, others are endemic to small areas of Guyana and immediately adjacent sites in neighboring countries.

 

An Update of Wallace's Zoogeographic Regions of the World

Credit: AAAS (Science)

Alfred Russel Wallace’s (1876) map of zoogeographical regions of the world was a milestone of 19^th century biogeography.  Based on the distributions and taxonomic relationships of mammalian families, Wallace’s classification became a foundation of modern biogeography.  An international group of biogeographers, including Gary Graves (Division of Birds), recently published a next-generation map of Wallacean zoogeographic regions, incorporating phylogenetic and distributional data for >20,000 terrestrial vertebrate species.  This study, published in Science (4 January 2013), is the first to combine evolutionary and distributional data for most living species of birds, mammals, and amphibians. 

Enigmatic Peruvian opossum gets a scientific name.

 

Monodelphis gardneri (Photo courtesy Fabrice Schmitt)

In 1987 Al Gardner (USGS-SI) collected the first specimen of a tiny striped opossum in a cloud forest of Peru, thousands of km away (and thousands of meters up) from other similar-looking short-tailed opossums. Over the years, six more were taken, including two collected in 1997 by Louise Emmons (Mammals-SI), who has co-authored its description as a new species, after enough work had finally been done on the genus to allow comparison (Monodelphis gardneri Solari, Pacheco, Vivar and Emmons, 2012). The new species is named to honor its first collector.

 

Tiny Peruvian opossum comes from a great big family

Long-beaked echidna may not be a thing of the past

Smithsonian scientist Kristofer Helgen examines a long-beaked echidna in the wild on the island of New Guinea, where a small and declining population of the species is still known to exist. (Photo by Tim Laman)

The world's largest egg-laying mammal, the Long-Beaked Echidna, was considered to be extinct in Australia since the terminal Pleistocene, and found in modern times only on the island of New Guinea. That is, until Kris Helgen uncovered a well-documented skin and skull of this monotreme collected in 1901 in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, overlooked in the collections of the Natural History Museum, London-- a discovery reported last week in the journal ZooKeys. Read more about it in the E-torch:

Long-beaked echidna may not be a thing of the past.

New Species Named in Honor of Fish Division Curator Emeritus

 

Top: Eviota springeri, USNM 222651, male. Bottom: Eviota springeri, paratype, USNM 222653, male. Photograph by S.L. Jewett, Smithsonian Institution, NMNH, Division of Fishes.

Vic  Springer, Curator Emeritus in the Division of Fishes, has a new namesake, an Indian Ocean goby, Eviota springeri.  Former Fishes Collections Manager, Susan Jewett, and David Greenfield, Professor Emeritus from the University of Hawaii and current Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences, named the new fish species in honor of Vic who collected the holotype and several paratypes from the Mascarene Islands during a 1976 expedition.  The full article documenting and describing this new species can be found in Greenfield, D. W. & Jewett, S. L. (2012) Two new Gobiid fishes of the genus Eviota from the Indian Ocean (Teleostei: Gobiidae). Zootaxa 3515: 67-74. 

 

Squirrels of the World book is launched

 

Dr. Richard Thorington, Jr. (seated), James Whatton and Paula Bohaska

During a recent Mammals Division weekly coffee hour, Richard Thorington, Jr. (with assistant Paula Bohaska) and co-author Jim Whatton (Division of Birds) celebrated the August, 2012 publication by Johns Hopkins University Press of Squirrels of the World, the first modern, comprehensive examination of all 285 species of the family Sciuridae worldwide.  Six years in the making, the book provides a detailed look at each species of ground squirrel, tree squirrel, flying squirrel, marmot, prairie dog, and chipmunk through a species account that describes distinguishing characteristics, reviews the ecology and natural history, details conservation status and threats, and lists the currently recognized subspecies for each of the 285 species.  The striking tome includes 285 colorful distribution maps, skull images for each genus, and photographs of 230 species, providing many visually stunning glimpses of rarely seen squirrels.