Greene View

In the 1980s, as a young Berkeley professor, I began promoting natural history research and teaching, activities that focus on how organisms are built and make their livings, the specifics of their surroundings and so forth. Back then, as is still true, natural history was threatened by poor financial support, elimination of college courses about flora and fauna, fewer outlets for publishing,...

This posting highlights a spectacular discovery, recently reported in one of the world’s most prestigious periodicals. Back in 2005, concerned about dwindling support for natural history, I noted that “Theories summarize science, tell us what to measure when we test hypotheses, and help us study nature better. Nevertheless, organisms themselves embody genetics, development, morphology,...

Organisms and their natural history—learning what they do out there, imagining what it’s like to be them—often are at the core of why a scientific paper is interesting. As a teenager marooned in Missouri, I was introduced to Texas Alligator Lizards by reading a book about amphibians and reptiles. It was love at first sight, and later field encounters with that and several related species...

If snakes are my favorite vertebrates, weasels (Mustelidae), the most snake-like of all mammals, includes some mighty close contenders. Mustelids range in size from Least Weasels (body mass ~250 g) to Sea Otters (up to ~50 kg) and, despite habitats as diverse as boreal forests and marine kelp beds, generally resemble each other in having elongate bodies and tails, but not especially prominent...

This first offering is unabashedly personal and there’s backstory. I began opening stomachs of snakes preserved in museums in the early 1970s, for my master’s thesis on the feeding biology of venomous coralsnakes. Since then I have examined thousands of specimens of hundreds of species, from all over the world. Accordingly, when my then Berkeley graduate student Randy Reiserer set out to learn...