Whether baby lizards will turn out to be male or female is a more complicated question than scientists would have ever guessed, according to a new report published online on June 4th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The study shows that for at least one lizard species, egg size matters.
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Penn State Assistant Professor of Biology Tracy Langkilde has shown that native fence lizards in the southeastern United States are adapting to potentially fatal invasive fire-ant attacks by developing behaviors that enable them to escape from the ants, as well as by developing longer hind legs, which can increase the effectiveness of this behavior.
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The fossil of a lizard-like New Zealand reptile has been identified by a team of scientists from UCL (University College London), University of Adelaide, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
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Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are continuing their march toward creating a synthetic, gecko-like adhesive, one sticky step at a time. Their latest milestone is the first adhesive that cleans itself after each use without the need for water or chemicals, much like the remarkable hairs found on the gecko lizard's toes.
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Male Jamaican anole lizards begin and end the day with displays of reptilian strength -- push-ups, head bobs and extensions of a colorful neck flap, or dewlap -- to defend their territory, according to a new study.
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Why bother running on hind legs when the four you've been given work perfectly well? This is the question that puzzles Christofer Clemente. For birds and primates, there's a perfectly good answer: birds have converted their forelimbs into wings, and primates have better things to do with their hands.
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Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History and Pennsylvania’s Villanova University have discovered a new family of gecko, the charismatic large-eyed lizard popularized by car insurance commercials.
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Female Australian painted dragon lizards are polyandrous, that is, they mate with as many males as they can safely get access to. This promiscuous behaviour is often found in species where male quality is dubious and there are high levels of infertility in the male population.
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The technique lizards use to grab their grub influences how they move, according to researchers at Ohio University.
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A new study of finger-sized Australian lizards sheds light on one of the most striking yet largely unexplained patterns in nature: why is it that some groups of animals have evolved into hundreds, even thousands of species, while other groups include only a few?
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Mothers know best when it comes to dressing their children, at least among side-blotched lizards, a common species in the western United States. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have found that female side-blotched lizards are able to induce different color patterns in their offspring in response to social cues, "dressing" their progeny in patterns they will wear for the rest of their lives.
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A comprehensive survey of lizards on islands around the world has confirmed what island biologists and seafaring explorers have long observed: Animals on islands are much more abundant than their counterparts on the mainland.
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