The fossilized skeleton of Clarisse, a 50 million-year-old snake fossil from Wyoming, recently shared a lot with the medical community. The entire chunk of limestone that Clarisse is preserved in underwent a procedure at the United Methodist Hospital in Houston, intended to examine the evolutionary shift of eating small bites and swallowing whole prey is one of the primary interests of scientists.

aher, professor and curator of the collections of herpetology and paleontology at the Museu de Zoologia of the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, worked with the Museum of Natural Science in Houston to get Clarisse to Methodist for the scan. He believes Clarisse could be an evolutionary link between snakes who take a lot of small bites to eat their prey and snakes who swallow their prey whole.
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Clarisse is the best preserved Caenozoic snake known in a U.S. scientific collection. According to preliminary analysis, this snake is believed to be closely related to Boavus indelmani, a booid snake described in the late 1930s. Zaher and the Houston museum hoped that getting a look at the underside of this unique fossil, as well as the inside of bones like the skull would shed some light on the evolutionary history of the species, and its relationship to booid snakes (like pythons and boas).

To read the full article at Science Daily, click here.

In a story that thankfully occurred in the correct place, the Sun Coast Titans have a rookie to thank for saving the day.
From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Training on an outside field near their home ground of Skilled Park, the snake had woken from its winter slumber and slithered through the adjacent bushland to get a closer look at training.

It had settled itself in near a walking path before the fearless Ridge picked it up by the tail and relocated it 30m down beside a nearby creek.

The Titans players gathered around as Ridge expertly handled the curious reptile, with Preston Campbell among those who appreciated his exploits with the potentially dangerous creature.

While some of the other players admitted to a phobia of snakes, they praised Ben on his bravery. Let's just hope for his luck, he plays as well as he wrangles venomous snakes.

Haitian and Dominicans are bonding together to save the highly endangered Ricord's Iguana and a youth group is leading the process.

From Dominican Today:

Institutions from both countries also participate in the effort, headed by a group Haitians of the Anse-a-Pitre Active Youngsters Organization (OJAA), whose main goal is to monitor and protect the Haitian area where the iguanas (Leza Rico in Creole) live and nest.

The group’s efforts have already bore fruit with a proposal to declare the zone "communal protected area" and managed to halt some activities such as the extraction of sand that threatened to ruin the potential reserve.

Having just spent time seeing the San Diego Zoos work with the conservation efforts, I am extremely excited. Outreach in countries can be hard and getting folks involved can be even harder. The International Reptile Conservation Foundation (IRCF), one of the charities kingsnake.com has supported for years, also has put work into saving the Ricord's. To learn more about the IRCF's efforts click here. Photo of the Ricord's taken from the IRCF page.