Geckos love Tet Zoo

If you didn't know, I've been away. The last four articles that have appeared here were all scheduled to publish in my absence. I've been in Romania and Hungary where I had a great time - saw lots of neat animals (fossil and living) and hung out with some neat people. I'll talk about some of this stuff in due course. For now, here's a really nice picture, kindly provided by artist-animator Ethan Kocak.

Ethan keeps and breeds geckos and, as you can see from this photo of one of Ethan's New Caledonian giant geckos Rhacodactylus leachianus henkeli, it seems that these lizards are big fans of at least one of my books (the hugely successful Tetrapod Zoology Book One). Thanks, Ethan, for the photo. If you're wondering why individuals of Rhacodactylus are so keen on Tet Zoo, it must be because they've read the extremely impressive and near-complete series of Tet Zoo gekkotan articles...

• The Tet Zoo guide to Gekkota, part I
• Gekkota part II: loud voices, hard eggshells and giant calcium-filled neck pouches
• Squirting sticky fluid, having a sensitive knob, etc. (gekkotans part III)
• Lamellae, scansor pads, setae and adhesion... and the secondary loss of all of these things (gekkotans part IV)
• The incredible leaf-tailed geckos (gekkotans part V)
• 300 years of gecko literature, and the 'Salamandre aquatique' (gekkotans part VI)
• Whence Uroplatus and... there are how many leaf-tailed gecko species now?? (gekkotans part VII)
• Ptychozoon: the geckos that glide with flaps and fringes (gekkotans part VIII)
• Meet the pygopodids (gekkotans part IX)
• The pygopodid radiation: diverse diets and the 'pygopodids got there first' hypothesis (gekkotans part X)
• Blindsnake mimics, scaly-foots and javelin lizards (gekkotans part XI)
• How gekkotans evolved into predatory 'snakes' (gekkotans part XII)