Penn St. biology prof's small finds loom large

0 Comments | Philadelphia Inquirer, The, August, 2008 | by Tom Avril Inquirer Staff Writer

First, Blair Hedges and a colleague discovered the world's smallest frog. Five years later, in 2001, he reported finding the smallest lizard. Now the Pennsylvania State University biology professor has completed what you might call the tiny trifecta: Under a sun-baked rock on the island of Barbados, he and his wife found a new species of reptile that can coil up comfortably on a quarter.

Meet  Leptotyphlops carlae . The globe's smallest snake. "It's kind of a weird coincidence," admitted Hedges, who published the results yesterday in the scientific journal Zootaxa. Yet in some ways, not so weird. The Penn State scientist spends a good chunk of his time doing fieldwork in the West Indies. Because of the vagaries of evolution, islands tend to yield plants and animals of...