How to catch a giant varanid lizard
Recently at the SEB conference in Spain I convinced a muscle expert, Taylor Dick from Simon Fraser University in Canada, to come out to Australia to study muscle variation in Australian varanids. The purpose of this study was based upon a previous paper I had written “Lizard Tricks” of which I wrote a blog about here . But incase you missed it, basically I had found that differences in the Kinematics of the lizards hindlimb were not based upon changes in lizard size (as I had expected) but rather were related to changes in the lizards habitat. The Arboreal lizards (both big and small) had a crouched, sprawling posture, as if they were in a perpetual pushup, the terrestrial lizards (again both big and small) had a more upright posture. The reason for this difference was probably since arboreal lizards wanted to be close to the surface they were climbing on to avoid toppling over (and so had the crouched posture), while the terrestrial lizards wanted to improve stride length, and so