Collin Bos

+++ Hissscord🐍 NEWS +++

Second call for joining our server! 🐸
Hissscord is open to everyone in the scientific herpetological community, from students to established researchers.

💬 DM me for an invite to the Discord channel, or reach out via email: hissscord[at]gmail.com

Please share!📣

As you will gather from the article, it does, in fact, sound like a cartoon villain the size of a piece of string cheese.

+++ Hissscord🐍 NEWS +++

Our new server is live! 🐍
A free space for young and experienced herpetologists to connect, collaborate, and get quick help.

💬 DM me here on Bluesky or elsewhere for an invite to the Discord channel!

Please feel free to share and repost!

#Herpetology #SEH2025 #Hissscord

Those Dire Wolves Aren’t an Amazing Scientific Breakthrough. They’re a Disturbing Symbol of Where We’re Heading. We shouldn’t be celebrating “de-extinction.” We should be focused on the species that are currently in danger.

I’ve been asked about de-extinction a lot this weekend, especially whether it’s scientifically possible.

No, it’s not, and Colossal has already been caught lying about their projects. Extinction is forever. We have to grieve and use that feeling to protect the future of life that is here now.

‘Completely shattered.’ Changes to NSF’s graduate student fellowship spur outcry The announcement comes months later than usual, leaving many would-be applicants stranded

Science news article about 2nd year grad students being unceremoniously dropped from the GRFP eligibility with no explanation or warning:
www.science.org/content/arti...

They also removed the provision that allowed students with Masters degrees to apply if 2 years had passed. Now I can’t apply, and even if admitted, I also can’t apply in the 1st year like many PhD students do :(

🚨 NEW PAPER! 🚨 Being an “internationally successful” scientist depends on English. But what if you also face gender & global inequalities? We show that women from the global South publish the same total # of papers but have 70% fewer in English language. Affecting their career possibilities.

Most of my group gathered in one place for the first time possibly ever. From left to right, former master's student Collin Bos, current postdoc Alice Petzold, me (Mark D. Scherz), former bachelor's student Joris Fleck, and current master's student and former bachelor's student Clara Keusgen.

Having a diffuse research group means that I rarely get to spend any time with my group in 3D. It was a great delight therefore to be joined by @collinbos.bsky.social @alicepetzold.bsky.social @njorisfleck.bsky.social and @clarakeusgen.bsky.social together in Bonn for the #SEH2025! 🧪🐸🦎🐍🧬

“fascist government controls media and bans dissent” is a straightforward description of what’s happening in the united states

Someone's pet cat with the native wild red squirrel it just killed.

Most cat owners have no idea of, or don't want to know, how much wildlife is slaughtered annually by domestic or feral cats. But it runs to 10s, possibly 100s, of BILLIONS of animals per year, and is a serious driver of extinction.

I’m setting up a Discord server for young herpetologists, derived from an idea at #SEH2025. The goal is to create a space for quick help, collaboration, and networking. If you’d like to give input or get involved, let me know!

#herpetology

#SEH2025 what a week!
Plenty of great talks, lovely people and chats…
Also presented a poster on our Grass Snake project in Berlin.

Hey #frog people!
If you are using @inaturalist.bsky.social, please feel invited to the new „Frogs in Amplexus“ project!
We try to collect all amplexi, (to be) recorded on iNat. So please consider to add your future amplexus observations, or such that you help identifying/correcting. #amphibians

🚨🚨🚨
In the worst tradition of the McCarthy-era anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee, the GOP House Oversight Committee has just launch a massive, grotesque, ad hominem, partisan assault on the US National Academy of Sciences.

oversight.house.gov/wp-content/u...

Clara presenting her slides. Featuring some very cute frogs, including a frog with a few eggs around it.

Loving the Herp-Omics symposium at #SEH2025! Proud to see several members of my lab presenting here—my postdoc @alicepetzold.bsky.social presented and is one of the chairs! Up now, @clarakeusgen.bsky.social is presenting on the Bachelor’s thesis that she did with us.

Collin in action talking about how diverse mitochondrial genome organisation is in amphibians

And now @collinbos.bsky.social is presenting on mitochondrial genome reorganisation in microhylid frogs from Madagascar, and how we can explore it using off-target sequencing from target capture sequencing reads. 🧪🐸 #SEH2025

3D rendering of a CT scan of Brachycephalus nanicus, with the skeleton rendered in light brown and skin rendered in transparent purple. Top = dorsal view, bottom = ventral view. In the bottom right corner there is an image of the frog (a small brown frog) sitting on a coin.

3D renderings of the skeleton of Brachycephalus nanicus, rendered in light brown. Top left = whole skeleton in dorsal (left) and ventral (right) views. Top right = skull in dorsal (left), ventral (middle), and right lateral (right) views. Bottom from left to right, 3D renderings of the hand, foot, spinal column, and should girdle (top) / pelvic girdle (right lateral).

Meet the newest species of Brazilian flea-toad 🐸 Brachycephalus nanicus! 🐸

B. nanicus is <1cm long & dwells under the leaf litter in the cloud forests of Serro do Mar, southeastern Brazil

I CT scanned this specimen for the osteological description

Out today in Zootaxa: mapress.com/zt/article/v...

Clara, wearing a T-shirt of my lab, beside her stunning black poster with brightly coloured images on it. The title:Dissecting without damage: inferring taxonomic affiliations from the gut content of a preserved museum specimen. It’s about an awfully preserved type specimen we scanned using phase-contrast CT, and segmenting the many ants it had in its gut to find out what kind of ants they were, and where it might have come from.

A wonderful first day of the #SEH2025 meeting today here in Bonn! Seeing my students presenting is especially gratifying; @clarakeusgen.bsky.social brought this absolutely beautiful poster. 🧪🐸

A small male chameleon, Palleon nasus, on my pointer finger. It’s about as long as the last last two phalanges. It’s tan with oblique dark brown lines, and has a rather pointy face and a short tail. Not exactly what you might expect for a chameleon.

On my way to Bonn for the #SEH2025 23rd European Congress of Herpetology! I’ll be giving a plenary on Wednesday about miniaturisation. Really looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones, and exchanging ideas across the field 🐢🐍🐸🧪

This is also the far right pro conspiracy theory newspaper in Korea (was previously pro Japanese occupation, then later pro dictatorships)

Baby snapper yawning.

Rawr! 🐢

Last week someone on r/GRFPApps said they had managed to make contact with a staff member who told them it would be announced on the 25th; of course that did not happen in the end… alternative claims say there is no funding for this year, seems the only info we have is rumors.

beautiful!!

the first images that show up when you google specific frogs are just AI slop that looks nothing like them 😭

NSF GRFP is also still not up

A closeup photo looking down at the top of a lizard's head. The lizard has spiny scales on the neck and body, in a high-contrast pattern of dark brown/black and white/bluish-cream. Visible in the center smooth scale atop the head is an oval dot called the parietal eye, a third eye not for image-forming but used to sense day-night cycles.

An extreme closeup photo looking down at the top of a lizard's head (a crop of the other photo in this post). In the center smooth scale is an oval dot, amber colored with a central spot; this is the parietal eye, a third eye not for image-forming but used to sense day-night cycles.

Yarrow's Spiny Lizard (Sceleporus jarrovii), Arizona. See the parietal eye? This third eye has a lens, cornea, & retina, but is not for image-forming. It senses light/dark to help regulate circadian rhythms, and may help the lizard avoid predators & assist with sense of direction. 🦎 #reptiles 👁️👁️👁️

One of our “green new scam” research grants that USDOT terminated focused on making transit infrastructure more resilient to more frequent and severe weather events. But “climate change adaptation” was too woke, obviously, and doing this research is clearly unnecessary

Been wandering the Kerala side of the southern Western Ghats for almost a week, and I’ve finally met, quite possibly, the most stunning frog on the planet. Photos from my phone do not do this frog any justice.

Galaxy Frog
𝘔𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘶𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘴

geckos are particularly fond of partheno-Genesis