"Hello, I’m Mark O’Shea and I want to thank you for visiting my Official Website."

Contact:
David Foster Management tel: +44 (0)1264 771726, email: talent@dfmanagement.tv

NEWS: Mark O'Shea has taken up the post of Professor of Herpetology at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom.

His University Profile can be found here:
https://researchers.wlv.ac.uk/M.OShea

Mark searching for spitting cobras in KwaZulu Natal, S.Africa.

Expeditions, Expeditions, Expeditions,
Expeditions are the main-stay of this website. In total Mark has been fortunate enough to have participated in over 60 expeditions and film trips, to almost 40 countries, on six continents, since the early 1980s.

Not only does this site include all his Expeditions since the end of O'Shea's Big Adventure in 2003, it also includes individual film-trip accounts for OBA Seasons 3 & 4, (Season 4 was are not represented on the original website).

It is also planned to expand and improve Seasons 1-2 here, and include the Pre-OBA expeditions from 1980-1997......... as time permits. The website also includes sections for Herpetology, Photography, Publications, Media & Public, with new and eclectic sub-sections being added frequently.

THE TROPICAL RESEARCH INITIATIVE
Reptile & Amphibian Survey of Timor-Leste
has been running at a rate of 1-2 phases per year, since 2009.

This project, led by Hinrich Kaiser and Mark O'Shea,
involves students from the United States, Germany and Timor-Leste.
To date, we have recorded over 70 species
and discovered 20-25 new species of lizards, snakes and frogs,
so our research also involves a great deal of specimen examination,
comparison and documentation in museums across the world.

For a short cut to the Official Reptile & Amphibian Survey of Timor-Leste web page,
where you can access reports from all the phases and download our papers as they are published,
PLEASE CLICK HERE.

The Summer 2014 fieldwork season will begin on 26 June.
Phase IX will centre on Ataúro Island and the Oecussi exclave.
Phase X will centre on the extreme eastern end of Timor, including Jaco Island.
To follow our progress please click on the
Expedition Field Notes
link at the top of the left-hand column.

ARE YOU AN HERPETOLOGIST ?

ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT TAXONOMIC VANDALISM ?

Then these papers will interest you.

A game changing paper:
Kaiser, Crother, Kelly, Luiselli, O'Shea, Ota, Passos, Schleip & Wüster 2013
Best Practices: In the 21st Century, Taxonomic Decisions in Herpetology are
Acceptable Only When Supported by a Body of Evidence and Published via Peer-Review.
Herpetological Review 44(1):8-23.

To download Herpetological Taxonomy Point of View No.1 click on this link.

Followed by:
Kaiser 2014 Best Practices in Herpetological Taxonomy- Errata and Addendum. Herpetological Review 45(2):257-268.

This paper picks up where the paper below left off, correcting three errata in the earlier paper and providing alternative names for another 255 taxa named coined in the last five issues of a glossy, self-published, non-peer reviewed blog known as the Australasian Journal of Herpetology.

This paper, and its predecessor below, are must reads for anyone interested in or concerned about herpetological taxonomy and nomenclature. Both papers are open access which means they are free to download and distributed widely.

To download Herpetological Taxonomy Point of View No.2 click on this link.

Mark wrote:
I have been intrigued by snakes and other reptiles since I was a child and I kept my first snake at the age of eight. Now, almost 5 decades since snakes first attracted my attention I am still fascinated by their world and it would be fair to say that the study of these amazing creatures had dominated almost half a century for me.

So through this website we hope to share Mark's fascination for reptiles with you, but we are getting ahead of ourselves, perhaps we should first provide you with a short biography to explain what set Mark on the path to becoming an herpetologist.

The Youtube video below also provides an insight into Mark's career as an herpetologist, and why he considers further education an invaluable asset in attaining personal goals.
It is never too late to learn, and never too late to consider going back into education.

For photographs of Mark with a variety of reptiles click the O'SHEA PIX link. There are also a small gallery of photographs below, divided into three categories: "O'Shea's Big Adventure" (1999-2003), Before "O'Shea's Big Adventure" (1970s-1998), and After "O'Shea's Big Adventure" (2004-present day). Click on any image to enlarge it.

Be aware this website already contains over 1,000 individual pages and thousands of photographs.
If you venture in further, please don't get lost!

"O'SHEA'S BIG ADVENTURE"

	Captions: left: Mark with a Water monitor lizard on Krakatau, Indonesia, OBA Season 2 "Return of the Reptiles" 2001. above: Mark with a Black caiman in the Rupununi, Guyana, OBA Season 1 "River Giant" 1999.

Captions: above: Mark diving in Lake Tanganyika, Zambia, in the search for Storm's water cobra, OBA Season 4 "Water Cobra" 2003. right: Mark photographing a king cobra, Bangkok, Thailand OBA Season 3 "Siamese Crocodile" 2002.

BEFORE "O'SHEA'S BIG ADVENTURE"

	Captions: left: Mark with a Yellow-tailed cribo, "Maracá Rainforest Project", Roraima, Brazil 1987-88. above: Mark and Professors Warrell & Theakston, milking a New Guinea small-eyed snake, Madang, PNG 1990.

Captions: above: Mark and his team with one of three Burmese pythons, the first documented from Nepal, "Karnali Quest II", 1991. right: Mark working with a Forest cobra, Operation Raleigh, Korup National Park, Cameroon, 1989.

AFTER "O'SHEA'S BIG ADVENTURE"

	Captions: left: Mark with a Papuan taipan, AVRU snakebite project, Central Province, PNG 2006. above: Mark and his colleagues on the "Amphibian & Reptile Survey of Timor-Leste", Phase VI, Meleotegi River, Ermera District, 2012.

Captions: above: Mark with an Ottoman viper, Thrace, Greece, 2012. right: Mark with a camel spider on his head, Sharjah, UAE, 2011.