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News and musings from the UCL Culture team
By Nadine Gabriel, on 15 June 2018
This specimen of the week is a lizard found throughout Asia. They have a colourful youth, are shy around humans and have been known to shelter in abandoned termite mounds. Say hello to the Bengal monitor (Varanus bengalensis)!
Skull of a Bengal monitor, Varanus bengalensis LDUCZ-X189
By ucwehlc, on 25 May 2018
This week we are meeting one of the weirder-looking species at the Grant Museum, and that’s really saying something. In life it had a nose like a snorkel, a shell like tree bark and a neck longer than its body. Specimen of the week is…
Mata mata skeleton Chelus fimbriata LDUCZ-X187
By Will J Richard, on 27 October 2017
Hello folks! Will Richard here choosing another specimen for you. And this blog I’ve gone for a good all-rounder. A lizard that seems to be the second best at almost everything it does. The reptile equivalent of “and Garfunkel”…
LDUCZ-X116 Asian water monitor
By Will J Richard, on 15 September 2017
Hello! Will Richard here, picking another specimen for you. And this week I’ve chosen a slick, little lizard that actually lives up to its name: there are lots of them and they live in buildings. That’s right folks it’s not the rare and only found outside gecko, it’s the…
LDUCZ-X161 preserved common house geckos
By ucwehlc, on 16 June 2017
Specimen of the week this week is big, very shiny and in need of some TLC. Today we bring you the…
LDUCZ-X1580 hawksbill turtle Eretmochelys imbricata
By Jack Ashby, on 5 May 2017
Taxidermy Bosc monitor lizard. LDUCZ-X1314
Taxidermy appears to being going through a period of popularity at the moment. Hipsters and fans of geek-chic have realised what many of us already knew – natural history is cool. Gastro-pubs and boutique coffee shops are widely using it as decoration (I wonder whether they know that it’s probably been covered in arsenic to stop it being eaten by moths and beetles – not the best things to have around food and drink), there are excellent museum installations exploring it, and there are taxidermy classes being offered all over the place. However, some of it is truly awful (perhaps that’s part of the charm?), including this week’s Specimen of the Week… (more…)
By Jack Ashby, on 15 July 2016
Slow worms are legless lizards. LDUCZ-X206
Not all legless reptiles are snakes, like this slow worm which is just one of the many kinds of legless lizards. The complete or near loss of limbs has evolved in lizards a great number of times. Some entire lizard families are legless. Some families contain a few species with tiny vestigial limbs, while the rest are limbless. Some families are mostly “normal” four-limbed species, with limblessness, near limblessness, or two-leggedness having evolved in certain lineages independently. The biggest lizard family – the skinks (of which there are 1500 of mostly leggy species) – has groups that have lost their limbs on numerous occassions in Africa, Europe and Australia. In most cases of legless lizards, some remnant of the hindlimbs is visible, often by the precence of scaly flaps.
Leglessness evolves when the legs become a hindrance rather than a help in an animals’ locomotion, and in lizards this is normally to do with burrowing. Essentially lizards have found that it is more effective to “swim” through the soil, pushing their way through little gaps with their heads. If you think about it, this makes sense because lizards’ arms aren’t that close to their snouts, so using them to dig can be a it awkward. This is one also one of the main hypotheses for how and why snakes evolved. Swimming is also a driving factor for losing limbs.
By Dean W Veall, on 26 February 2016
Rough-nosed lizard (Ceratophora aspera) LDUCZ-X431
Hello Specimen of the Week fans, Dean Veall here. We’re mixing it up with our weekly specimen blogs, publishing on Fridays and making them shorter and snappier. So here goes. My main motivation for choosing this specimen is the pure patriotism of a Welsh man exiled here in London. How, you may ask, does this small lizard indigineous to Sri Lanka invoke the land of my fathers, green valleys, cawl and industrial heritage? It be a dragon……
By Will J Richard, on 19 February 2016
Hello blog-heads! Will Richard here tapping out another specimen of the week on my trusty keyboard. And this time I’ve picked out a pretty dangerous customer from Case 16. I’m not an ophidiophobe, though according to Wikipedia about one in three of us are, but this is certainly not a snake I’d like to tangle with.
LDUCZ-X167 Indian cobra skull
By ycrnsmk, on 1 February 2016
“Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon”
The English band, Culture Club said almost everything one needs to know about this week’s Specimen of the Week with their 1983 hit single “Karma Chameleon”.
Using the wise words of the Culture Club to guide us, we will embark on a journey of discovery and come to find that this reptile group, containing approximately 180 different types is anything but common. That said, this week’ Specimen of the Week is……….
LDUCZ-X79 preserved common chameleon
