Our Mission:
To educate the general public about these frequently misunderstood animals, promote conservation of all wildlife, especially reptiles and amphibians, and to encourage cooperation between amateur and professional herpetologists toward a broader and deeper knowledge of this fascinating field.
Next Speaker :
2014-07-30
Robert Jadin : Title: Untangling a phylogenetic knot of venomous snakes: Evolutionary discoveries of highland pitvipers from Middle America click for more/less infoNew World pitvipers, such as the Timber Rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus), were incorporated into the first formal species descriptions by Linneaus (1758). This trend continued in the 18th and 19th centuries through the works of Laurenti (1768), Dumeril and Bibron (1835), Schlegel (1841), Günther (1863), and many others. Surprisingly, after more than 250 years of investigation there is still much to be discovered about New World pitvipers systematics. Central and South American pitvipers are a point of continued systematic confusion as cryptic lineages, in combination with inadequate sampling, obscure the complete diversity and evolutionary relationships of this group. This incomplete understanding results in an impediment for medical treatment of snakebite victims. From fieldwork in the tropics to morphology in the lab, this talk will shed light on how new species are found and described as well as how these advances are permitting us to make broader understandings about biogeographic patterns and treatments in modern medicine. Systematic studies like this are becoming increasingly important in our current age of rapid biodiversity loss.
Robert Jadin is currently a biology instructor at Northeastern Illinois University. Robert is a herpetological systematist whose graduate work focused on studying the diversity and evolutionary relationships of New World pitvipers incorporating both morphological and molecular phylogenetics. However Robert's research expands beyond reptiles and includes other projects ranging from speciation mechanisms of trematode parasites to descriptive morphology of lizard and snake hemipenes. Robert's fieldwork includes months in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, and Peru. In addition, Robert enjoys road cruising on rainy nights, long walks in cloud forest habitats, flipping rocks and logs with herps underneath, writing natural history notes, and inferring phylogenies.
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