BOOK REVIEWS

Abstract

Dragon Lizards of Australia: Evolution, Ecology and a Comprehensive Field Guide. Jane Melville and Steve K. Wilson. 2019. Museums Victoria Publishing. ISBN 9781921833496. 416 p. AU$49.95/US$35.00 (softcover).— Dragon lizards are iconic reptiles of Australia. Frill-necked Lizards. Thorny Devils. Bearded Dragons. These are some of the well-known stars of the Aussie dragon world, but there is much more to this diverse group than these large or bizarre famous species. Authors Jane Melville and Steve Wilson are well positioned to produce this book on Australian dragons. Melville has focused her research almost exclusively on agamids over the last 20 years, and her research has greatly enhanced our systematic knowledge of these animals. At the time of this volume’s publication, her group had described 20 dragon species (now 25, over half of which are Tympanocryptis), and raised many more from subspecies to full species or revalidated species or genera in synonymy. Her first-hand knowledge of dragons comes through decades of fieldwork that has taken her nearly over the entire continent, searching for new species and collecting specimens and tissue samples for genetic analyses. Steve Wilson is Australia’s most prolific—and arguably the best—reptile photographer. His series with Gerry Swan, A Complete Guide to the Reptiles of Australia (Wilson and Swan, 2017), is about to be published in a 6 edition, and he has other quality publications such as Australian Lizards: A Natural History (Wilson, 2012). With Wilson’s name on the cover, you immediately know you are in for a visual feast. His photographs not only sparkle with clarity and excellent color balance, but they are well-composed aesthetically. Owing to his knowledge of the animals, images have been picked to tell a story and show insightful angles, not just the standard portrait. Even within pages, images seem to have been chosen to show dragons in different postures from different perspectives. Dragon Lizards of Australia is best described as an intermediate-level book that is probably more comfortable on a coffee table than in a rucksack when heading to the field. At just over 400 pages long, it is a bit heavy for only one group of Australian reptiles—after all, where would the room in your bags be for the gecko, skink, and snake books if each were covered in as much detail? The book is available as a paperback only, with a nearly square shape of 19 3 21 cm, and just over 2 cm thick. The size and heavy paper cover function well, as the pages open—and stay open—quite nicely, making it easy to flip back and forth among sections. The burnt-orange color of the frontispiece and leading page of the sections is pleasing to the eye, and it evokes the arid zone where dragons are plentiful. The orange also mirrors the background of the stunning front cover featuring a Thorny Devil (Moloch horridus). Even the little rectangle of orange in the upper corners of the pages was a nice touch, although perhaps different colors might have been used for each of the sections. An orange dotted line appears in the Quick Guide to Genera and Field Guide sections, which connects the generic or species name with the correct photos of the dragons. This element was not terribly functional in the field guide but did serve to break up the white background. Plus, the right-angle shape also somehow evoked the northeastern corner of South Australia and the Lake Eyre Basin—not a bad thing owing to all the interesting dragons there. The first 75 pages are titled Evolution, Ecology and Biology, and they present introductory chapters on diversity, behavior, physiology, and other overarching topics that apply to all dragons. In the very first pages of the introductory sections, some text appears in irregularly shaped orange blobs, giving these pages a playful look, and it suggests that the audience includes diverse naturalists and enthusiasts comfortable with material presented at an intermediate level, vs. an academic tome. But the blobs are not seen again until the Glossary, where they serve as figure-caption backgrounds, making these appearances seem like an idea that was simply abandoned. The first sections introduce agamid lizards, and Australian agamids (subfamily Amphibolurinae) specifically, including a nice series of colored maps that show where the three main groups occur in the world (p. 4). The difference in dentition between agamids (acrodont) and iguanians (pleurodont) is explained, as well as general features of their morphology (e.g., well-developed limbs with five digits, long tails, and non-glossy scales with keels, spines, and tubercles). The many photographs in these sections of iguanians and agamids from around the world put the Australian radiation in perspective. The chapter on Origins and Diversification largely concerns the timeline of the major events of how agamids got to Australia and then the major evolutionary branching events once they arrived, which were coincident with changes in climate and environments. Most of the groups reviewed here are at the genus or species-group levels. Some of the main patterns are touched upon, such as most of the basal taxa residing along the Great Dividing Range in the east, and the highly distinctive monotypic genera Moloch and Chelosania also being basal taxa but at the tips of long branches with no surviving congeners. Of all the chapters in the introduction, I thought this section might have benefited from a longer, more detailed treatment. For example, why is it that of the three large agamid genera, Ctenophorus shows the most morphological and ecological diversity, Diporiphora less so, and Tympanocryptis remained a relatively monomorphic assemblage of similar-looking species? Furthermore, are the genetic distances among species within genera or species groups the same, or have some species within genera only recently diverged compared to more ancient lineages? Although most books pitched at an intermediate level do