Lizards and Friends
A website about lizards, scientists who study lizards, and kids who think lizards are cool!
Blog!
We need YOUR help to solve a lizard mystery! For the past eight years, members of our Lizard Lab have studied green anole lizards (scientific name: Anolis carolinensis) in Palmetto State Park in Luling, Texas. This park is about an hour[…]
Si nunca has conocido a un científico, podrías preguntarte cómo se ven. La respuesta es simple: los científicos se ven como cualquier otra persona! No existe un solo tipo de científico. En nuestro Laboratorio de las Lagartijas en San Antonio,[…]
If you’ve never met a scientist, you may wonder what real scientists look like. The answer is that scientists look like all of us! There’s not one type of scientist. In our Lizard Lab in San Antonio, Texas, we have[…]
There are lots of different kinds of jobs in science, and one of the most important jobs is that of a technician. In many research labs, technicians are the people who have the skills to do the hands-on work of[…]
Howdy lizardsandfriends followers, My name is Faith, and I’ve worked in the Lizard Lab for the past two years. (Check out my previous blog posts here and here!) In this post, I’ll describe how we can tell the difference between[…]
What makes lizards, snakes, crocodiles, and turtles so cool? There are LOTS of reasons why these animals are fun to learn about, and our friend Jordan Bush has written about her top three. (Jordan used to be a student in[…]
The students who work in the Lizard Lab have accepted the “Mannequin Challenge” and made a video of ourselves one day while we were “working” in the lab… (Note: Although we were being silly, we were also very careful to[…]
Everybody you know has a unique personality. Some of us are shy, hyper, optimistic, caring, awkward, friendly, smart, or talkative…the list goes on. And our personalities are complicated – each of us can be described with many different words, or[…]
When I was a kid, the idea of going to college was a long way off in the future. I would daydream about what my life would be like when I was a teenager, and what it would be like[…]
It’s been an amazing summer, here in the Lizard Lab! We have learned a lot of new things (see here and here), thought about new ideas to test, collected the data to see if those ideas are right (see here, here, and[…]
Club LizKids
Are you a kid (or an adult) excited about lizards? Then Club LizKids is for you! (if you are under 13 years old, you need to ask for permission from your parent or guardian to sign up for the club)
Members of Club LizKids will receive monthly emails with cool pictures and interesting facts about lizards. We will not share your email address with anyone else, and we will only use your email address to send you Club LizKids updates.
Email Us
We’d like to hear from you!
Do you have a question about lizards for a member of the Lizard Lab? Have you seen lizards do something funny, or cool, or confusing? Or do you have another question about science? Send us a note, and we’ll email you in response.
For Teachers
Lizards can be excellent classroom pets, and there are many classroom activities in which you can use lizards to teach science, math, reading, writing, and more! The following activities were developed for use in fifth grade classes in Texas, as part of Trinity University’s Science Teaching Institute, to address Texas science teaching standards. We encourage you to adapt these materials in any way you find to be useful in your own classroom.
If you are a teacher near San Antonio, Texas, and would like to invite members of Dr. Michele Johnson’s laboratory to visit your classroom, please contact us at michele.johnson@trinity.edu.
How to keep green anole lizards as classroom pets
(DOC // PDF)
How do lizards get energy from their food? An experimental study in three parts.*
(DOC // PDF)
Oh what a tangled web…An activity exploring food webs, using a simple math model
(DOC // PDF)
Connecting lizard and mealworm biology
(DOC // PDF)
How do animals communicate when they can’t talk? by Dr. Thom Sanger of Loyola University
(PDF)
About
This website is maintained by Dr. Michele Johnson, a lizard biologist at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and the members of the Johnson Laboratory. We are scientists who study how and why lizards behave the way they do. You can learn more about the Johnson Lab at www.trinity.edu/mjohnso9.
Michele Johnson has a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution, and the members of the Johnson Lab (called the Lizard Lab on this website) are college students. We hope this website will show how exciting it is to learn new things about lizards, and how anyone can be a scientist by looking carefully at the world around you.
–Johnson Lab, 2015–
Support for this website comes from the National Science Foundation (IOS-1257021) and from Trinity University’s Department of Biology
This website is maintained by Dr. Michele Johnson. Customized design and graphics by Tara Whittle.