Pillar · Herpetology

Research

This is the scientific half of the faunalore project: reptiles studied as biological subjects. My herpetological work centers on systematics — the reconstruction of how living groups are related — with a focus on the African plated lizards, family Gerrhosauridae, and the genus Gerrhosaurus in particular.

I work primarily from morphology. Long before DNA sequencing, and still alongside it, the shape of an animal is evidence: the architecture of the skull, the arrangement of scales and osteoderms, the proportions of the limbs. Read carefully, those characters trace the branching history of a lineage. My master's thesis reconstructed the relationships within Gerrhosaurus on exactly that basis, and it has since been cited in broader syntheses of southern African reptile phylogenetics — the work of Lamb and colleagues in 2003, and of Bates and colleagues in 2013.

Reptiles reward close attention past the family tree, too. I've looked at how a lizard's tail performs after it is shed and regrown — the biology of autotomy and regeneration — and I review the scholarship on how reptiles fare in human care, where the physiology of the animal runs straight into the ethics of keeping it.

That last question is where this pillar leans toward the other. The lizards I sort into a phylogeny are the same animals people bring home, breed for color, show at fairs, and tell stories about. Studying reptiles as lineages and studying them as cultural subjects are two views of one curiosity — which is the whole premise of faunalore. For the complete, citable record across both halves, see all publications.