How David Middleton mixes up his lizards at WUWT: hot vs cold climates, eggs vs live birth

David Middleton thinks he's hit gold at Australia's ABC (archived here). What he's hit is amber. He should have heeded the warning. David wrote about an article that describes how a team of scientists, led by Dr Emma Sherratt of UNE, looked at lizards fossilised  in amber, from the Caribbean.

Amber means "stop"
(and think)

The ABC article (not the WUWT article, so much!) is about a paper in PNAS, which has this to say:

An unresolved question in ecology is whether the structure of ecological communities can be stable over very long timescales. Here we describe a wealth of new amber fossils for an ancient radiation of Hispaniolan lizards that, until now, has had a very poor fossil record. These fossils provide an important and previously unavailable perspective on an ecologically well-studied group and indicate that anole lizard communities occurring on Hispaniola 20 Mya were made up of the same types of habitat specialists present in this group today. These data indicate that the ecological processes important in extant anole communities have been operative over long periods of time.

This video is from Emma Sherratt, showing her amber-fossilized lizards - beautiful. Something you won't see at WUWT:

There are rabbits and rabbits and lagomorphs unknown at WUWT

Today Eric Worrall has decided, again, that scientists "don't know nuffin'". He writes about a new paper in PLOS One, which is about rabbits. Or more properly, about the Order Lagormorpha, which includes rabbits. The paper was by a team led by Katie Leach of Queen's University Belfast. It suggests climate change will have an impact on up to two thirds of 87 lagomorph species. In the abstract, the authors write:

Climate change is likely to impact more than two-thirds of lagomorph species, with leporids (rabbits, hares, and jackrabbits) likely to undertake poleward shifts with little overall change in range extent, whilst pikas are likely to show extreme shifts to higher altitudes associated with marked range declines, including the likely extinction of Kozlov’s Pika (Ochotona koslowi).

All lagomorphs look the same to Eric. Not only that, but he goes on to write about how a change in environment affected one particular species of rabbit (though he didn't mention it by name). That's the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). It didn't cause it to die out, it caused it to rise to plague proportions.