About the size of a chicken wing, Alberta's only native lizard species lacks protection from predators — so they shoot blood out of their eye sockets.
And earlier this week, as part of an annual search for the endangered blood-squirting reptiles, the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) found eight greater short-horned lizards in southeastern Alberta.
It's the highest record of the species the NCC has ever found.
"I don't think we've ever found more than two or three.… So to be able to find that many — it's pretty incredible for us," said Megan Jensen, NCC's natural area manager for southeastern Alberta.
The relationship of affection you can have with domestic animals is outstanding and amazing, but truly it is also something to manage to gain the trust of a creature that will never love you truly but still trusts that large predator enough to slither, crawl on them and be interested in their buisness
This is a gentle reminder to those who keep poultry to PLEASE keep in mind wild snakes if you are using fake eggs in your chicken coop. Snakes are incapable of digesting the wooden/plastic/ceramic fake eggs that are commonly placed in chicken coops to train hens. Snakes (like this little ratsnake here) can and often do eat these fake eggs and suffer life-threatening obstruction as a result!
If you need to use fake eggs in your coop please strive to ensure that the enclosure is snake-proof (difficult) or superglue 3 or more eggs together so that snakes cannot consume them and become obstructed.
During low tide on Scotland's Isle of Skye, a graduate student hunting for dinosaur bones looked down at the coastal rocks and made the discovery of a lifetime: the remains of the largest pterosaur on record from the Jurassic period.
Since collecting the specimen in 2017 – an eventful excavation that involved cutting out the pterosaur chunks with diamond-tipped saws and almost losing the fossil when the tide returned – researchers have studied its anatomy and determined that it's a previously unknown species.
They gave the beast the Scottish Gaelic name Dearc sgiathanach (jark ski-an-ach), a double meaning of "winged reptile" and "reptile from Skye," as Skye's Gaelic name (An t-Eilean Sgitheanach) means "the winged isle".
D. sgiathanach would have sported a wingspan of more than 8 feet (2.5 meters) long, a wild size for a pterosaur dating to the Jurassic period (201.3 million to 145 million years ago), the team said.