Dr Mark D. Scherz

@markscherz.bsky.social

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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

A pebble of a frog. It is round. It is pale beige. It has a smoky grey chevron on the back and a distinct curved fold of skin over the ear. It rests on a pile of leaves. There is almost a feeling that, hefted in the right way, it would skip well across a calm little lake. Please do not skip the frog.
A rather chubby brown frog on a moss-covered log. It's not much to look at. But just wait.
To the untrained eye, this might be called a 'toad'; its resemblance to a bufonid is striking, with rough skin with distinct warts and bumps. But this is not a bufonid. It lacks the parotid glands. It has strong hindlimbs. The back is brown splotched with dark umber, especially in a chevron over the shoulders. The eye is almost maroon as the frog looks to frame left. It rests on a large dead leaf on the forest floor.
Picture a slightly overdone American-style pancake. Add frog limbs along the edges. There you go.
A very, very shiny frog, reflecting the diffuser used to take the picture. Its skin glistens, but below the shine is a fine grey-brown. In the hip and on the thigh are large, yellow spots reminiscent of the egg spots of cichlid fish. These are totally hidden when the frog is at rest; here it is just starting a step forward.
A pinkish, almost peach rotund frog on a green leaf. Its back has a few black spots with light centres. Above the ear is a dark blotch, behind the richly bronze eyes.
Basically an animated pinecone on a log. This frog looks like a clump of mud, not a frog.
A new species, Rhombophryne sonaliae, looking right at you. It looks a lot like Kaloula pulchra, aka chubby frogs, with its light flank stripes and dark brown top and sides, but is super shiny.
Full stands in front of a brightly lit stage, itself in front of Edinburgh castle with sconces lit, in the evening light.
A child prone on the sand, his hands full of beetles, the swings and other accoutrements of the playground forlorn and forgotten in the background.
Bouba as a frog butt
A selfie of Mark standing beside his poster, which features a penguin trying to explain what miniaturisation is and why it matters.
A map of rainforest in Eastern Madagascar, with a beautiful square point cloud representing observations around Andasibe.
A dragon wing in pale white resin on the cerulean printing plate of a Photon S 3D printer
Yours truly and the Very Large Frog, our faces with the same expression. The Frog (the F is capitalised; a proper noun for a proper Frog) is huge, about the size of my face, and held in a gloved hand.
Picture if you will a light brown, almost beige toad. Cover that toad in large algal-green blotches, and intersperse a few warts that are neither green nor tan, but rather a rich orange. For an artistic flare, this same colour is repeated at the tips of the fingers and toes. The eye is black flecked with gold, with golden rims outlining the iris on top and below. A masterpiece of amphibian art.
A wide angle photo of a pond reflecting a cloud spotted sky, with little black toad poles in the shallows in the foreground
A large female adder, curled in a defensive posture among leaf litter, sticks, and rocks.
A weird bulbous expansion stretches up from the back of thorax of a robber fly, which has somehow gotten attached to the tip of a leaf in the forest.
Boophis reticulatus, a brown tree frog with weird ridges on its back, perched on a serrated bright green Pandanus leaf.
A little yellow and brown frog in the groove in the middle of a vibrant green Pandanus frond, its feet splayed to the side to brace it in place.
A big brown tree frog on a rich green leaf. The flank of the frog is marbled with yellow, its toe webbing is orange, its thigh striped with dark brown, the edge of its eye bright green, and the edge of the lip bright yellow. It sounds gaudy, but really it’s quite subtle.
A very small frog in the leaf litter. This is Mini mum. The name says it all: these frogs are approaching what we think is the minimum possible adult body size for a vertebrate.
A swamp with dark brown water, full of pandanus screw palms rising up to and above eye height. We had to wade to the knee through this water, leaving our shoes and socks soaked for the rest of the hike.
The team with all 21 porters who helped get us into the forest, and also a chicken.
The team in front of a forest backdrop. From left to right: Augustin, a local guide working for the site managed by Missouri Botanical Gardens; Louisette, our phenomenal cook; Laza, a researcher working at the local environmental ministry office; Angeluc, expert guide; Alice, postdoc in my group working in herpetology and especially museomics; Sandratra, a student at the University of Antananarivo and trainer expert herpetologist; Ranary, another local guide; and yours truly, a giant (literally, apparently) goober who likes to set nearly impossible tasks like finding the eggs of specific frog species when we have no idea where they lay those eggs.
A chaotic scene of two wood-cut tables set at a right angle to one another, strewn with various scientific accoutrement, including a microscope and several boxes of cryotubes. A blue light is cast over the tables by the large tarp keeping everything in shade. Behind the tables, the littoral forest surrounds the science area. Some of the samples we needed were collected just a couple metres from the tables we have been working at.
A little green tree frog delicately spotted with red, sitting on a fern frond and singing into the night. Dozens of others nearby sing the same song, and females are hard to come by.
Rainy Malagasy landscape through the windshield of a car with the wipers going.
A Malagasy landscape, with pines in shadow in the foreground and a hill with exposed rock in the distance
A panther chameleon in grey, painted over newspaper? on a corner wall bedecked with barbed wire in Antananarivo. Passing through the chameleon is a yellow and red stripe that’s continuous on the walls before and behind the chameleon. In front and below it sits a small trolly selling Soya Yoghurt with vitamins and calcium in French and Malagasy.
Snowy Denmark with yours truly in the centre wearing an orange winter jacket, a red scarf, a green hat, a backpack, and a few other small bags. Not exactly appropriate clothing for the 28°C that await me in Antananarivo.
Snow. So much snow. It’s blizzarding in Denmark. No frogs here.
My hiking boots covered in snow, with snow covering the ground. These same boots will see the rainforest and littoral forests of Madagascar for the next two months.
A jar of lizard with what once was a rubber seal but is now a failure and a disappointment.
We explored the bioacoustic differentiation of these frogs, and found clear differences among basically all species, especially those co-occurring at the same elevation. This figure shows cut-outs of a the little whistling calls each frog species makes, and a plot of call duration against dominant frequency for all individual calls recorded, coloured by species.
A pink glow over a green glow in a light-polluted night sky over a residential area, with a playground and a tree in the middle foreground. The composition is shite and the aurora itself is pathetically pale, but it’s there!
My hand next to a difficult to discern smooth newt on the wet pavement, with a tiny green caterpillar in its mouth.
An ikea welcome mat that looks either like a ghost with its hands up, or a temnospondyl (or Calyptocephalella) from above. If you had a screen reader read either of those two words, please tell me how it went.
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 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.
A sunrise over a football field full of geese.
The opening page of the Silmarillion, signed at the bottom 'Jane Goodall'
Rhombophryne coronata rendered in 3D from a micro-CT scan. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn good.
Anders demonstrating a car net. It fits on top of a car. You get the picture.
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’
Ranidae: Rana temporaria, a generic brown frog from Denmark.
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.
A frozen caiman curled up on a yellow metal and wood trolley on cobblestone and flagstones. It could almost be sleeping.
Polypedates colletti, a brown treefrog with a very pointy nose
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.
Skeletons and skull closeup of some little frogs. A plate from an upcoming paper.
Angele on the podium beside a slide showing some tiny blindsnakes, worm snakes, and thread snakes.
Collin in action talking about how diverse mitochondrial genome organisation is in amphibians
Clara presenting her slides. Featuring some very cute frogs, including a frog with a few eggs around it.
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.
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.