Category: biologist Blair Hedges

For the last 15 years or more the mass extinctions of amphibians have gotten lots of news coverage, but a similar die-off among lizards seems worth covering too. Readers got a small peek this week after a Penn State U. professor and a former student of his published a paper on all the skinks they found - species new to science - and perhaps only long enough to say goodbye to many of them. Some seem already to be gone from all but collections of corpses in museums. Tops among these sleek lizards' problems are mongooses not native to the Caribbean islands where the study was performed. The paper is monumental - a 245-page job that is instant illustration that staffers at the New Zealand-based Zootaxa are not blowing smoke when...