UTAherpetology

Name: UTAherpetology
Address: University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, 76019, US
Telephone: +18172723615

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UTAherpetology

Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center at University of Texas at Arlington 🐍🦎🔬

08/20/2026

Congratulations to another one of our star undergraduates that has been involved with the ARDRC for many years – Morgan Conklin! Morgan has been consistently volunteering and taking research credit with the ARDRC for three years. One of her biggest accomplishments here was completely inventorying, cataloguing and organizing ALL of our specimens in buckets (60+ five-gallon buckets!), which was a monumental feat. Because of her work, uncatalogued specimens that used to be scattered all over the museum in every nook and cranny, some leaking and desiccating, are now properly catalogued and curated in drums, and available to researchers. We will certainly miss having Morgan’s help with the collection but we’re excited to see how her career develops!

08/14/2026

Tyler Irvin, one of our recent graduates, just ran an excellent workshop this summer in specimen preparation here at the ARDRC, and had 9 people in attendance ranging from undergraduates to graduate students to community members!

08/10/2026

More photos from the Hazina Project workshops led by our staff, Greg Pandelis! These included both collections management protocols and specimen based research methods.

07/27/2026

Hazina in Swahili means treasure - which is a perfect descriptor for scientific specimens! Our staff was proud to participate in the Hazina Project at the University of Dar es Salaam, which is a funded project in collaboration with the Natural History Museum in London to revitalize the historic UDSM wet collections, providing funding for new staff, students, materials, workshops, and a huge new climate-controlled space for the collections. Our collections manager, Greg Pandelis, organized the first round of workshops for the project - the goal of which was to train the three new curators that will be working with the museum collection as well as teach relevant skills to five new masters students which will be funded to work on specimen-based research. The workshops included discussions of museum philosophies, reptile and amphibian specimen preparation, field data collection, cataloguing and inventory pipelines, GIS skills and resources, and methods and protocols for accessing and using museum specimens, among other things! Very excited to see how the UDSM collection and the careers of these talented young scientists continues to grow and thrive with this new initiative! More photos from the workshops coming soon.

07/17/2026

Celebrating the most slithery and under appreciated creatures that boast some of the most challenging stereotypes - Happy World Snake Day! This is a female Horned Viper (Vipera ammodytes), found near a stream in Epirus, Greece.

Photo credit: Stephanie Tran

07/08/2026

Detailed ecological studies on tropical snakes are rare - we are fortunate to have led an effort together with our colleagues from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok to gather a tremendous amount of multi-year survey data on reptiles and amphibians of Northern Thailand, which culminated in this paper showing that arboreal pitvipers of the genus Trimeresurus track Rhacophorid frogs as their local distributions change with annual rainfall patterns. Check it out!

https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.73791

06/29/2026

Zamenis situla, known as the Leopard Ratsnake, is a nonvenomous colubrid found in southeastern Europe and Anatolia. They can be found in natural and disturbed habitat, adults primarily hunting for rodents. This individual was found active just after dusk at a lake’s edge in the Peloponnese of Greece as part of one of our field expeditions this year. UTA is building its herpetology resources in Greek specimens, tissues, photos, and ecological data, all of which are publicly available to researchers working in this awesome region of the world!

Photo credit: Stephanie Tran

06/11/2026

Our researchers just completed an expedition to the Southern Highlands of Tanzania - a collaborational effort between the University of Dar es Salaam and UTA, funded by the Auckland Zoo, The Explorers Club, American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, and Herpetological Conservation International. Our focus was the conservation of two poorly known Tanzanian endemic species of bush vipers: Atheris barbouri and Atheris matildae. Our team collected data from multiple individuals of each species, and added significantly to our understanding of their natural history, habitat requirements, and diet, while also discovering range extensions of several other species in the area, some of which are critically endangered. Stay tuned for future publications! See captions under each photo for more info.

05/08/2026

The ARDRC is proud of the fact that our researchers have strong and mutually beneficial collaborational ties all over the world! Last week we had a visit from our collaborators at the National Autonomous University of Mexico - including the labs of Dr. Uri Garcia and Dr. Oscar Flores. UTA has collaborated with researchers and students from UNAM for many decades and across academic generations, and it has resulted in some excellent science, the description of many new species, and the growth of both of our scientific collections. We were honored to host our friends from UNAM as they attended a conference in Texas and collected data from hundreds of our specimens for their ongoing research!

04/26/2026

Our herpetology graduate students had some excellent presentations at this year’s Biology Graduate Student Association Symposium, which showcases the work of our UTA Biology graduate students. Congratulations on all their awesome work!!

Address

University Of Texas At Arlington
Arlington, TX
76019

Telephone

+18172723615

Website

https://ardrcenter.uta.edu/

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