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reptiles

April 9, 2019 by Erin Southerland

Carnegie Museum of Natural History Extends Reptiles: LIVE! Exhibition by Popular Demand

Carnegie Museum of Natural History announced today that its popular touring exhibition, Reptiles: LIVE!, will extend for two extra weeks, through Memorial Day Weekend. The exhibition, which features live reptiles and family-friendly activities, will now be open until Memorial Day, Monday, May 27, 2019.

The museum is excited to offer the extension in response to overwhelmingly positive visitor feedback. When asked about the most memorable aspects of their trip to the museum, visitors cited fantastic experiences during Reptiles: LIVE! including:

“the wonderful presentation of the reptiles and the outstanding … short films.”

“my granddaughters’ reactions to the reptiles.”

“seeing my nephew in awe of everything, especially the Dinosaurs and Reptiles: LIVE!”

Reptiles: Live! is $5 for adults and $3 for members, children, students, and seniors (after museum admission). For more information, visit CarnegieMNH.org.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: reptiles

April 5, 2019 by wpengine

What Makes Reptiles So Unique?

What makes reptiles so unique? Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles, Jennifer Sheridan, shares some of her favorite facts about the unique adaptations of reptiles including flying lizards and flying snakes. She also addresses how human activities impact reptiles like turtles, and how they adapt to changes in climate.

Ask a Scientist is a video series where we ask our research staff questions about the millions of amazing objects and specimens stored in our museum collection. Tune in on YouTube, and submit your own questions at https://carnegiemnh.org/visitor/ask-a-scientist-videos/

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: amphibians and reptiles, Anthropocene, herpetology, Jennifer Sheridan, Lizards, reptiles, snakes

March 1, 2019 by wpengine

The Enduring Appeal of Snakes

by Jennifer A. Sheridan

As a herpetologist, I’m often asked whether I see a lot of snakes. To be clear, seeing snakes is always an exciting treat for me. But I’ve come to learn that when people ask this question, they’re usually not asking because they want to hear about all the gorgeous ones I’ve seen, but because they want to gauge how “dangerous” it is to be out and about in the forests where I work. I always explain that snakes are fairly skittish and most will quickly move away from humans, but that yes, I do have the good fortune of seeing some excellent individuals. I especially love Danum Valley, one of my field sites in Borneo, for this reason. Depending on the year, I may be lucky enough to see several species within a short time, and last October I had some great sightings.

Because I focus on amphibians, most of my work is at night, and mostly along streams. Often, we see snakes on branches as we come into the stream, like this lovely triangle keelback (Xenochrophis triangularis):

snake on a branch at night

Or in the middle of our search for frogs along the stream transect, like this blunt-headed snail-eating snake (Aplopeltura boa):

snake in a tree at night

This species is one of my favorites because it has a big fat head that it uses to hunt for snails. It unhinges its jaw and inserts the lower jaw into the shell to pull out the meat. Sorry, Tim Pearce! 😉

Other times we see snakes swimming in the water as we’re walking upstream, like this baby Python reticulatus:

snake in the water

This was one of the highlights of the trip because a) baby pythons are so cute and b) it had clearly just eaten, so it had a large belly bulge (I feel you, python). When it tried to dive under water, its belly kept floating at the surface and it didn’t really have much luck in hiding away from us. Adorable. (It eventually made its way over to the bank and up into the forest.)

One of the most striking sights, however, had to be this mangrove snake (Boiga dendrophila) swimming downstream towards us, head held up above the water, jet black body lithely undulating behind it. Because of its bright yellow chin and underside, it is extremely striking at night.

snake on rocky ground at night

One time, years ago, I was in the middle of a transect and the batteries in my headlamp had started to die. I stopped, turned off my light, and changed them out while my teammates continued the survey upstream. When I got my headlamp back on my head and switched it on, a Boigadendrophilawas between my feet. While I am fairly calm in the field, I have to admit that this gave me quite a start! But he went on his way and I went on mine, neither of us all that bothered by the other. So while many people fear snakes, for the vast majority of species if you don’t bother them, they really won’t bother you.

Jennifer A. Sheridan is the Assistant Curator in the Section of Herpetology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

Blog author: Sheridan, Jennifer A.
Publication date: March 1, 2019

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: amphibians and reptiles, Borneo, herpetology, Jennifer Sheridan, reptiles, snakes

January 30, 2019 by wpengine

The Search for the Near Threatened Green Salamander, Aneides aeneus

By Kaylin Martin

green salamander
Photo credit: Aaron Semasko

Fueled by caffeine and the promise of a sighting of the elusive and threatened green salamander, I made my way to the assigned meeting point in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. I was told we would be meeting a contact that could lead us to his secret location wherein there was prime habitat for green salamanders. Slowly, a muddy truck approached us and motioned for us to follow him. Thirty minutes of unpaved, unmarked, pothole riddled roads later I was standing in front of a hillside with rough terrain.

I knew I was in for an intense hike. Green salamanders are found in rock crevices in outcroppings or on the sides of cliffs. Unlike most salamanders that can be found abundantly under damp logs or rocks, green salamanders are extreme habitat specialists. Because of their habitat requirements, these salamanders are considered Near Threatened by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The green salamander is listed as Endangered in Indiana, Ohio, Maryland, and Mississippi, as Threatened in Pennsylvania, and as Protected in Georgia. Some herpetologists argue that they should be nationally classified as Endangered, given that population sizes are decreasing due to habitat loss, drought and road development.

Armed with flashlights, our group of enthusiastic herpetologists made our way toward outcrops of rock along the hillside. We pointed our flashlights into every small crevice big enough to fit a salamander, hoping to see two large round eyes staring back at us. Within the first hour, we found a handful of common slimy salamanders, Plethodon glutinosus. Distinguished by their black color with silver or gold spots running along their backs, slimy salamanders are most known for the sticky substance they exude when threatened. Mostly found under logs or stones, the slimy salamander is also known to utilize its climbing abilities to crawl into crevices of shale banks, the same habitat that green salamanders favor.

green salamander

As I was photographing an eastern red-backed salamander, Plethodon cinereus, I heard a yelp of excitement, “A green! A GREEN!” A few agonizing minutes of scrambling through brambles and rocky terrain to get to my colleague ensued. As I approached, I was filled with excitement. Being the Curatorial Assistant of Amphibians and Reptiles allows me to catalogue specimens from all over the world, collected by renowned scientists in my field. This position gives me a platform to tell the public about why amphibians and reptiles are so important to our ecosystem. The thrill of seeing a Near Threatened salamander in its natural habitat reaffirmed my love for my career and the honor I feel in being an ambassador for amphibians and reptiles. Nothing beats the opportunity to photograph the species camouflaged into the moss around it, or the few minutes where you promise yourself and the species in front of you that your life’s goal is to promote environmental awareness of Pennsylvania herpetofauna (reptiles and amphibians), and the hope that maybe the green salamander will thrive in Pennsylvania in the age of the Anthropocene.

What can you do? Check out the Pennsylvania Amphibians and Reptiles Survey at https://paherpsurvey.org/.If you find an amphibian or reptile, take a photo and send it to the PA Herp Survey to help document the biodiversity and status of Pennsylvania herpetofauna.

Kaylin Martin, M.Sc, is the curatorial assistant in the Section of Amphibians and Reptiles. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, Anthropocene, herpetology, Kaylin Martin, pennsylvania, reptiles

November 28, 2018 by wpengine

Field Time in Borneo

By Jennifer Sheridan

Jennifer Sheridan and students in Borneo

As some of you know, my main field research takes place in Malaysian Borneo, in the state of Sabah. I travel there frequently for work (ecological fieldwork), and I was lucky enough to be asked to serve as an instructor for a graduate field course held at one of my main field sites in October of this year. This particular site, Danum Valley Conservation Area, is one of the largest expanses of lowland primary forest remaining in Borneo, and because I have been going there regularly since 2010, it holds special meaning for me. Thus, I was very eager to share my enthusiasm for and knowledge of this place and its herpetological inhabitants with students.

AudioMoth on a tree and students in the background

This particular field course is run by the Tropical Biology Association, based out of Cambridge (UK). TBA courses are wonderful for many reasons, but one of my favorite features is that they are an even mix of students from Europe and, in the case of the Danum course, Southeast Asia. Because students in SE Asia don’t always have the same opportunities for continued graduate education as do students in Europe and the US, this course provides much-needed capacity building in a region that suffers from the highest rate of deforestation (and thus biodiversity loss) in the world. This year’s course featured students from 12 countries, and was nearly 2/3 female—another important capacity-building measure, given that women remain underrepresented in the sciences.

tarsier in a tree at night

The structure of the course is also one that I think works well: two weeks of detailed field instruction and exercises, introducing students to methods of surveying and studying multiple taxonomic groups, followed by two weeks of students working in small groups to design, execute, and present original research projects. For me, as a scientist working at the site long-term, this structure also allows me to test new methods or gather pilot data for potential future projects. This year I supervised two groups who chose to work on frogs: one group who radiotracked a species of frog that had never been tracked before, and one group who measured the biomass of frogs on three different streams. The former project was intended to serve as pilot data for future radiotracking studies in primary and disturbed forest areas, to determine whether movement patterns and dispersal of amphibians are impacted by fragmentation. The latter project was partly because I had never measured this before and was curious what the biomass of frogs on these streams was, and partly because knowing biomass, in addition to abundance and diversity, can help ecologists like me better understand how loss of species or communities (multiple species of frogs, for example) impacts ecosystem function. Both of these projects, though small, will be written up by myself and the students who conducted them, and submitted to regional peer-reviewed journals for publication. In science, publications such as this are important both for me as curator, as well as for students just beginning their careers.

frog on a leaf at night

In addition to the wonderful educational and research opportunities this course afforded all of us, I happen to just love being in the field. I wake up to the sound of gibbons or birds calling. I get to hike through the jungle to get to my pristine streams (most frogs in Borneo are stream-breeders), which are so beautiful. I can talk shop with other researchers, like the fellow instructor I met who studies carbon stocks of Sabah forests, and who will now collaborate with me on my long-term research project. I look for frogs along streams at night, and in doing so I get to see loads of other wildlife, like snakes, sleeping lizards and birds, fluorescent caterpillars, glow-in-the-dark fungi, mouse deer, civets, slow loris, tarsier, and clouded leopard, just to name a few. The dual nature of my job—sitting at my desk analyzing data, managing the section of amphibians & reptiles, and writing papers, then going out and living and working in the jungle—is one of the greatest things about being a scientist, and one of the reasons I love being a curator. This was one of the greatest field months of my life thanks to the amazing students, my fellow instructors, and the luck of seeing so much great wildlife, and now I get the pleasure of sharing the results of that trip with the public as well as the scientific community, while exploring other projects with our expansive museum collections. I really can’t imagine doing anything else.

Jennifer A. Sheridan is the Assistant Curator in the Section of Herpetology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: amphibians, Borneo, conservation, herpetology, Jennifer Sheridan, reptiles

September 21, 2018 by wpengine

Scientists Live – Jennifer Sheridan

Assistant Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles, Jennifer Sheridan, discussed her upcoming research and teaching trip to Borneo on Facebook Live! If you missed it live, check out the recording to learn all about her trip. While in Borneo, she will search for frogs to study how they are affected by climate change and the actions of humans. Learn about why the trip is important and how you can follow along while she is traveling.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Borneo, frogs, Jennifer Sheridan, reptiles, Scientists Live

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