For Emei moustache toads, a top-quality moustache is an essential, and violent, weapon … During the breeding season, each male grows 10 to 16 spines. "They are as sharp as a pencil lead" says Cameron Hudson of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, adding that the frogs "do try to stab you a bit when you pick them up".

The males fought underwater, head-butting each other in the belly to drive their spines into the other toad's flesh. "I've never seen any of them kill each other," says Hudson. "But they get a lot of puncture wounds."

After 1972, biologists had almost four decades to get used to the idea that birds had this amazing miraculous lung thingy that was unique in the animal kingdom. Then in 2010, Colleen Farmer and Kent Sanders of the University of Utah blew our collective minds by demonstrating that alligators have unidirectional flow-through lungs, too. That means that far from being a birds-only thing, unidirectional flow-through lung ventilation was probably primitive for Archosauria, and was therefore the default state for non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, the other ornithodirans and the hordes of croc-line archosaurs.

The birdy-ness of crocodilian lungs was further cemented earlier this year when Schachner et al. described the lung morphology and airflow patterns in Nile crocs, which have lungs that are if anything even more birdlike than those of gators. I got to review that paper and blogged about it here.

Now…well, you read the headline. Monitor lizards have unidirectional airflow through their lungs, too. This falls at about the halfway point between "whatisthisIdonteven"–I mean, dude, unidirectional airflow in friggin’ lizards!–and “yeah, that makes a weird sort of sense”. Because to sum up a lot of science unscientifically, monitors just kick a little more ass than other squamates. They have crazy high aerobic capacities for animals that aren’t birds or mammals, they’re ecologically versatile and geographically widespread, they get waaay bigger than any other extant lizards (Komodo dragons) and until recently got even bigger than that (Megalania). Is it going too far to link the success of varanids with their totally pimpin’ flow-through lungs? Maybe, maybe not. But it seems like fertile ground for further study.

That new choice meant wearing two prosthetics legs, and Jackson wanted his to look like snakes.

"They're like me," Jackson Stone said.

"How's that?" Reporter Brian Carlson asked.

"I have no feet, they have no feet," he said.

Snakes are part family business. A tattoo artist created the design for Jackson's dream legs, but prosthetic maker couldn't do it.

"So they brought me the art work and it was on canvas which was too heavy for me to apply the prosthesis," said Eric Green, Prosthetist.

That's when Shriners stepped in.

"So I said ya know, I might be able to help," said William "Mr. Bill" Voorhies, Shriners of Salt Lake City.

William Voorhies contacted fellow Shriner Bob Shupe who runs a printing company. He put the design on surface that worked.

"Fortunately our company was able to take that need and develop it," said Bob Shupe, Past Potentate.

The prosthetic maker turned Jackson's snake legs into reality. He loves them, and his friends do too.

"They think it's really cool because a tattoo artist designed it and none of them can get tattoos," said Jackson Stone.

Hop on over to the photo-sharing site Flickr and you’ll find dozens of photos and videos of people eagerly feeding grapes to hungry iguanas on the beaches of the Bahamas. It looks like great fun and the iguanas obviously go crazy for the fruit, which is usually fed to the lizards on the ends of long sticks. There’s just one problem with this activity: the food is making the iguanas sick. Health conditions arising from the grapes and other foods that iguanas do not normally eat in the wild include diarrhea, high blood sugar and cholesterol as well as lowered levels of potassium and a high level of parasitic infections. All of these problems “could have deleterious effects on long-term fitness and population stability,” according to Charles Knapp, director of conservation and research at Chicago’s John G. Shedd Aquarium and the lead author of a new study of the iguanas published last week in Conservation Physiology.

Using venom milked from the snake, researchers filtered out all but one protein to create a drug called Anfibatide, which in human testing prevented blood clots from forming but didn't prolong bleeding as is the case with some clot-busting drugs.

"The concept that we can harness something potentially poisonous in nature and turn it into a beneficial therapy is very exciting," said Dr. Heyu Ni, a scientist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto involved in the drug's development.

Anfibatide is designed to target a specific receptor on the surface of platelets in the blood that is instrumental in the formation of clots.