Dr Mark D. Scherz
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markscherz.bsky.social
Dr Mark D. Scherz
@markscherz.bsky.social
3.9K followers 1.3K following 640 posts
Curator of Herpetology & Associate Professor of Vertebrate Zoology at Natural History Museum of Denmark • ERC StG: GEMINI • Co-host of SquaMates Podcast and AnatomyInsights on Youtube • He/Him
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markscherz.bsky.social
Today we described three new toad species that give birth to fully formed toadlets, from the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania! 🇹🇿🧪🐸

vertebrate-zoology.arphahub.com/article/1670...
A fine black toad with bright white fingers, toes, and lips, and brown pustular blobs along its legs, resting on a dark green leaf. A black and white toad on a green fern frond. The head and limbs are grey, and the body black. A toad looking at the camera over a brown leaf, its black body splotched with yellow and white. It is very Halloween-core. A black toad with huge yellow glands on its legs, head, arms, and parts of the back. Jack Skellington himself could hardly have painted a more Halloween-flavoured toad.
November 6, 2025 at 8:38 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
After ELEVEN YEARS of work, today I finally submitted my 205-page monograph on the diamond frogs of Madagascar, genus Rhombophryne, in which we are describing several new species. Feels so good to finally have it submitted. I can't wait to share the new species with you all! 🧪🐸🟤💎
A gloriously rotund brown frog flecked with burnt umber, resting on a dead leaf. This is the iconic Rhombophryne testudo. He is a thing of beauty.
October 3, 2025 at 9:52 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Oh, what a beautiful morning!
A sunrise over a football field full of geese.
October 2, 2025 at 7:30 AM
markscherz.bsky.social
So sorry to hear of Dame Jane Goodall's passing. What a life to celebrate, though! One of my most prised possessions is my copy of the Silmarillion, which she signed for me in 2014 when she came to deliver a talk in Munich. She said that she, too, admired the works of Tolkien. 🧝‍♀️💎💎💎
The opening page of the Silmarillion, signed at the bottom 'Jane Goodall'
October 1, 2025 at 7:58 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Spent a little time in the last couple of day working with micro-CT scans of frogs again. This is the holotype of Rhombophryne coronata. I’m hoping to submit a manuscript including a plate of this specimen’s skeleton tomorrow! 🧪🐸🩻
Rhombophryne coronata rendered in 3D from a micro-CT scan. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn good.
September 30, 2025 at 9:42 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
CAR NETS
Anders demonstrating a car net. It fits on top of a car. You get the picture.
September 25, 2025 at 12:02 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Newly minted Full Professor Anders P. Tøttrup is giving his inaugural lecture as Professor of #CitizenScience at the @nhmdk.bsky.social now. 🧪🦅🦩🦢
Anders in front of a crowd in a lecture hall, with his title slide in the background, which reads ‘Citizen Science as a Pathway to Innovative Research: from Schoolyards to Car Nets’ Anders wearing the same binoculars he would wear as a child when birdwatching
September 25, 2025 at 11:15 AM
markscherz.bsky.social
Four generic frogs? No! These are members of four different FAMILIES from Europe, Borneo, Madagascar, and East Africa, convergently evolved on the generic brown frog morphotype! 🧪🐸
Ranidae: Rana temporaria, a generic brown frog from Denmark. Dicroglossidae: Limnonectes paramacrodon, a generic brown frog from Borneo. Mantellidae: Aglyptodactylus madagascariensis, a generic brown frog from Madagascar. Pyxicephalidae: Amieitia tenuoplicata, a generic brown frog from Tanzania.
September 23, 2025 at 9:40 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Check out the remarkable variation in the Critically Endangered Anodonthyla theoi. It is restricted to a tiny area of littoral forest in SE Madagascar, and its habitat is extremely threatened by deforestation and fire. When the rains come, males emerge from tree holes and leaf axils to call. 🐸🧪
17 individuals of Anodonthyla theoi, tangling from greenish to copper to almost black. Some have stripes, some have big white spots. This is why we cannot trust colour in frogs to help much with species identification.
September 21, 2025 at 10:41 AM
markscherz.bsky.social
Just another day at the office! Today, we needed to get a specimen out of the freezer to be prepped as a skeleton, so we pulled out this nice big Paleosuchus trigonatus. 🐊🧪
A frozen caiman curled up on a yellow metal and wood trolley on cobblestone and flagstones. It could almost be sleeping.
September 19, 2025 at 10:32 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Look at the fantastic variety of shape in these wonderful frogs I photographed in Gunung Mulu National Park on Borneo last year. Amazing how much frogs can do with so little. 🐸🧪
Polypedates colletti, a brown treefrog with a very pointy nose Phrynoidis asper, a toad that is very Toad™ Occidozyga cf. laevis, a delightfully round and absolutely Built puddle frog Limnonectes sp. Honestly I have no idea which species this is, I just know it's one that doesn't have a bos on the head. If it weren't from Borneo you might think it's a Rana or a Lithobates or something. It's brown and froggy with a dark tympanic field.
September 19, 2025 at 7:45 AM
markscherz.bsky.social
Having a diffuse research group means that I rarely get to spend any time with my group in 3D. It was a great delight therefore to be joined by @collinbos.bsky.social @alicepetzold.bsky.social @njorisfleck.bsky.social and @clarakeusgen.bsky.social together in Bonn for the #SEH2025! 🧪🐸🦎🐍🧬
Most of my group gathered in one place for the first time possibly ever. From left to right, former master's student Collin Bos, current postdoc Alice Petzold, me (Mark D. Scherz), former bachelor's student Joris Fleck, and current master's student and former bachelor's student Clara Keusgen.
September 19, 2025 at 7:35 AM
markscherz.bsky.social
Just a small taste of some of the work we have going on behind the scenes right now. It feels like everything is painfully slow at the moment, but there are some very nice things on the way!
These are skeletons of type specimens of Platypelis tetra, a little microhylid from NE Madagascar 🇲🇬 🧪🐸
Skeletons and skull closeup of some little frogs. A plate from an upcoming paper.
September 16, 2025 at 3:26 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
The final plenary of #SEH2025 is Angele Martins, talking about descriptive anatomy of blindsnakes, worm snakes, and thread snakes. Fantastic animals, and wonderful work! 🐍🧪
Angele on the podium beside a slide showing some tiny blindsnakes, worm snakes, and thread snakes.
September 12, 2025 at 7:59 AM
markscherz.bsky.social
And now @collinbos.bsky.social is presenting on mitochondrial genome reorganisation in microhylid frogs from Madagascar, and how we can explore it using off-target sequencing from target capture sequencing reads. 🧪🐸 #SEH2025
Collin in action talking about how diverse mitochondrial genome organisation is in amphibians
September 10, 2025 at 3:05 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Loving the Herp-Omics symposium at #SEH2025! Proud to see several members of my lab presenting here—my postdoc @alicepetzold.bsky.social presented and is one of the chairs! Up now, @clarakeusgen.bsky.social is presenting on the Bachelor’s thesis that she did with us.
Clara presenting her slides. Featuring some very cute frogs, including a frog with a few eggs around it.
September 10, 2025 at 2:54 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
A wonderful first day of the #SEH2025 meeting today here in Bonn! Seeing my students presenting is especially gratifying; @clarakeusgen.bsky.social brought this absolutely beautiful poster. 🧪🐸
Clara, wearing a T-shirt of my lab, beside her stunning black poster with brightly coloured images on it. The title:Dissecting without damage: inferring taxonomic affiliations from the gut content of a preserved museum specimen. It’s about an awfully preserved type specimen we scanned using phase-contrast CT, and segmenting the many ants it had in its gut to find out what kind of ants they were, and where it might have come from.
September 9, 2025 at 8:22 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
On my way to Bonn for the #SEH2025 23rd European Congress of Herpetology! I’ll be giving a plenary on Wednesday about miniaturisation. Really looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones, and exchanging ideas across the field 🐢🐍🐸🧪
A small male chameleon, Palleon nasus, on my pointer finger. It’s about as long as the last last two phalanges. It’s tan with oblique dark brown lines, and has a rather pointy face and a short tail. Not exactly what you might expect for a chameleon.
September 7, 2025 at 12:10 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Today I had the great pleasure to be an invited speaker at the meeting of the Nordisk Herpetologisk Forening. A good opportunity to share the work my team and I have been doing at the @nhmdk.bsky.social for the last four years, as well as the history of our remarkable collection. 🧪🐸🐍🐢🦎🐊
The four speakers of the day, from left to right: Bart Spanoghe, Marc Vaillant, yours truly, and Francis Cosquieri. Standing in front of the green toad emblem that represents the Nordic Herpetological society.
August 23, 2025 at 10:31 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Any chance someone can give us a confident ID on these two Phrynosoma models? @somuchpingle.bsky.social @afroherper.bsky.social @ethankocak.com @emilytaylorscience.com
August 21, 2025 at 2:26 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Great to be at Copenhagen Pride today! Appreciated this sign in particular!
A parade member with a green bucket hat holding a sign that says Be Gay Do Crime, with the Crime slashed out and Science written underneath
August 16, 2025 at 10:34 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Thrilled to announce version 2.0 of my poster featuring some of Madagascar's endemic frog species, to scale! This version features 176 species—40 more than version 1.1 (now retired)! Check it out!
🐸🧪
www.redbubble.com/i/poster/Som...
The poster features 176 species of frog from Madagascar, to scale. The biggest species are over 100 mm, the smallest are under 10 mm. They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and colours. So many variations on the theme of frog!
August 12, 2025 at 10:45 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
This week I learned about braconid parasitoid wasps that infect aphids and make a little disc underneath them. I found several of these on a plant for sale at my local supermarket. Thought at first that this was a fungus! Super cool. 🧪🐝
A translucent adult aphid that looks like it is sitting on a tiny coin on a vibrant green leaf. The coin is where the wasp larva lives. The aphid is dead. The leaf is thriving. #Hot_Wasp_Summer
July 28, 2025 at 12:10 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Musings on the theme of Brown, as performed by a selection of amphibians from southeastern Madagascar 🐸
An intricately patterned, rhomboid frog on a leaf, with a very distinct colour border along its flank that separates the more reddish brown dorsum from the more coffee-brown flank. This is Plethodontohyla notosticta. it sits on a light brown leaf. A frog that looks like it is probably made of a light rubber, a bit like an eraser. Its large eyes and short face give it a comical appearance. The whole body is a tan brown, with darker brown on the side of the head below and behind the bronze eye. Each wide finger has a light stripe before its tip. This is Platypelis ranjomena. It sits on a rich brown leaf. A slender, slightly metallic-brown looking frog, its long narrow snout almost blue in places, the dorsum a fine teak, the flanks darkening to umber, with a stark yellow-white line running from the lip all the way to the hip along the side of the body. This is Blommersia grandisonae. It, too, sits on a richly brown leaf. A contrast of wet and dry. A large-looking frog covered in fine narrow skin folds that run the length of the body. Most of the body is an ashy brown, but the legs have umber crossbands, and the top of the snout is a creamy chocolate colour. The iris is bronzed, to almost red around the pupil, but a vertical black extension of the pupil below. This is a potentially new species of Mantidactylus from the subgenus Brygoomantis, and indeed it seems to be one of the largest members of that subgenus. It sits on a leaf that looks phenomenally crunchy. The kind you would use for ASMR.
July 18, 2025 at 1:57 PM
markscherz.bsky.social
Madagascar is home to a beautiful, totally endemic snake fauna. Here are some from my most recent fieldtrip for you to appreciate for #WorldSnakeDay 🐍🧪
A greenish boa on a white background A speckled noodle with its tongue far out. The base of the tongue is pink, the tip is black. It’s funky An elegant snake on a white background with absolutely killer eyeshadow game A stripy speckly coiled bronze-coloured snake on white
July 16, 2025 at 9:46 PM