As readers of the blog and followers on twitter are probably aware, I work a lot on chameleons. I’ve been involved in the description of a few species previously (including three earlier this year and one last year), and earlier this year I was involved in the discovery of bone-based […]
While I have been focussing most of my efforts over the last months on the most important publications for my PhD thesis, I’ve still been involved in a number of other papers. This week, two of these have been published: two new species of Guibemantis frogs from northern Madagascar published in […]
From November 2017 to January 2018, I was in Madagascar conducting research on the herpetofauna of Montagne d’Ambre, an isolated rainforest mountain in the north of the island. I have posted about the research we were conducting separately before it began, during the fieldwork, and at the end, but largely with the […]
On the 4th of June 2018 a festschrift was published by the journal Alytes in honour of the 70th birthday of Alain Dubois of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle of Paris. Amongst the contributions was a paper by my colleagues and me, describing two new species of Gephyromantis from northern Madagascar, fittingly […]
So you’ve done the hard parts: you’ve landed yourself a PhD position doing the research that you’ve always been fascinated by and working with the leaders in the field you’ve wanted to be in since you were a little tot. You’ve managed to get a few publications out of it, […]
Continuing our work on the small arboreal chameleons of the Calumma nasutum species group, today my colleagues and I have published a new paper in which we describe three new species from the C. guibei complex. These new chameleon species are marvellously different, with one having a rainbow of colour, another having […]
Most of the time when taxonomists discover new species it is a gradual transition from ‘hmm, this looks a little different’ to ‘yes this is certainly new to science’—but not always! Today, my colleagues and I have described a new species of frog from northern Madagascar that was immediately recognised […]
It is around the time of year where blogs tend to publish reviews of their posts of the previous year, and academics think back to their achievements of the past year, so I want to take an opportunity to do both here. My last ‘year in review’ was actually midway […]
This week, we published something a little different than our typical taxonomic output. Roughly three years ago, my friend, fellow PhD student David Prötzel, discovered a fascinating phenomenon in chameleons: shining a UV torch on them made patterns of fluorescence appear on their heads and in some species across their […]
After two months in the forest, fieldwork in Montagne d’Ambre has now drawn to a close. On the 6th of December, we exited the forest in some haste (for reasons that will become apparent below), and over the next few weeks we will be working on getting permits and transportation […]
