After witnessing the N.W. Harborton Drive frog slaughter with his friend, Shawn Looney, Rob Lee started making calls and e-mailing biologists and herpetologists.

"I started trying to find the appropriate people to tell about this – that something was going on that we should be paying attention to," he says.

He also approached Jane Hartline, a retired Oregon Zoo marketing director and conservation advocate with a knack for organizing.

No one knew whether the great frog massacre of 2013 was an anomaly or, more likely, an unwitting annual death march. They were determined to find out, to help the frogs if they could, to precisely document everything they observed and to contribute to the scant science on the Forest Park red-legged frog population.

Liz Ruther, a habitat conservation biologist with ODFW, granted Lee, Looney and Hartline a permit to handle the frogs. Without one, it's illegal to touch or harass them, given the species' sensitive-vulnerable status.

With help from The Forest Park Conservancy, Hartline rounded up about three dozen volunteers willing to rush to Linnton with little notice. Their task: spend hours intercepting frogs on wet, chilly nights when most Portlanders were tucked in at home, dry and cozy.

It hasn't hurt that all of the islands the night lizard calls home are owned by the federal government. San Clemente and San Nicolas islands are owned and managed by the U.S. Navy, while Santa Barbara Island and its tiny neighbor Sutil Island belong the the National Park Service. That's simplified tasks such as removing introduced predators and yanking out weeds.

In 2004, the Navy petitioned USFWS to delist the lizards on San Clemente and San Nicolas islands, claiming that each island's population was properly considered a Distinct Population Segment (equivalent to a species under the Endangered Species Act) and saying that the population of night lizards on each of the two islands had recovered.

That prompted a 2006 status review for the lizard, and in February 2013 USFWS finally got around to its response: a proposal that the lizard be delisted throughout its range. With this new ruling, scheduled for printing in the Federal Register on April 1, that delisting becomes official.

According to USFWS, estimates of the lizard's current population range from 15,300 on San Nicolas and 17,600 on Santa Barbara/Sutil, with an astonishing 21.3 million estimated for San Clemente Island. The estimates didn't count lizards, but merely assessed the acreage of lizard habitat on each island and used mathematical models to extrapolate estimated total populations.

A one-metre brown snake on the NRL field at Robina took the ABC Grandstand commentary team by surprise, but it did not stop them from encouraging on-field reporter Zane Bojack to take a closer look, despite his professed herpetophobia.

Muskegon firefighter Scott Hemmelsbach told The Muskegon Chronicle that he reluctantly agreed to enter the two-story, smoke-filled house Sunday night to retrieve the snake. He says he cradled the "weighty" snake before carrying it to safety.

"It was trying to crawl up the side of his terrarium and get out," Hemmelsbach said. "His face was pushed up on the screen and trying to get out. There was a lot of smoke and he was trapped."

The firefighter said he learned how to handle snakes while he was at Grand Haven High School, where he helped showcase them.

The 1.5-inch-long (4-centimeter-long) frog "is rather strange-looking—it’s quite fat with short legs and bright orange spots on its sides," said Luis German Naranjo, WWF Colombia‘s conservation director.

Naranjo and a team of scientists were surveying wildlife in eastern Colombia’s Orinoco savanna, including animals found on a small farm.

Expecting to find little more than livestock, the team was surprised when the farmer’s seven-year-old son, whose name was given only as Camilito, called the group over to a pool. There, in the water, was the small spotted frog.

The team’s herpetologist, Daniel Cuentas, had never seen anything like it, and immediately set out looking for other examples.

Daniel Goldman spends his days working with venomous rattlesnakes, baby sea turtles, and a dozen other types of animals. But he isn’t a zookeeper, or even a biologist. He’s a physicist, studying locomotion at Georgia Tech. In order to test his hypotheses, he builds robots that mimic the ways animals move. Jealous yet?

Popular Science: Why do you have so many sandboxes?

Daniel Goldman: No one has ever studied the complexities of a sidewinder rattlesnake’s movement on sand, its natural substrate. In principle, you can understand how a hummingbird stays aloft or how a shark swims by solving fluid-dynamics equations. We don’t yet have fundamental equations for complex terrain—sand, leaf litter, tree bark. To figure that out, we built giant sandboxes that are equipped with high-speed cameras and can tilt to mimic dunes.

PS: Which animals are the hardest ones to work with?

DG: The rattlesnakes were a lucky break. You put them in a sandbox, and they just start sidewinding—the sideways slithering they do to cross sand. But most animals don’t do what you want. Ghost crabs, for example, are ridiculously fast. In the laboratory, you can get about 10 good trials out of them: They’ll run away from you down a track, where high-speed cameras record them. After that, they seem to decide they are no longer afraid and start trying to pinch you.

"In the Oligocene epoch, from about 34 to 23 million years ago, we would have expected to see a fauna dominated by booid snakes, such as boas and pythons. These are generally 'sit and wait' constricting predators that hide and ambush passing prey," lead author Jacob McCartney, a postdoctoral researcher in the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, said in a news release.

The newly discovered species is named 'Rukwabyoka holmani' and was unearthed in the Rukwa Rift Basin of Tanzania. The species genus name comes from the Rukawa region with the Swahili word for snake. And the species name honors J.Alan Holman, a palaeontologist. The team found eight different types of fossil snakes varying in length from 2.6 mm to 5 mm.

Lillywhite started studying this species in 2009, at a site off the coast of Costa Rica. “We’ve looked at hundreds,” he says. “No sea snake we’ve observed has drunk any seawater.”

They only stick to the fresh stuff, but the amount they drink varies throughout the year. These snakes live in a place that goes through drought from November to May. If they were captured during these dry spells, they betrayed their thirst by sipping heavily from fresh water; if they were caught in wetter months, they barely drank. “If the snake drinks fresh water, it’s thirsty,” says Lillywhite. “If it’s thirsty, it’s dehydrated, and if it’s dehydrated, it’s not doing what the textbooks said.”

The team also found that the snakes had significantly less water in their bodies than in the dry months than in the wet ones. Despite having a salt gland and being surrounded in water, the snakes are thirsty and dehydrated for months on end. Lillywhite thinks that they cope by having an unusually high amount of water in their bodies to begin with. They might also have adaptations that help them to lose water slowly, and to withstand the effects of dehydration.

In the wild, it is possible that the snakes use deep springs or estuaries, but they are incredibly widespread and Lillywhite has never found any evidence of them congregating in specific sites.

Instead, rain brings them salvation.

...Megalania ain’t what it used to be. For one thing, the lizard’s bones are so similar to those of other monitor species – belonging to the genus Varanus – that paleontologists have taken to calling it Varanus priscus. And while it seems likely that the big lizard was venomous, recent size estimates have shrunk this “dragon in the dust.”

Let’s have a look at the traditional baseline first. In 2004, working with the relationship between vertebrae size and body length, paleontologist Ralph Molnar proposed that mature Varanus priscus could have been between 23 and 26 feet long, depending on the anatomy of the tail. But other researchers think such sizes are major overestimates. In a 2002 study that critiqued “the myth of reptilian domination” in prehistoric Australia, anatomist Stephen Wroe reanalyzed old body size data and calculated that the lizard probably averaged about 11 feet in total length and, citing earlier estimates from Molnar, wouldn’t have grown much longer than 15 feet.

Size estimates in a 2012 paper by paleontologist Jack Conrad and colleagues came out in between the extremes. While describing a new, large Varanus species that once lived in Greece, the researchers also took a look back at Australia’s ever-contentious lizard. Without the tail, the Varanus priscus specimen in their study had an estimated body length of almost seven feet, meaning that this individuals total length was almost certainly longer than the 11 foot average Wroe suggested. Especially large specimens, Conrad and coauthors noted, could have had bodies almost 10 feet long with the tails trailing behind, although these animals still would have been smaller than the monstrous lizards paleontologists used to reconstruct.