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Platyplectrurus Trilineatus
''Platyplectrurus trilineatus'', commonly known as the tri-striped shield-tail snake or the lined thorntail snake, is a species of uropeltid snake endemic to the Western Ghats of Southern India. Like most other shieldtail snakes, it is presumed to be a nocturnal, fossorial snake inhabiting evergreen forests. A very rare snake, about which nothing is known in terms of live colouration and natural history. Geographic range It is found in southern India in the southern Western Ghats in the Anamalai Hills The Anamala or Anaimalai, also known as the Elephant Mountains, are a range of mountains in the southern Western Ghats of central Kerala (Idukki district, Ernakulam district, Palakkad district, Thrissur district) and span the border of western ... of Kerala and Tamil Nadu states. Type locality of ''Plectrurus trilineatus'': "Anamally forests; elevation 4,000 feet". Type locality of ''Platyplectrurus bilineatus'': "Madura Hills". Description Adults are reddish brown ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Henry Beddome
Colonel Richard Henry Beddome (11 May 1830 – 23 February 1911) was a British military officer and naturalist in India, who became chief conservator of the Madras Forest Department. In the mid-19th century, he extensively surveyed several remote and then-unexplored hill ranges in Sri Lanka and south India, including those in the Eastern Ghats such as Yelandur, Kollegal, Shevaroy Hills, Yelagiri, Nallamala Hills, Visakhapatnam hills, and the Western Ghats such as Nilgiri hills, Anaimalai hills, Agasthyamalai Hills and Kudremukh. He described many species of plants, amphibians, and reptiles from southern India and Sri Lanka, and several species from this region described by others bear his name. Early life Richard was the eldest son of Richard Boswell Brandon Beddome, solicitor, of Clapham Common, S.W. He was educated at Charterhouse School and trained for the legal profession, but preferred to join the East India Company at the age of 18 and joined the 42nd Madras Native I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Günther
Albert Karl Ludwig Gotthilf Günther FRS, also Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf Günther (3 October 1830 – 1 February 1914), was a German-born British zoologist, ichthyologist, and herpetologist. Günther is ranked the second-most productive reptile taxonomist (after George Albert Boulenger) with more than 340 reptile species described. Early life and career Günther was born in Esslingen in Swabia (Württemberg). His father was a ''Stiftungs-Commissar'' in Esslingen and his mother was Eleonora Nagel. He initially schooled at the Stuttgart Gymnasium. His family wished him to train for the ministry of the Lutheran Church for which he moved to the University of Tübingen. A brother shifted from theology to medicine, and he, too, turned to science and medicine at Tübingen in 1852. His first work was "''Ueber den Puppenzustand eines Distoma''". He graduated in medicine with an M.D. from Tübingen in 1858, the same year in which he published a handbook of zoology for students of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Albert Boulenger
George Albert Boulenger (19 October 1858 – 23 November 1937) was a Belgian-British zoologist who described and gave scientific names to over 2,000 new animal species, chiefly fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Boulenger was also an active botanist during the last 30 years of his life, especially in the study of roses. Life Boulenger was born in Brussels, Belgium, the only son of Gustave Boulenger, a Belgian public notary, and Juliette Piérart, from Valenciennes. He graduated in 1876 from the Free University of Brussels with a degree in natural sciences, and worked for a while at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels, as an assistant naturalist studying amphibians, reptiles, and fishes. He also made frequent visits during this time to the ''Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle'' in Paris and the British Museum in London. In 1880, he was invited to work at the Natural History Museum, then a department of the British Museum, by Dr. Albert C. L. G. Günther a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Species
In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. Other ways of defining species include their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology, behaviour or ecological niche. In addition, paleontologists use the concept of the chronospecies since fossil reproduction cannot be examined. The most recent rigorous estimate for the total number of species of eukaryotes is between 8 and 8.7 million. However, only about 14% of these had been described by 2011. All species (except viruses) are given a two-part name, a "binomial". The first part of a binomial is the genus to which the species belongs. The second part is called the specific name or the specific epithet (in botanical nomenclature, also sometimes i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uropeltidae
The Uropeltidae, also known Common name, commonly as the shieldtails or the shield-tailed snakes, are a Family (biology), family of primitive, nonvenomous, burrowing snakes native to peninsular India and Sri Lanka. The name is derived from the Greek words ('tail') and ('shield'), indicating the presence of the large keratinous shield at the tip of the tail. Seven or eight genus, genera are recognized, depending on whether ''Teretrurus rhodogaster'' is treated in its own genus or as part of ''Brachyophidium''. The family comprises over 50 species. These snakes are not well known in terms of their diversity, biology, and natural history. Description Snakes in the family Uropeltidae are small snakes, with adults growing to a total length (including tail) of . They are adapted to a fossorial way of life, which is apparent in their anatomy. The skull is primitive and inflexible, with a short, vertical quadrate bone and rigid jaws; the coronoid bone is still present in the lower jaw. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endemism
Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsewhere. For example, the Cape sugarbird is found exclusively in southwestern South Africa and is therefore said to be ''endemic'' to that particular part of the world. An endemic species can be also be referred to as an ''endemism'' or in scientific literature as an ''endemite''. For example '' Cytisus aeolicus'' is an endemite of the Italian flora. '' Adzharia renschi'' was once believed to be an endemite of the Caucasus, but it was later discovered to be a non-indigenous species from South America belonging to a different genus. The extreme opposite of an endemic species is one with a cosmopolitan distribution, having a global or widespread range. A rare alternative term for a species that is endemic is "precinctive", which applies to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia. Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago., "Y-Chromosome and Mt-DNA data support the colonization of South Asia by modern humans originating in Africa. ... Coalescence dates for most non-European populations average to between 73–55 ka.", "Modern human beings—''Homo sapiens''—originated in Africa. Then, int ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nocturnal
Nocturnality is an animal behavior characterized by being active during the night and sleeping during the day. The common adjective is "nocturnal", versus diurnal meaning the opposite. Nocturnal creatures generally have highly developed senses of hearing, smell, and specially adapted eyesight. Some animals, such as cats and ferrets, have eyes that can adapt to both low-level and bright day levels of illumination (see metaturnal). Others, such as bushbabies and (some) bats, can function only at night. Many nocturnal creatures including tarsiers and some owls have large eyes in comparison with their body size to compensate for the lower light levels at night. More specifically, they have been found to have a larger cornea relative to their eye size than diurnal creatures to increase their : in the low-light conditions. Nocturnality helps wasps, such as ''Apoica flavissima'', avoid hunting in intense sunlight. Diurnal animals, including squirrels and songbirds, are active du ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fossorial
A fossorial () animal is one adapted to digging which lives primarily, but not solely, underground. Some examples are badgers, naked mole-rats, clams, meerkats, and mole salamanders, as well as many beetles, wasps, and bees. Prehistoric evidence The physical adaptation of fossoriality is widely accepted as being widespread among many prehistoric phyla and taxa, such as bacteria and early eukaryotes. Furthermore, fossoriality has evolved independently multiple times, even within a single family. Fossorial animals appeared simultaneously with the colonization of land by arthropods in the late Ordovician period (over 440 million years ago). Other notable early burrowers include ''Eocaecilia'' and possibly ''Dinilysia''. The oldest example of burrowing in synapsids, the lineage which includes modern mammals and their ancestors, is a cynodont, ''Thrinaxodon liorhinus'', found in the Karoo of South Africa, estimated to be 251 million years old. Evidence shows that this ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evergreen Forests
An evergreen forest is a forest made up of evergreen trees. They occur across a wide range of climatic zones, and include trees such as conifers and holly in cold climates, eucalyptus, Live oak, acacias, magnolia, and banksia in more temperate zones, and rainforest trees in tropical zones. Species of trees Coniferous temperate evergreen forests are most frequently dominated by species in the families. The trees include: Pinaceae and Cupressaceae. Broadleaf temperate evergreen forests include those in which Fagaceae, such as oaks and ferns are common, those in which Nothofagaceae predominate, and the eucalyptus forests of the Southern Hemisphere. There also are assorted temperate evergreen forests dominated by other families of trees, such as Lauraceae in laurel forest. Regions Temperate evergreen forests, coniferous, broadleaf, and mixed, are found largely in the temperate mid-latitudes of , Siberia, Canada, Australia, Africa, Scandinavia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Amazon and Orino ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anamalai Hills
The Anamala or Anaimalai, also known as the Elephant Mountains, are a range of mountains in the southern Western Ghats of central Kerala (Idukki district, Ernakulam district, Palakkad district, Thrissur district) and span the border of western Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore district and Tiruppur district) in Southern India. The name ''anamala'' is derived from the Malayalam word ''aana and'' the Tamil language, Tamil word ''aanai'', meaning elephant, or from tribal languages. ''Mala'' or ''Malai'' means 'hill', and thus 'Elephant hill'. Anamudi Peak (8,842 feet (2,695 metres)) lies at the southern end of the range and is the highest peak in southern India. The Palakkad Gap is the mountain pass which divides it from the Nilgiri Mountains. The northern slopes of the hills in Tamil Nadu now have Coffee bean, coffee and tea plantations(especially around Valparai), as well as teak plantations of high economic value. The rest are mostly forests, of mainly two ecoregions-the South Western Gh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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