Hi. I'm Dr. Krista Keller. I'm a veterinary specialist in zoological medicine
and assistant professor in the Department of Veterinary Clinical Medicine.
This here is B.
Bearded dragons are definitely the number one companion lizard species that we see
in veterinary practice. Our clients tell us routinely that they really enjoy having them
be part of the family because they like to do lots of fun things:
like go for a walk...
maybe go for a swim in the bathtub...
watch tv with their human family members.
And so it really makes them great companion animals.
I literally have clients who are like,
"If i don't turn on the soaps by 11am, they start freaking out."
And so these guys truly become part of the family.
Bearded dragons routinely present for veterinary care.
And when we are going to make a diagnosis in a non-traditional species like a bearded dragon,
we're actually going to reach for many of the same diagnostic tools we would reach for in more
traditional pet species like dogs and cats.
One of those tools when we need to explore a disease inside the skull or in the brain would be an MRI.
An MRI in our pet population needs to be done when our patients a ren't wiggly like this,
but under full anesthesia.
So that way we can get the fastest and most diagnostic scan without them moving.
When it comes to some of our weird and wacky species, we don't always have great answers as to what is a
safe anesthetic protocol for that animal. And also just look at B here. The size of his head is a lot
smaller than the size of even the smallest cat. And so it really does require that we know very
specific settings within that MRI machine that are going to allow us to get the structural
information we need from the MRI. And so that does require a bit of tinkering to figure out what is
that best MRI protocol to diagnose structural disease or structural changes
in the shortest amount of time possible.
Another really important part of our study is to determine what does
a normal bearded dragon brain look like through the development of a bearded dragon MRI-based brain
atlas; where we can look at a bearded dragon that comes in and compare that bearded dragon back to
the normal study we are developing, in order to assess what is wrong with that clinical patient.
Here at the University of Illinois, we have the unique opportunity of having a college
of veterinary medicine where there's people who work exclusively on avian, exotic, and zoological
species, and people who specialize in neurology, and then institutions like the Beckman Institute,
where we can partner with researchers to do things like perform MRIs on bearded dragons.
It's only at a huge, monster institution like University of Illinois that we have
the capability of doing really great collaborative research; whether that's for the bearded dragon,
or future species that we reach out to next, I know that this will
improve the health and welfare of all of our pet species, whether they're exotic or otherwise.