THE NATURAL MOMENT 



UP FRONT 



•< See preceding two pages 



With all their 

 hoiling and 

 tolling, the witches 

 of Macbeth — who 

 were cooking with 

 "eye of newt, and 

 toe of frog" — 

 might have been 

 improvising by 

 tossing newt eyes into their cauldron 

 in lieu of a much rarer ingredient: 

 the newt's external gills. 



Newts can live for more than 

 twenty years, but they sport feath- 

 ery gills on their heads or necks 

 only for the first few months of 

 life, in a so-called larval stage. The 

 warty newt (Triturus cristatus), pic- 

 tured here with its air-catching 

 tiara, probably hatched two or 

 three months before photographer 

 Rene Krekels saw it. A few weeks 

 later the fishy creature would have 

 absorbed its gills and gone ashore. 



Newts don't stay on land forever, 

 though. Sexually mature adults re- 

 turn to the water every spring to 

 mate. A pair doesn't embrace; the 

 male simply drops a sperm packet in 

 the water. If a female deigns to pick 

 it up, she will have one of the 

 longest labors in the animal world. 

 For more than a hundred days the 

 pregnant newt lays two or three 

 eggs a day, meticulously folding 

 them in the tip of a leaf with her 

 hind legs. By July, she's finished lay- 

 ing, and her firstborn of the season 

 are almost ready to join her in leav- 

 ing the water behind. 



Krekels had to take great care in 

 photographing the warty newt — a 

 protected species in Europe. After 

 getting a permit from the Dutch 

 government, he briefly removed a 

 young newt just under four inches 

 long from the southern province of 

 Limberg and photographed it un- 

 derwater on a familiar plant, Elodca 

 canadensis. Four days later, the newt 

 was released — free to stew naturally 

 in its home pond. — Erin Espelie 



Back When 



he lizard version of the Rolling Stones' legendary stuck-out tongue 

 on our cover is a reminder of just how ancient these creatures are. 

 No, not the Stones. True, the bands tongue logo dates to 1971 , 



primeval by rock n' roll standards. But our lizard's direct ancestors go back 

 to the Lower or Middle Triassic, as long as 25 1 million years ago — and, as a 

 group, Squamata ("the scaly ones," aka lizards and snakes) are just as much 

 with us today as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. If you, like me, are a big 

 fan of squamates, bliss and rapture are at hand: the new exhibition "Lizards 

 & Snakes: Alive!" opens July 1 at the American Museum of Natural History 

 in New York City, and runs through January 7, 2007. Our cover story, by 

 two of the world's leading experts on squamates, Laurie J. Vitt and Eric R. 

 Pianka ("The Scaly Ones," page 28), makes evolutionary sense out of the 

 extraordinary diversity of lizards and snakes today. 



• • • 



Run the wayback machine another 130 million years or so, to the 

 Late Devonian, about 380 million years ago. There you reach an- 

 other milestone in the history of life: the arrival of the first four-legged 

 creatures on land. In the classic version of the event, memorialized in 

 dozens of cartoon images, a frsh sprouts legs and crawls out of the ocean 

 onto a deserted beach. But discoveries that made headlines this past April, 

 along with meticulous reconstructions that have enabled paleontologists to 

 identify new evidence in fossils previously labeled "indeterminate," tell a 

 very different story. Jennifer A. Clack, whose work has been at the center 

 of the revolutionary new understanding, fills in the story of twenty-five 

 years of remarkably productive investigations, in her article, "From Fins to 

 Limbs" (page 36). 



• • • 



Now strap yourself in once more and zoom even further into the past, 

 to the beginning of time, some 14 billion years ago, when our uni- 

 verse began with a big bang. Alex Vilenkin is a leading academic theoreti- 

 cal physicist who heads the Tufts [University] Institute of Cosmology, but 

 the news he brings about the latest consequences of big-bang cosmology 

 ("Beyond the Big Bang," page 42) is anything but stuffy. 



According to Vilenkin, "our" big bang is only one of infinitely many 

 others, many of which have given rise to exact duplicates of the world we 

 know. Like raindrops condensing out of water vapor, each big bang is a 

 region of true vacuum — ordinary spacetime — that "condenses" out of a 

 substance called the false vacuum, whose boundaries are expanding furi- 

 ously And just as the change from water vapor to liquid water dumps 

 copious quantities of heat into the atmosphere, the change from false to true 

 vacuum releases such prodigious amounts of energy that it generates a big 

 bang. Meanwhile, the rest of the false vacuum continues expanding into a 

 void of its own creation, racing on like an unstoppable wildfire that began 

 from nothing and is now spreading in size by a factor of at least a googol 

 (1 ()'"") every thirtieth of a microsecond. If your worldview has been shrink- 

 ing of late, if life's minutiae have been crowding out the big picture, 

 Vilenkin's article is just what you'll need to regain a cosmic perspective. 



— Peter Brown 



6 



NATURAL HISTORY July/August 2006 



