Fire ants accidentally sent to Alabama in 1930s helping wipe out Texas horned lizards al.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from al.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Horned Lizard Conservation Society, a nonprofit that sponsors scientific research on the critters, started in 1991. Speaking at one of its first meetings was Wade Sherbrooke, the former director of the Southwest Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History in Arizona. He was moved by people’s passion about the creatures he’d studied for more than 40 years.
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“Some old rancher would get up and say, ‘We
had horny toads and we should have them again! Ice cream cones and horny toads, that’s what life’s all about!’” he recalled.
But the lizard’s decline,
he said, is just one tragic example of the damage humans have inflicted on this ever-warming planet.