Coming soon!

This specimen was collected in Australia by W. Swanson in 1954. It was made available to The University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility for scanning by Dr. Jessie Maisano of The University of Texas at Austin and Mr. Alan Resetar of the Field Museum. Funding for scanning and image processing was provided by a National Science Foundation Assembling the Tree of Life grant (EF-0334961), The Deep Scaly Project: Resolving Squamate Phylogeny using Genomic and Morphological Approaches, to Drs. Jacques Gauthier of Yale University, Maureen Kearney of the Field Museum, Jessie Maisano of The University of Texas at Austin, Tod Reeder of San Diego State University, Olivier Rieppel of the Field Museum, Jack Sites of Brigham Young University, and John Wiens of SUNY Stonybrook.

The specimen was scanned by Matthew Colbert on 14 March 2005 along the coronal axis for a total of 1095 slices. Each 1024x1024 pixel slice is 0.030 mm thick, with an interslice spacing of 0.030 mm and a field of reconstruction of 13.5 mm.

Literature

Jennings, W. B., E. R. Pianka and S. Donnellan. 2003. Systematics of the lizard family Pygopodidae with implications for the diversification of Australian temperate biotas. Systematic Biology 52:757-780.

Links

Lialis burtonis page on the Virtual Museum of Natural History

pictures of L. burtonis on kingsnake.com

Pygopodidae page on the EMBL Reptile Database

Three-dimensional volumetric renderings of the skull with the scleral ossicles, hyoid and jaw removed, and of the isolated left mandible. All are less than 2mb.

Skull pitch movie	Skull roll movie
Mandible yaw movie	Mandible pitch movie	Mandible roll movie