Reptiles Magazine
The researchers attribute the decline of the reptiles to the introduction of cats and mongoose.
May 19, 2021
The Terre-de-Haut racer (Alsophis sanctonum). Photo by Xavier Heckmann/Wikipedia
A new study of how European colonization impacted the Guadeloupe Islands in the French Caribbean details how the arrival of Europeans caused half of the islands lizard and snake populations to go extinct.
Dr. Corentin Bochaton and Professor Nicole Boivin of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany along with researchers with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) and the Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE), looked at 43,000 bone fragments from fossil and archaeological assemblages on six of the islands in the archipelago and found that 50 to 70 percent of reptiles