To celebrate our 1600 members, here’s little selection of North-east Africa carpet vipers, Echis pyramidum, all from Wajir, northeast Kenya. Not a brilliant picture, but in mitigation I took it in 1972! There’s lovely bit of history here; the species was named by the brilliant French scientist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in 1827. Geoffroy was a member of the team of scientists in Napoleon’s ill-fated Egyptian campaign. Geoffroy was a disciple of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who gets a lot of stick – rather unfairly, I think – because his ideas about the mechanisms of evolution were wrong; what is often forgotten was that in the early 19th Century, not many people approved of the idea of evolution, but Lamarck did. And Geoffroy was the man who did excellent work on homologous structures; the super pieces of evidence of shared ancestry. Geoffroy’s classic work was on the pentadactyl (five-fingered) limb, that structure that shows that birds, reptiles and mammals have a common ancestor. Think of him when you next see a carpet viper. A nice popular book that touches on this, as well as on that controversial figure Richard Owen is Deborah Cadbury’s ‘The Dinosaur Hunters’.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 20:27:15 +0000
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