HOME





Coastal Taipan
The coastal taipan (''Oxyuranus scutellatus''), or common taipan, is a species of extremely venomous snake in the family Elapidae. Described by Wilhelm Peters in 1867, the species is native to the coastal regions of northern and eastern Australia and the island of New Guinea. The second-longest venomous snake in Australia, the coastal taipan averages around long, with the longest specimens reaching in length. It has light olive or reddish-brown upperparts, with paler underparts. The snake is considered to be a least-concern species according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The coastal taipan is found in a wide range of habitats, from monsoon forests to open woodland, as well as human-modified habitats such as sugarcane fields. It mainly hunts and eats small mammals, and opportunistically takes bird prey. The species is oviparous. According to most toxicological studies, this species is the third-most venomous land snake in the world after the inland tai ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Wilhelm Peters
Wilhelm Karl Hartwich (or Hartwig) Peters (22 April 1815 – 20 April 1883) was a German natural history, naturalist and explorer. He was assistant to the anatomist Johannes Peter Müller and later became curator of the Natural History Museum, Berlin, Berlin Zoological Museum. Encouraged by Müller and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, Peters travelled to Mozambique via Angola in September 1842, exploring the coastal region and the Zambesi River. He returned to Berlin with an enormous collection of natural history specimens, which he then described in ''Naturwissenschaftliche Reise nach Mossambique... in den Jahren 1842 bis 1848 ausgeführt'' (1852–1882). The work was comprehensive in its coverage, dealing with mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, river fish, insects and botany. He replaced Martin Lichtenstein as curator of the museum in 1858, and in the same year he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In a few years, he greatly increased ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Walsh River
The Walsh River is a river located on the Cape York Peninsula of Far North Queensland, Australia. The headwaters of the river rise in the locality of Watsonville on the Atherton Tableland approximately north of Herberton and then flow in a westerly direction then turning north past Mount Masterton and then veering west again near Tabacum. It crosses and then runs parallel to the Mareeba-Dimbulah Road then under Mount White and past Fumar and Dimbulah and through the Featherstone Range. It then flows to the north west crossing the Burke Developmental Road and eventually discharges into the Mitchell River of which it is a tributary A tributary, or an ''affluent'', is a stream or river that flows into a larger stream (''main stem'' or ''"parent"''), river, or a lake. A tributary does not flow directly into a sea or ocean. Tributaries, and the main stem river into which they ... on the boundary of the localities of Gamboola and Wrotham. The drainage sub-basin occupies ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Mitchell River National Park (Western Australia)
Mitchell River National Park is a national park in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, northeast of Perth. The park adjoins the northern boundary of the Prince Regent National Park. The nearest towns are Derby, to the southwest, as well as Wyndham, to the southeast. Created in 2000, the park covers an area of over on the Mitchell Plateau (Ngauwudu). The two main features of the park are Mitchell Falls (a waterfall on the Mitchell River) and Surveyors Pool (or Aunauyu). It lies in the traditional lands of the Wunambal, an Aboriginal Australian people. The park is known for distinctive plants such as a species of fan palm; it is home to several significant and threatened species, including the tiny rock wallaby known as the monjon and the black grasswren. A new Kimberley National Park, which would encompass Mitchell River National Park, Prince Regent National Park and Lawley River National Park, was in the early stages of planning around 2015 by Colin Barnett's gover ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Raymond Hoser
Raymond Terrence Hoser (born 1962) is an Australian snake-catcher and author. Hoser's work on herpetology is controversial, including his advocacy of the surgical alteration of captive snakes to remove their venom glands and his self-published herpetological taxonomy, which has been described as " taxonomic vandalism". Career Taxonomy Hoser has written on herpetology, with a focus on the taxonomy of Australian snakes. He has written and edited for ''Monitor'', an amateur magazine of the Victorian Herpetological Society. Since 2009, he has self-published the ''Australasian Journal of Herpetology.'' Hoser has described several species and genera of reptiles, including '' Pseudechis pailsei'' and '' Acanthophis wellsi'' (snakes in the family Elapidae). A 2021 review found that 59 of Hoser's reptile names had been over-written by other herpetologists. His work on the taxonomy of the Pythoninae was affirmed by a later phylogenetic study, but Reynolds ''et al.'' 2013, suggest the n ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Wolfgang Wüster
Wolfgang Wüster (born 1964) is a herpetologist and Professor in Zoology at Bangor University, UK. Wüster attained his bachelor's degree at the University of Cambridge in 1985 and his doctorate at the University of Aberdeen in 1990. His primary areas of research are the systematics and ecology of venomous snakes and the evolution of their venoms. He has authored approximately 180 scientific papers on varying herpetological subjects. Recent contributions have included descriptions of new species, especially of cobras, several studies into how natural selection drives the evolution of snake venoms, and demonstrating the likely vulnerability of Madagascar's native fauna to the skin toxins of the invasive Asian toad '' Duttaphrynus melanostictus''. He was the scientific editor for ''The Herpetological Journal'' (2002–2009), the scientific publication of the British Herpetological Society The British Herpetological Society (BHS) is an international herpetological society base ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Mitochondrial DNA
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA and mDNA) is the DNA located in the mitochondrion, mitochondria organelles in a eukaryotic cell that converts chemical energy from food into adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Mitochondrial DNA is a small portion of the DNA contained in a eukaryotic cell; most of the DNA is in the cell nucleus, and, in plants and algae, the DNA also is found in plastids, such as chloroplasts. Mitochondrial DNA is responsible for coding of 13 essential subunits of the complex oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) system which has a role in cellular energy conversion. Human mitochondrial DNA was the first significant part of the human genome to be sequenced. This sequencing revealed that human mtDNA has 16,569 base pairs and encodes 13 proteins. As in other vertebrates, the human mitochondrial genetic code differs slightly from nuclear DNA. Since animal mtDNA evolves faster than nuclear genetic markers, it represents a mainstay of phylogenetics and evolutionary biology. It als ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Snake Man Of La Perouse
The Snake Man is the common name for a reptile show at La Perouse, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Also known as 'the snake pit', an occasional Sunday afternoon visit to the Snake Man was a tradition for generations of Sydney families. History The show was held on the same site in La Perouse since the early 20th century. "Professor" Frederick Fox The original Snake Man was "Professor" Frederick Fox, also known as the "Snake King", who was proud of the immunity to snake venom that he had developed. However, like other such showmen, he did have his own special antidote. In 1913, Fox travelled to India to sell his antidote. While demonstrating his antidote in Calcutta in 1914, Fox was bitten several times by a krait. He treated himself but overlooked one bite and died after a few hours. Herbert See Another local, Herbert See, took over the La Perouse show but he was bitten by an Eastern Brown Snake and died in hospital. George Cann George Cann took on the show in the 1919 an ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Common Name
In biology, a common name of a taxon or organism (also known as a vernacular name, English name, colloquial name, country name, popular name, or farmer's name) is a name that is based on the normal language of everyday life; and is often contrasted with the scientific name for the same organism, which is often based in Latin. A common name is sometimes frequently used, but that is not always the case. In chemistry, IUPAC defines a common name as one that, although it unambiguously defines a chemical, does not follow the current systematic naming convention, such as acetone, systematically 2-propanone, while a vernacular name describes one used in a lab, trade or industry that does not unambiguously describe a single chemical, such as copper sulfate, which may refer to either copper(I) sulfate or copper(II) sulfate. Sometimes common names are created by authorities on one particular subject, in an attempt to make it possible for members of the general public (including s ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Ken Slater (herpetologist)
Kenneth R. Slater (22 June 1923 - 15 August 1999)Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). ''The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. . ("Slater, K.", p. 245). Retrieved througGoogleBooks 18 June 2017. was an Australian engineer and herpetologist.Mirtschin P (2006). "The pioneers of venom production for Australian antivenoms". ''Toxicon'' 48: 899-918. (Slater is in pages 911 and 912). Retrieveonline 18 June 2017. Slater's deliveries of snake venom were instrumental in the development of antivenom for several species. Biography Slater was educated as a civil engineer, but he was interested in zoology and snakes, as well. In his early years, he accompanied Eric Worrell a few times, searching for live snakes in the Australian wild. In 1952, he took a job in the oil industry in Papua New Guinea, to be able to spend more time in the wild. Shortly after, he was appointed acting animal ecologist by the Department of Agri ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Principle Of Priority
Priority is a principle in Taxonomy (biology), biological taxonomy by which a valid scientific name is established based on the oldest available name. It is a decisive rule in Botanical nomenclature, botanical and zoological nomenclature to recognise the first Binomial nomenclature, binomial name (also called ''binominal name'' in zoology) given to an organism as the correct and acceptable name. The purpose is to select one scientific name as a stable one out of two or more alternate names that often exist for a single species. The ''International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants'' (ICN) defines it as: "A right to precedence established by the date of valid publication of a legitimate name or of an earlier homonym, or by the date of designation of a type." Basically, it is a scientific procedure to eliminate duplicate or multiple names for a species, for which Lucien Marcus Underwood called it "the principle of outlaw in nomenclature". History The principle of ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Donald Thomson
Donald Finlay Fergusson Thomson OBE (26 June 1901 – 12 May 1970) was an Australian anthropologist and ornithologist. he is known for his studies of and friendship with the Pintupi and Yolngu peoples, and for his intervention in the Caledon Bay crisis. Early life and education Donald Finlay Fergusson Thomson was born on 26 June 1901 in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton. Thomson went to Scotch College, Melbourne, before earning a B.Sc. in zoology and botany at the University of Melbourne in 1925. In 1927 he studied at the University of Sydney, earning a diploma in anthropology in 1928. While still a school student, he joined the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union in 1917. He served as press officer in 1923, and then as assistant editor of its journal, ''Emu'' from 1924 to 1925. After two trips to Cape York, Queensland, Thomson joined the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, and in 1932 joined the University of Melbourne as a research fellow ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Palatine Bone
In anatomy, the palatine bones (; derived from the Latin ''palatum'') are two irregular bones of the facial skeleton in many animal species, located above the uvula in the throat. Together with the maxilla, they comprise the hard palate. Structure The palatine bones are situated at the back of the nasal cavity between the maxilla and the pterygoid process of the sphenoid bone. They contribute to the walls of three cavities: the floor and lateral walls of the nasal cavity, the roof of the mouth, and the floor of the orbits. They help to form the pterygopalatine and pterygoid fossae, and the inferior orbital fissures. Each palatine bone somewhat resembles the letter L, and consists of a horizontal plate, a perpendicular plate, and three projecting processes—the pyramidal process, which is directed backward and lateral from the junction of the two parts, and the orbital and sphenoidal processes, which surmount the vertical part, and are separated by a deep notch, the s ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]