Snakes, salamanders, and other slimy specimens peer sightlessly out from rows of glass jars in a College Station archive. As Lee Fitzgerald walks past roughly 115,000 preserved amphibians and reptiles that belong to Texas A&M University’s Biodiversity Research and Teaching Collections, he points out a boa constrictor from California, a goliath frog from Cameroon, and a thorny devil from Australia. In front of one metal shelf, he stops before a hefty container piled with about thirty lizard corpses in varying shades of brown and gray. Fitzgerald picks up the jar and holds it up proudly, as one might when introducing a beloved pet. He and fellow herpetologists collected these two-inch-long lizards during more than three decades of research in West Texas and New Mexico, where…
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