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  Green water dragon  

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Uploaded: 07/06/06 1:30 PM GMT
Green water dragon
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Status: active

The Chinese or green water dragon, Physignathus cocincinus, is a large arboreal lizard that inhabits the forests of eastern Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, and southern parts of China. Water dragons live in the immediate vicinity of fresh water. They are aptly named as they are strong swimmers and can remain submerged for 25 minutes or more. Water dragons use their swimming abilities and facultative bipedality to escape predators. Today, Physignathus cocincinus is one of the most popular lizards in the pet trade, which is where this specimen originated. Physignathus is a member of Agamidae, a lineage of iguanian lizards that also includes the Australian thorny devil, Moloch horridus. Agamidae is the Old World counterpart of the New World iguanids, such as the Mexican spinytail iguana (Ctenosaura pectinata) and the Texas horned lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum). Agamidae includes 12 genera distributed throughout Africa, Asia and Australia. Relationships within Agamidae remain problematic, but an analysis of mitochondrial DNA (Macey et al., 2000) suggests that Physignathus cocincinus is the sister taxon to a clade containing all taxa from Australia and New Guinea. Thus, Physignathus was CT scanned because it appears to be a relatively basal member of Agamidae. Info from http://www.digimorph.org/specimens/Physignathus_cocincinus/ Photo taken with analog camera Canon AV1, scanned with Canoscan 8400F. Touchup and framing in Photoshop Elements. Hope you like it and thanks for watching :-)

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.connodado
07/09/06 11:59 PM GMT
this one made me smile. this little critter has a lot of charactor and one again you've captured the aobject of the picture in great detail. very nice
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