I get to study DRAGONS

Okay, let's just rip this bandaid off right away. Not these dragons:​

Source: Panda Whale.

Source: Panda Whale.

​Mostly because those dragons, despite the recent publication of their phylogeny, are mythical. But also because Operational Health & Safety would never approve the risk assessment. The dragons I work with are much more adorable:

​Adorable Central Netted Dragons (Ctenophorus nuchalis). Henbury Station, Northern Territory, 2012.

The dragons I study are part of the mostly Australo-Papuan group of lizards which are referred to as "dragons". The scientific name for this group is Amphibolurinae​. To anyone outside of Australia, the most familiar members of this group are probably the bearded & Chinese water dragons, both of which are commonly sold in pet shops across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. In Australia, dragons are well known because they're diurnal and like to bask in the sun from conspicuous locations such as rock piles, bushes, and trees.

How can you tell a dragon from any other lizard? Well, you probably can't. Neither could I. I cannot think of a single morphological character that would allow me to look at a lizard and identify it as a dragon (i.e. a member of the Amphibolurinae​), nor can I find any in the literature. Genetically, however, they are distinctly their own group. Amphibolurine dragons are part of a larger group of lizards called agamids, which are identifiable from skeletal characteristics, but still there are no external morphological features that would allow you to look at an agamid and identify it as such. Here's a non-dragon agamid:

​Blue-headed Tree Agama (Acanthocercus atricollis). Nairobi National Park, Kenya, 2013.

Some agamids that are not amphibolurines may also be called "dragons", notably the flying dragons of the genus Draco​ and the mountain horned dragons of Acanthosaura​. These are members of another agamid group, the Draconinae.​ Since, as any HP fan can tell you, "draco" means "dragon" in Latin, that's fair enough. It's interesting, though, that every species of amphibolurine carries the name dragon (with one notable exception), however the name seems to be only haphazardly applied to a few species within Draconinae​, a group literally called "the dragons".

There is another lizard out there referred to as a dragon:

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​Komodo Dragon (Varanus komodoensis). Rinca Island, Indonesia, 2013. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Komodo dragons are not closely related to the agamid dragons. They are members of the Varanidae, which are known as goannas (to Australians) or monitor lizards (to the rest of the world) and they are closely related to gila monsters and snakes. Agamids are off quite a different branch of the lizard evolutionary tree. Their closest living relatives are the chameleons and iguanids. Here's a sample chameleon, the closest living relative of the agamids:​

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Ruwenzori Three-horned Chameleon (Chameleo johnstoni). Kibira National Park, Burundi, 2012.

There is one last dragon I can think of. I would love more than anything to be able to study this dragon:

puff the magic dragon (live version) Present tense!!!!

​And by "study" I mean "be best friends with".

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The Lizard Lab

I'm based in Canberra at the ANU, but at the moment I'm a "visiting researcher" at Macquarie University in Sydney where my co-supervisor Martin Whiting is located. Martin runs a dynamic lab of people studying lizard social behaviour & cognition. He's also quite new-media savvy, especially for an academic! He runs "The Lizard Lab" website on which all of his students have their own section:​

The Lizard Lab​

​You can also follow Martin & The Lizard Lab on Twitter:

@lizard_lab

​And "Like" them on facebook:

​The Lizard Lab: Behaviour, ecology and evolution of lizards

So many different ways to check out what they do!​

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I love a good picture, but hate photography

I think I will use this blog mostly to post interesting pictures from my fieldwork trips, at least at first. The blog format will give me extra room to provide a context in which to place the pictures, and the flexibility of the format will, I hope, give me the freedom to tell an interesting story in the process. We'll see how well it works. ​Worst case scenario, we can all TL;DR and look at the pretty pictures. Here's one:

​Elephant with rainbow. Maasai Mara, Kenya, 2008.

​The main problem with this idea is I don't have many pictures. I own a decent camera, a Nikon D60, which is a digital SLR camera. I have three lenses for it, a 55-200, an 18-55, and a 2.8-32. I don't even know what those numbers mean, but I refer to the lenses as my telephoto, wide-angle, and macro lenses, respectively. I'm sure I could figure out what the numbers mean, it can't be too complicated, but to be honest I'm just not that interested. One thing I've learned about myself from owning an SLR camera is that I'm really not that into photography. 

Some people are artists with their photographs. I have great respect for these people, and I admire and appreciate their work. But I am not one of them. I take pictures primarily for the memories. I want that picture so that I can look back later and be nostalgic for that moment, remembering good times, great people, and interesting places. When I take lots of pictures of the same thing, it's more because it bugs me to have to look at a picture that's out of focus, rather than because I'm concerned about framing or getting the lighting right.​

​A good example of this is when I caught my first tuatara. Tuatara live only on remote, offshore islands in New Zealand and are the last remnants of their own unique group of reptiles. They're unlike anything else on this planet and getting to see them in the wild, let alone catch them and admire them up close, is a true privilege for any wildlife enthusiast. I was over-the-moon ecstatic. In that moment, how many pictures did I get? Exactly one. Here it is:

​Me with my first tuatara. New Zealand, 2004.

​In fact, over the six weeks I spent in New Zealand, I took only 63 pictures. Photography just isn't my thing.

Fortunately, photography is a thing for other people.​ On my PhD field trips in Australia I bring plenty of volunteers to help catch lizards and thankfully most of them bring their cameras. Before we leave, I make it clear that I would like them to "donate" their pictures to me. That way I can have all the memories without actually having to take the pictures myself. And what use is it for everyone to stand next to each other and all take pictures of the same thing anyway? To me it makes a lot more sense for one person to take the picture and then share it. I know not everyone feels the same way, and I respect that. Lucky for me, all but one of my photography-inclined volunteers have shared their photos with me.

It's these photos, taken by my volunteers, that I'll be sharing here. If a photo appears here then the person who took it gave me permission to use their photos publicly. Each photographer has specified how they want to be acknowledged. If a photo appears without accreditation, either the photographer has given me permission to share their pictures uncredited or the photo was one (begrudgingly) taken by me.

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Website!

I have a website! Actually, I'm the last person in my lab to get off their butt and make a website, and I was starting to get quite a bit of flack for it! So I got my act together and asked a friend of mine, Angus Kennedy, to help me make one. Gus is an excellent web designer and created this beautiful piece of Internet real estate for me to call home. Gus is also a lizard-catcher extraordinaire and has come with me during both my field seasons, in 2011 and 2012. Here he is with our two most exciting finds of 2012:

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Angus Kennedy with a thorny devil, Moloch horridus​. Thurlga Station, South Australia, 2012.

The lizard is a thorny devil (Moloch horridus), one of Australia's most unusual and iconic reptiles. It's not an easy creature to come across in the wild. The other exciting find is Gus's hat, which we found in the Alice Springs Salvation Army. The hat is as ridiculous as it is sun-safe, also not an easy thing to come across.​

As part of the website I now have a blog, this blog, that I think I will use mostly for posting pictures with a little more background information than is possible with the gallery. The best photos posted here will be cross-posted to the gallery as I put them up, with links coming back to the blog post they belong to.