As I said aim new at uromastyx and these are my first semi-desert animals (no uromastyx are from real desert habitat) I did keep an ornate 11 years ago, I kept him 3 year hoping my wife who’d start loving my monitors, she never did however she really liked the uromastyx and cared for him. At that time I was to cut up in my other herp project and never really paid attention to uromastyx and chameleons in general, thinking of them as entry level reptiles (I know what a dork) now I understand these are perhaps the most awesome reptiles we can keep, anyways this little experience 11 years ago came back when my wife said why don’t you work with uromastyx the kids will love it?
Therefore I started reading about them (especially there habitat) also I read Douglas and Lindsay and these kind peoples really got my interest to its highest level, they paved the road for me to better understand these creatures, if it wasn’t for the extreme kindness and valuable information that Douglas so freely shared with me, id be up for years of trial and errors. You’re probably asking yourself Doug isn’t keeping his animals this way? Right he isn’t and he’s very successful, furthermore I strongly advise on doing what he says if you obtain uromastyx from him, but why am I doing deferent? Simply because aim not interested in copy cat Douglas, he was kind enough to open other doors for me, by telling me his success but more importantly telling me about his failures (not many breeders are honest enough to say these) this allowing me to focus on the problems of establishing the problematic species, aim having lots of fun learning the basics of understanding uromastyx biology.
If you want to learn something new don’t study the same books others have your likely to obtain the same results? I started with habitat, the funny thing is all uromastyx habitat used to be flood lands, rivers, swamps none of them live in real deserts and the thinner tailed species all have something in common, they prefer rocky hill as habitat, these are humidity traps, not apparent at first sight but a foot or more deep and water is trapped on the underside of every layers of flat stones, other species like Mali’s and Moroccans have very thick tails allowing them to endure dryness much more then ornate, Sudanese, Saharans, benties these species will dig as deep as necessary to get moisture, in captivity every one says these guys are bullet proof, they say these are the easiest to acclimate, this rang a bell and made me wonder if our husbandry is at fault.
To answer your question yes they use 145f basking, very briefly but they use it and it serve a purpose regulating gut flora (protozoa’s are killed at 40-50c) so when needed they use it. Also uromastyx borrow to support live (predation, temps, humidity) and safety from all of the above extremes. We think they love high heat because they come out when the sun is backing, however there morphology says otherwise! This is a delicate species with an armoured tail, I presume snakes to be there primary predator followed by birds, this is why they come out when it’s to hot for snake and other predators, and so what we think is a preference is really a tool for survival.
Theirs 1000 things we will learn about uromastyx in the next coming year, some will be amassing some futile but nevertheless fun and exiting.
Rgds 
