Date: January 27, 2016
Source: Pensoft Publishers
The first females of a scarcely
known chameleon species from Northeast Madagascar have been described. Because
of lack of genetic data, X-ray micro-computed tomography scans of the
chameleon's head were used for species assignment. Regrettably, the habitats of
this and many other chameleon species are highly threatened by the ongoing
deforestation in Madagascar. The study is published in the open-access journal Zoosystematics
and Evolution.
Chameleons belong to the most
popular animals of Madagascar and have been quite intensively studied in the
past. However, many new species are still being discovered and described, and
several species are only known by a single or a few specimens. Likewise, the
chameleon species Calumma vatosoa from northeastern Madagascar was
described in 2001 based on a single male. The identity of females of this
species has been unclear until now.
Recently, the PhD student David
Proetzel of the herpetology section of the Zoologische Staatssammlung Munchen
(ZSM), Germany, found specimens of female chameleons in the collection of the
Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, that looked similar
to Calumma vatosoa. The problem was, how to prove this? The specimens from
Frankfurt were collected back in 1933 and therefore, the extraction of DNA for
genetic analysis was not possible anymore.
Researchers of the ZSM have been
using X-ray micro-computed tomography scans for a few years to study the
internal morphology of organisms in a non-invasive way.
"With the help of Micro-CT
you can investigate even the skeleton of very valuable samples like holotypes
without destroying them," explains David Proetzel.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!