This Special Volume of Zootaxa has had a long gestation! Way back in 2011, Pat Hutchings was approached by Anne Hoggett, one of the Co-Directors of Lizard Island Research Station which is a facility of the Australian Museum, with the concept of running a polychaete workshop at Lizard Island. Back in 2005, the first Lizard Island taxonomic workshop investigating biodiversity of amphipod crustace...

Gene flow, and resulting degree of genetic differentiation among populations, will shape geographic genetic patterns and possibly local adaptation of parasites and their hosts. Some studies of Plasmodium falciparum in humans show substantial differentiation of the parasite in locations separated by only a few kilometers, a paradoxical finding for a parasite in a large, mobile host. We examined ...

Lizard is a lightweight stream cipher proposed by Hamann, Krause and Meier in IACR ToSC 2017. It has a Grain-like structure with two state registers of size 90 and 31 bits. The cipher uses a 120 bit Secret Key and a 64 bit IV. The authors claim that Lizard provides 80 bit security against key recovery attacks and a 60-bit security against distinguishing attacks. In this paper, we present an ass...

In the ‘50s of XX century, a German expedition lead by Richard Dehm collected large amount fossil remains from northern Pakistan. Among these was an isolated trunk vertebra lizard, which is here referred to Varanus sp. The collecting site this specimen not precisely known, but it most likely comes middle early late Miocene Siwalik sediments Chinji Formation. This first published record lizard N...

Thirty specimens of sand lizard, Lacerta agilis, were analyzed and Ophionyssus saurarum was found on three of them. These parasitic mites were located in the ear opening of the host. The only lizard specimens which were infested were those that inhabit areas degraded by human activity.

Here we report the partial nucleotide sequence of a reptilian uncoupling protein (repUCP) gene from the European common lizard (Lacerta vivipara). Overlapping sequence analysis reveals that the protein shows 55%, 72% and 77% sequence homology with rat UCP1, UCP2 and UCP3, respectively, and 73% with bird and fish UCPs. RepUCP gene expression was ubiquitously detected in 4 degrees C cold-acclimat...

BACKGROUND Transition from a lizard-like to a snake-like body form is one of the most important transformations in reptilian evolution. The increasing number of sequenced reptilian genomes is enabling a deeper understanding of vertebrate evolution, although the genetic basis of the loss of limbs in reptiles remains enigmatic. Here we report genome sequencing, assembly, and annotation for the As...

Foraging mode is an important aspect of life history, often associated with traits such as locomotor mode, energy budget, risk of predation and reproductive effort. Because of these life-history associations, classification of foraging mode can be conceptually useful. Lizards figured prominently in the historical development of foraging mode concepts, yet our current understanding is dominated ...

Citation: Ollonen J, Da Silva FO, Mahlow K and Di-Poï N (2018) Skull Development, Ossification Pattern, and Adult Shape in the Emerging Lizard Model Organism Pogona vitticeps: A Comparative Analysis With Other Squamates. Front. Physiol. 9:278. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2018.00278 Skull Development, Ossification Pattern, and Adult Shape in the Emerging Lizard Model Organism Pogona vitticeps: A Comparat...