2 July 2000
SUMMER is upon us in Cyberlizardland, but as the Cyberlizards are not due to go away for a while, we still have a number of things planned for the site.
Those who have visited the site before may notice that the Beaver Water World pages have disappeared from the main page. This is because the zoo found a professional developer who was keen to do it for practically nothing, and I think if you visit it you'll agree that he has done a fine job so far. We were also finding it hard to keep it updated as well as putting our own articles on the Web, so I was not miffed to let it go. We still support BWW and hope that the new site works well for them. As it is, this has freed up some space to put another animal-related area on our site, mainly one to catch all those odds and ends (invertebrate pets, animal issues, hopefully a bit of zoology) that we could not include under the other categories.
The biggest project we completed recently was the Gerrhosauridae pages, a section devoted to the lizard family of that name which includes both pet favourites such as Gerrhosaurus major, the wonderful plated lizard, and such unusual and, let's be honest, best-left-in-the-wild lizards such as the Tetradactylus swimming grass lizards or Cordylus subtessellatus of the Namib dunes. I would like in particular to thank Klaus Adolphs of the Squamata Verlag in Germany and Lucy & Co. of the Sudan Plated Lizard E-group for their input on this. We also finally completed, after much research, a Brief Guide to Newts and Salamanders, which hopefully will give anyone interested in these amphibians a few helpful pointers.
I am painfully aware that a couple of large projects we have undertaken on the site are still unfinished. I refer to the Gecko pages, which was always going to be a mammoth undertaking as there are about 700 species of these fascinating lizards to account for, and the Monitor pages, which I do want to complete soon. In addition the secondary stuff that we do, notably films, books and cult TV, are looking a bit thin. We will probably add some films and books in due course, but to be honest don't expect too much cult TV in the near future. It's a question of priorities, after all. But we are currently also updating and adding to the European Herptile pages, and as part of that we would like to add something on the lines of the Monitor pages for the lacertid lizards, which are quite a large family but which have little dedicated to them at the moment. We also intend to add a guide for frogs and toads similar to the one we did for salamanders and newts.
Finally, while I have added nothing to it since the Millennium celebrations in January, I have a few articles in mind for the Weightier Matters pages. Although in terms of quantity these form a small part of this site, I hope that the philosophy espoused within them informs and guides the rest of our work in these pages.
CYBERLIZARD