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Leeward Island Racer
The Leeward Island racer (''Alsophis rijgersmaei'') is a species of snake in the family Colubridae. The species is found in Anguilla, Saint Barthélemy, and is probably extirpated from Sint Maarten. Taxonomy It was named by Edward Drinker Cope in 1869, the specific name honouring the Dutch government physician in St. Maarten, Hendrik Elingsz van Rijgersma, who was an avid amateur naturalist.Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). ''The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. . ("''Alsophis rijgersmai'' ic, p. 222). Conservation It was thought to have been eradicated by the mongoose (Westerman, 1955; Sajdak and Henderson, 1991 in Powell et al., 1992). However, in 1992 there was a report of five specimens that were captured at Mary's Fancy, and in the same year one was observed in the field (Powell et al., 1992). A snake was also seen after the hurricane in January 1996 during a field trip at Flagstaf (Ecovisio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Drinker Cope
Edward Drinker Cope (July 28, 1840 – April 12, 1897) was an American zoologist, paleontologist, comparative anatomist, herpetologist, and ichthyologist. Born to a wealthy Quaker family, Cope distinguished himself as a child prodigy interested in science; he published his first scientific paper at the age of 19. Though his father tried to raise Cope as a gentleman farmer, he eventually acquiesced to his son's scientific aspirations. Cope married his cousin and had one child; the family moved from Philadelphia to Haddonfield, New Jersey, although Cope would maintain a residence and museum in Philadelphia in his later years. Cope had little formal scientific training, and he eschewed a teaching position for field work. He made regular trips to the American West, prospecting in the 1870s and 1880s, often as a member of United States Geological Survey teams. A personal feud between Cope and paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh led to a period of intense fossil-finding competition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hendrik Van Rijgersma
Hendrik Elingsz van Rijgersma (born 5 January 1835 in Lemmer, Province of Friesland, the Netherlands, died 4 March 1877 in St. Martin) was a Dutch naturalist, physician, amateur botanist, malacologist and ichthyologist. Biography Rijgersma became a physician in 1858, and practiced medicine in the small town of Jisp and on the island of Marken. In 1861 he married Maria Henriette Gräfing; they had seven children. When slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies in 1863, he was one of six physicians appointed to provide medical care to the liberated slaves on the island of St. Martin in the Netherlands Antilles, where he served as government physician until his untimely death at the age of 42. There he collected many fossils, plants, birds, reptiles, fishes, mollusks, crustaceans and insects. Hendrik van Rijgersma was an excellent painter and left to posterity many, mostly unpublished, drawings, sketches and water colors of plants, shells and other subjects. His animal col ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reptiles Described In 1869
Reptiles, as most commonly defined are the animals in the class Reptilia ( ), a paraphyletic grouping comprising all sauropsids except birds. Living reptiles comprise turtles, crocodilians, squamates (lizards and snakes) and rhynchocephalians (tuatara). As of March 2022, the Reptile Database includes about 11,700 species. In the traditional Linnaean classification system, birds are considered a separate class to reptiles. However, crocodilians are more closely related to birds than they are to other living reptiles, and so modern cladistic classification systems include birds within Reptilia, redefining the term as a clade. Other cladistic definitions abandon the term reptile altogether in favor of the clade Sauropsida, which refers to all amniotes more closely related to modern reptiles than to mammals. The study of the traditional reptile orders, historically combined with that of modern amphibians, is called herpetology. The earliest known proto-reptiles originated around 3 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reptiles Of The Caribbean
Reptiles, as most commonly defined are the animals in the class Reptilia ( ), a paraphyletic grouping comprising all sauropsids except birds. Living reptiles comprise turtles, crocodilians, squamates (lizards and snakes) and rhynchocephalians (tuatara). As of March 2022, the Reptile Database includes about 11,700 species. In the traditional Linnaean classification system, birds are considered a separate class to reptiles. However, crocodilians are more closely related to birds than they are to other living reptiles, and so modern cladistic classification systems include birds within Reptilia, redefining the term as a clade. Other cladistic definitions abandon the term reptile altogether in favor of the clade Sauropsida, which refers to all amniotes more closely related to modern reptiles than to mammals. The study of the traditional reptile orders, historically combined with that of modern amphibians, is called herpetology. The earliest known proto-reptiles originated around 31 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alsophis
''Alsophis'' is a genus of snakes in the subfamily Dipsadinae of the family Colubridae. Species in the genus ''Alsophis'' are among those snakes commonly called "racers". ''Alsophis'' species are endemic to the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. One species in the genus ''Alsophis'', ''A. antiguae'', is one of the world's rarest known snakes. Snakes of the genus ''Alsophis'' are small and rear-fanged, and they are considered harmless to humans. This genus contains nine described species which are recognized as being valid. Several species once included in this genus have been placed in the genera ''Borikenophis'' and '' Pseudalsophis''. Rarest species '' Alsophis antiguae'' is the rarest snake in the genus ''Alsophis''. This snake once occurred on Antigua and Barbuda, but by 1995, only 50 individuals remained on Great Bird Island, off the coast of Antigua. Following the removal of invasive alien predators and successful reintroductions to a further three islands (Rabbit in 1999 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carnegie Museum Of Natural History
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as CMNH) is a natural history museum in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was founded by Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896. Housing some 22 million specimens, the museum features one of the finest paleontological collections in the world. Description and history The museum consists of organized into 20 galleries as well as research, library, and office space. It holds some 22 million specimens, of which about 10,000 are on view at any given time and about 1 million are cataloged in online databases. In 2008 it hosted 386,300 admissions and 63,000 school group visits. Museum education staff also actively engage in outreach by traveling to schools all around western Pennsylvania. The museum gained prominence in 1899 when its scientists unearthed the fossils of ''Diplodocus carnegii''. Notable dinosaur specimens include one of the world's very few fossils of a juvenile ''Apatosauru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Schwartz (zoologist)
Albert Schwartz (September 13, 1923 – October 18, 1992) was an American zoologist who worked extensively with the herpetofauna of Florida and the West Indies, and later with butterflies. One magazine article once dubbed him as one of the "Kings of West Indian Anole Taxonomy". Career Schwartz obtained his PhD from the University of Michigan in mammalogy in 1952. Already at that time, he had a keen interest in amphibians and reptiles, as well as in warmer climates. Schwartz spent most of his professional working life at Miami-Dade Community College; he was also supported by a family trust, which he used to fund his own activities as well as field expeditions by others. He was a Research Associate of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and also an associate of the Florida Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution), and the ''Museo Nacional de Historia Natural'', Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Starting in 1954, he worke ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Specific Name (zoology)
In zoological nomenclature, the specific name (also specific epithet or species epithet) is the second part (the second name) within the scientific name of a species (a binomen). The first part of the name of a species is the name of the genus or the generic name. The rules and regulations governing the giving of a new species name are explained in the article species description. For example, the scientific name for humans is ''Homo sapiens'', which is the species name, consisting of two names: ''Homo'' is the " generic name" (the name of the genus) and ''sapiens'' is the "specific name". Historically, ''specific name'' referred to the combination of what are now called the generic and specific names. Carl Linnaeus, who formalized binomial nomenclature, made explicit distinctions between specific, generic, and trivial names. The generic name was that of the genus, the first in the binomial, the trivial name was the second name in the binomial, and the specific the proper term for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Garman
Samuel Walton Garman (June 5, 1843 – September 30, 1927), or "Garmann" as he sometimes styled himself, was a naturalist/zoologist from Pennsylvania. He became noted as an ichthyologist and herpetologist. Biography Garman was born in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, on 5 June 1843. In 1868 he joined an expedition to the American West with John Wesley Powell. He graduated from the Illinois State Normal University in 1870, and for the following year was principal of the Mississippi State Normal School. In 1871, he became professor of natural sciences in Ferry Hall Seminary, Lake Forest, Illinois, and a year later became a special pupil of Louis Agassiz. He was a friend and regular correspondent of the naturalist Edward Drinker Cope, and in 1872 accompanied him on a fossil hunting trip to Wyoming. In 1870 he became assistant director of herpetology and ichthyology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His work was mostly in the classification of fish, especially sharks, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sint Maarten
Sint Maarten () is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Caribbean. With a population of 41,486 as of January 2019 on an area of , it encompasses the southern 44% of the divided island of Saint Martin, while the northern 56% of the island constitutes the French overseas collectivity of Saint Martin. Sint Maarten's capital is Philipsburg. Collectively, Sint Maarten and the other Dutch islands in the Caribbean are often called the Dutch Caribbean. Before 10 October 2010, Sint Maarten was known as the Island Territory of Sint Maarten ( nl, Eilandgebied Sint Maarten), and was one of six island territories () that constituted the Netherlands Antilles. Sint Maarten has the status of an overseas country and territory (OCT) and is not part of the European Union. On 6 and 7 September 2017, the island was hit by Category 5 Hurricane Irma, which caused widespread and significant damage to buildings and infrastructure. Etymology The island was named by C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
