The imagery on this page was the basis for a paper entitled A new lungless caecilian (Amphibia: Gymnophiona) from Guyana by M.H. Wake and M.A. Donnelly (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277, 915-922, 2010). The abstract is as follows:

We report the discovery of a single specimen of a small, terrestrial, lungless caecilian, the second known taxon of lungless caecilians. It differs from all other caecilians in lacking open external nares, and from the large aquatic lungless species described by Nussbaum & Wilkinson (Nussbaum, R. A. & Wilkinson, M. 1995 Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 261, 331–335) in having no significant skull modifications. All modifications are of ‘soft morphology’ (covered external nares and choanae, lung and pulmonary vessel loss, etc.). A new genus and species are described to accommodate this form. Aspects of its skull and visceral morphology are described and considered in terms of the possible life history and evolution of the species, and compared with those of other lungless amphibians.

This specimen, the holotype and an adult female, was collected on 10 March 1997 by members of the Iwokrama Vertebrate Survey Team near 'Top Camp' in the Iwokrama Forect of Guyana. It was made available to the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility for scanning by Dr. Marvalee Wake of the University of California, Berkeley. Funding for scanning and image processing was provided by a National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative grant to Dr. Timothy Rowe of the University of Texas at Austin.

This specimen was scanned by Matthew Colbert on 30 April 2003 along the coronal axis for a total of 600 slices. Each 1024 x 1024 pixel slice is 0.012 mm thick, with an interslice spacing of 0.012 mm and a field of reconstruction of 5 mm.

Links

Caecilita iwokramae page on AmphibiaWeb

None available.