The fossilized skeleton of a Jurassic reptile that appears to be part lizard, part snake, has been unearthed on Scotland's Isle of Skye.

This mysterious lizard had hooked, snake-like teeth for hunting down prey 167 million years ago, a new study has found.

The newly discovered species is named Breugnathair elgolensis, which means "false snake of Elgol," honoring the creature's confusing anatomy and the Elgol area of southern Skye, where the fossil was found, according to the study published Wednesday (Oct.1) in the journal Nature.

B. elgolensis was only about 16 inches (41 centimeters) long, but that still made it one of the largest lizards in its ecosystem, according to a statement released by the researchers. Scientists suspect that it hunted smaller lizards, early mammals and even young dinosaurs, such as small herbivorous heterodontosaurids and predatory bird-like paravians.

It had a snake-like jaw and curved teeth similar to a modern python, but its body was short, with fully formed limbs like a lizard. B. elgolensis also had gecko-like features on some of its bones, including the back of its skull. Researchers are still deciphering B. elgolensis' evolutionary history, but its discovery could change the way they look at early snake evolution.

Related: Night lizards survived dinosaur-killing asteroid strike, despite being close enough to see it happen

Scientists currently have a scattered understanding of early lizard and snake evolution. Both animals belong to a group called Squamata, which emerged about 190 million years ago. There's some overlap between members of the group, but lizards came first and generally have four limbs, while snakes are limbless.

"The Jurassic fossil deposits on the Isle of Skye are of world importance for our understanding of the early evolution of many living groups, including lizards, which were beginning their diversification at around this time," study co-lead author Susan Evans, a professor of vertebrate morphology and paleontology at the University College London, said in the statement.

Study co-author Stig Walsh, a senior curator of vertebrate paleobiology at the National Museums Scotland, first uncovered the B. elgolensis fossil in 2015. The team has since spent nearly a decade preparing and studying the specimen, which has included subjecting it to high-powered X-rays and detailed computed tomography (CT) imaging scans.

The researchers determined that B. elgolensis belonged to a Squamata sub-group called Parviraptoridae, which was previously only known from fragments of other fossils. While snake-like bones had been found in close proximity to gecko-like bones, some scientists had assumed they came from two separate animals. The new fossil confirms that one species did indeed have both features, according to the statement.

"I first described parviraptorids some 30 years ago based on more fragmentary material, so it's a bit like finding the top of the jigsaw box many years after you puzzled out the original picture from a handful of pieces," Evans said. "The mosaic of primitive and specialized features we find in parviraptorids, as demonstrated by this new specimen, is an important reminder that evolutionary paths can be unpredictable."

The researchers still aren't sure whether snakes evolved from species like B. elgolensis or whether snakes independently evolved similar mouth parts. It's also possible that B. elgolensis is a stem lineage within Squamata, helping to give rise to all lizards and snakes.

"This fossil gets us quite far, but it doesn't get us all of the way," study lead author Roger Benson, the Macaulay Curator at the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology, said in the statement. "However, it makes us even more excited about the possibility of figuring out where snakes come from."

Mysterious night lizards survived the giant asteroid strike that ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, despite living right next to the impact site, a new study finds.

Thanks to a new evolutionary analysis, researchers discovered that the little lizards, in the family Xantusiidae, were living around the Gulf of Mexico before and after the asteroid struck what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. This makes night lizards the only group of land vertebrates known to have survived close to the impact location, and still have members living in the region today.

The dinosaurs' doomsday asteroid was around 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) wide and caused widespread devastation when it hit at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). The impact was catastrophic for much of Earth's wildlife, triggering the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event, in which around 75% of all species died out. However, two lineages of night lizard managed to persist through the disaster, despite likely being close enough to see the impact.

"They would have been all around the margin of the asteroid impact," study lead author Chase Brownstein, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, told Live Science.

How did night lizards survive amid all the devastation? Researchers aren't sure, but Brownstein noted that they have slow metabolisms, so they wouldn't have needed to eat very often.

The researchers published their findings Wednesday (June 25) in the journal Biology Letters.

Related: Iguanas sailed one-fifth of the way around the world on rafts 34 million years ago

Night lizards grow to only a few inches in length. Often very secretive, the lizards live in specialized microhabitats, like inside rock crevices and dense vegetation, or beneath bark and logs.

Some previous studies suggested that night lizards' "crown" group — the group containing the last common ancestor of all living night lizards — evolved during the age of dinosaurs, which would have meant the animals persisted through the K-Pg devastation. The new study put that hypothesis to the test.

Brownstein and his colleagues reconstructed the ancestry of the three living night lizard genera (Lepidophyma, Xantusia and Cricosaura). They used molecular clock dating to estimate when the night lizards evolved, based on their mutations and the rate at which mutations occur in DNA over time.

The researchers found that the most recent common ancestor of living night lizards emerged during the Cretaceous around 90 million years ago and that night lizards have been living in North America and Central America since around that time, well before the asteroid struck 66 million years ago, according to the study.

The new findings suggest that two night lizard lineages survived the asteroid strike. One of these lineages then gave rise to Xantusia, which ranges from the southwestern U.S. into Mexico, and Lepidophyma, which ranges across parts of North America and Central America. The second lineage then gave rise to Cricosaura and its only species, Cuban night lizards (Cricosaura typica), in Cuba.

Night lizards weren't the only animals to survive the K-Pg mass extinction event. We wouldn't be here today if some of the mammal family tree hadn't lived through the asteroid impact. Avian dinosaurs (birds), fish and plenty of other animals survived, too. However, night lizards are the only known surviving group of terrestrial vertebrates that have remained endemic to — living only in — North America and Central America since the asteroid hit.

Brownstein noted that some lineages of turtles and other lizards in the region probably survived the asteroid in a similar way as night lizards (scientifically named xantusiids) did. However, these other lineages have since disappeared.

"The problem is that they just aren't there anymore," Brownstein said. "So, what's interesting is that xantusiids have persisted and have remained endemic to the region."

Around 34 million years ago, iguanas undertook the longest-known transoceanic trip of any terrestrial species, sailing one-fifth of the way around the world from North America to set up home in Fiji, a new study suggests.

Researchers believe the iguanas made the more than 5,000 mile (8,000 kilometer) journey on rafts made of vegetation, arriving in Fiji shortly after the islands formed. "You could imagine some kind of cyclone knocking over trees where there were a bunch of iguanas and maybe their eggs, and then they caught the ocean currents and rafted over," lead author Simon Scarpetta, lead author and assistant professor of environmental science at the University of San Francisco, said in a statement.

Fiji's bright-green lizards are the only iguanas outside the Western Hemisphere, and how they got there has been a long-standing mystery. In a new genetic analysis published Monday (March 17) in the journal PNAS, researchers found Fiji's iguanas are much more closely related to their Western Hemisphere cousins than previously believed, making the journey directly from the West Coast of the United States to Fiji about 34 million years ago.

"That they reached Fiji directly from North America seems crazy," study co-author Jimmy McGuire, professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. "But alternative models involving colonization from adjacent land areas don't really work for the time frame, since we know that they arrived in Fiji within the last 34 million years or so."

Related: Labord's chameleon — the color-changing lizard that drops dead in 4 months

Previously, some biologists posited the Fijian lizards — which comprise the genus Brachylophus — descended from a now-extinct family of iguanas that once populated the Pacific. Others have suggested the lizards could have floated shorter distances from South America and through Antarctica or Australia before finally ending up in the Pacific.

But these ideas were based on past genetic analyses that did not conclusively show how closely Fiji iguanas were related to other iguanids.

The new analysis relies on a genome-wide DNA sequence that Scarpetta collected from over 200 iguana specimens from museums around the world.

The work revealed the Brachylophus genus in Fiji is most closely related to lizards in the Diposaurus genus, which are widespread in the deserts of North America. These desert iguanas are well adapted to searing heat, so potentially had adaptations to survive the long journey.

"Iguanas and desert iguanas, in particular, are resistant to starvation and dehydration, so my thought process is, if there had to be any group of vertebrate or any group of lizard that really could make an 8,000 kilometer journey across the Pacific on a mass of vegetation, a desert iguana-like ancestor would be the one," Scarpetta said.

The researchers estimate these lineages split approximately 34 million years ago — roughly aligning with geological history of the islands' formation. "This suggests that as soon as land appeared where Fiji now resides, these iguanas may have colonized it. Regardless of the actual timing of dispersal, the event itself was spectacular," Scarpetta said.

Name: Labord's chameleon (Furcifer labordi)

Where it lives: Western Madagascar

What it eats: Crickets, flies, locusts, grasshoppers and stick insects

Why it's awesome: Labord's chameleons live fast and die young. They hold the record for the shortest lifespan of all tetrapods — they hatch, grow, mate and die in just four to five months.

Labord's chameleons actually spend more time developing inside their eggs than they do outside of them. For around eight to nine months, the embryos rest beneath the forest floor, preparing for their whirlwind time above ground.

These short-lived chameleons grow to around 3.5 inches (9 centimeters) long and are found exclusively in forests in the lowlands of western Madagascar.

Once they hatch, they grow quickly and reach sexual maturity at 2 months old.

Their aggressive mating season begins in January, during the wet season, with males battling fiercely for the chance at reproducing then dying shortly after.

Females then put all their energy into producing eggs, which they lay in February. They have a relatively high reproductive rate to compensate for their short adult lifespan, with each female laying up to 11 eggs. Hours after laying their eggs, the females die.

This means that for two-thirds of the year, the entire species exists in eggs buried underground.

This unusual — and seemingly risky — lifecycle is thought to be a survival adaptation to the harsh seasonal environment of western Madagascar. The region experiences distinct wet and dry seasons, with the rainy season providing the necessary resources for survival, such as food and water, while these become more scarce in the dry season. Although many tropical regions experience wet and dry seasons, the climate of Madagascar is extremely variable and environmental unpredictability is much greater than other tropical areas.

To align with these conditions, the chameleons have evolved to spend most of the year as embryos in their eggs — emerging during the brief rainy season to mate and lay more eggs.

By compressing their entire adult existence into the wet season, the chameleons maximize their chances of finding food and mates. This strategy also reduces competition for resources, as most adults die before the next generation hatches (although during unusually long rainy seasons, females can survive for a second breeding season).

Chameleons are known for their ability to change color, and Labord's chameleons are no different. Their skin changes color by expanding and contracting special cells that contain nanocrystals, which alters how they reflect light. But they don't do it to camouflage themselves. Instead, they use it to communicate with other chameleons — for example, to attract mates — and in response to emotions.

In a 2024 PBS documentary filmed in the Kirindy Forest in western Madagascar, a Labord's chameleon broke into a vibrant, pulsating display of color just moments before its death. This is the result of the nervous systems continuing to send signals to skin cells, resulting in a dramatic "technicolor fireworks display," according to the experts in the documentary.

Name: Greater short-horned lizard (Phrynosoma hernandesi)

Where they live: North and Central America

What they eat: Ants, spiders and other small insects

Why they're awesome: Greater short-horned lizards have a squat, flat shape and short snouts, which makes them look more like amphibians than reptiles — hence the nickname "horny toads." But these lizards are most famous for their unusual defense mechanism: When threatened, they squirt a stream of blood from their eyes up to a distance of 5 feet (1.5 meters).

They do this by restricting the blood flow leaving their heads, which increases blood pressure and causes tiny blood vessels to burst around the eyes. They shoot the blood at predators to cause confusion, giving them a chance to escape.

Around eight species of horned lizards are thought to use this grisly trick, known as autohaemorrhaging.

Greater short-horned lizards, which grow to around 6 inches (15 centimeters) long, may release a third of theirits total blood supply this way.

While it doesn't appear to deter birds, the blood does affect canines like dogs (Canis familiaris), coyotes (Canis latrans) and foxes (Vulpes), which shake their heads to get rid of it. The lizards seem to recognize this and are more likely to use it on dogs than on other predators.

The blood is laced with toxic chemicals, which may come from the venomous harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex) that the lizards eat. Although their blood isn’t poisonous, it tastes unpleasant to predators. Short-horned lizards aren't affected by the venom of the harvester ants they feed on because a chemical in their blood plasma neutralizes it. They also produce large amounts of mucus to immobilize the insects, enabling the lizards to swallow them without getting hurt by the venom.

But blood squirting isn't short-horned lizards' only defense. They have mottled skin and flat bodies, making them very well-camouflaged. Their bodies are covered in sharp spines, including two large head spikes. If a predator attempts to bite them, the feisty lizards bow their head, exposing the horns to the predator's mouth.

The lizards can also inflate themselves to twice their normal size when attacked. Not only does this make them look more intimidating, it can cause predators trying to swallow them to choke.

Scuba-diving lizards have an aquatic trick up their sleeves: They can create air bubbles on their foreheads to breathe underwater, enabling them to stay submerged for long periods and escape predators, researchers say.

In 2018, scientists captured the first-ever footage of a semi-aquatic lizard known as a stream anole (Anolis oxylophus) breathing underwater using a bubble of stored oxygen surrounding its snout — an ability that had never been seen before in lizards. Since then, at least 18 other species of anoles have been found to do this too, including water anoles (Anolis aquaticus).

However, until now, researchers had no idea if this bubble enabled these lizards to stay underwater for a long time or if it merely formed as a side effect of their water-repelling skin.

In a study published Sept. 18 in the journal Biology Letters, researchers tested nearly 30 water anoles and found that those using air bubbles stayed underwater 32% longer than anoles without bubbles. In the wild, this extra time underwater likely helps them to evade predators.

"There are a lot of threats in their environment, and it makes sense that they would evolve a unique way of dealing with them using the resource — water — that they have available," study author Lindsey Swierk, assistant research professor in biological sciences at Binghamton University in New York, told Live Science in an email.

Related: Watch chameleon erupt in color 'as if uttering her last words' in her final moments before death

Semi-aquatic water anoles spend most of their time living on boulders close to river banks in forests in Costa Rica and Panama. They are small lizards that can grow up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) long. When threatened, they have been observed jumping into nearby water to escape.

"We know that they can stay underwater at least about 20 minutes, but probably longer," Swierk said.

Upon diving, these anoles exhale to create a bubble that surrounds their head, held on by the lizards' water-repelling skin. "When water anoles dive, their hydrophobic ("water-repelling") skin keeps a slick of air over the body surface," Swierk said.

As the anoles exhale and inhale, the bubble expands and collapses. The researchers suggest this redistributes air on and in an anole's body, giving it sufficient oxygen for long dives.

To test this, scientists collected 28 water anoles from the Rio Java in Costa Rica. The team applied a substance to 13 of the anoles' heads to stop their skin from being water repellant, meaning the bubble would fail to attach, Swierk said.

"We then compared the dive length and the ability to rebreathe bubbles in anoles with and without emollient applied," Swierk said.

In the control group — the anoles with no substance applied — the longest dive recorded was 477 seconds (nearly eight minutes), although this was excluded from the analysis for being an outlier. The longest dive included in the analysis was 308 seconds (just over five minutes). In the group with the substance applied, the longest dive was 254 seconds (over four minutes).

On average, anoles without the substance applied spent 67.5 seconds longer underwater than those with the substance. "These results show that when semi-aquatic anoles are allowed to rebreathe using bubbles, they can dive longer," Swierk said.

Swierk suggests the difference between dive times may have been greatly different if this experiment was conducted in the wild and not in tanks. "The pressure to stay concealed from a real predator, which we didn't use in our study, could nudge the control group's dive times much longer," Swierk said.

Anoles are not the only animals known to use bubbles underwater. For example, diving beetles carry trapped air behind them at the tip of their wing covers. This bubble acts as a "physical gill," exchanging oxygen with the water to replenish the supply inside the bubble.

The team now wants to find out if water anoles use their breathing bubbles in the same way.

Name: Thorny devil (Moloch horridus)

Where it lives: Australia

What it eats: Ants

Why it's awesome: Thorny devils are native to Australia and live in the country's arid scrubland and interior desert. These small lizards grow to 8 inches (20 centimeters) long and have evolved an impressive set of defenses, including an appendage on the back of the necks that acts as a "'false head."

When threatened, the lizards tuck their real head down between their front legs, leaving the fake head exposed while protecting the real head.

These lizards' defenses don't stop there. Their bodies are covered in spikes, which are the size of rose thorns and are thought to deter predators by making the lizards difficult to capture, bite and swallow.

Thorny devils can also inflate their chests to make themselves look larger when faced with a threat. When they're out in the open — either looking for food or mates — they also have a slow and jerky walk, which is thought to confuse predators. This is because moving slowly and intermittently may help the lizards from activating a predator’s chase-and-attack response, which can happen when they spot quick-fleeing prey.

Devils are well-adapted to their hot, harsh environment. In extreme temperatures, they bury themselves in sand to protect themselves from the sun. They then use channels on their skin, located between their scales, to draw moisture from damp sand and transport it to their mouths like a straw.

They can also change color to help them regulate their body temperature and metabolism. In the cooler mornings, the lizards are a drab brown, becoming a lighter yellow as the temperature rises and they become more active. The lighter coloring likely helps reflect the sun and prevents them from overheating. However, they can also change color quickly in order to camouflage themselves.

Thorny devils are named after a human sacrifice god. Their scientific name, Moloch horridus, was inspired by John Milton's poem "Paradise Lost," which references the Canaanite god Moloch — a bloodthirsty figure that requires child sacrifices. The Latin word horridus means rough, dreadful, wild or frightful. According to research, a thorny devil was first exhibited in London by naturalist and businessman John Gould in 1840, but it was given its scientific name by zoologist John Gray in 1841, who allegedly had Milton’s epic poem in mind at the time.

In reality, though, thorny devils are harmless — unless you're a predator or an ant. They can consume thousands of the insects a day, using their sticky tongues and hard teeth to capture ants.

For more than 100 years, researchers assumed that dinosaurs were like giant lizards: sluggish reptiles that spent most of their day basking in the sun. This image changed when we started to realize that dinosaurs were far more similar to birds than to modern-day lizards. Today, researchers agree that birds are technically dinosaurs — the only ones to have survived the mass extinction 66 million years ago. Yet, if that's true, why aren't birds cold-blooded like most modern-day reptiles?

The answer is straightforward: Most dinosaurs were probably warm-blooded, too. 

Birds are descended from a diverse group of two-legged dinosaurs called theropods, which included giant, meat-eating predators like Tyrannosaurus rex, as well as the smaller 3-foot-long (1 meter) Mononykus. 

Like mammals, birds are warm-blooded, or endothermic, meaning they internally regulate their own body temperature. Endothermic animals have a higher metabolism, which permits more physically demanding activities — like flying — but requires more calories to maintain. 

"Animals that are warm-blooded are usually more active," Holly Woodward, a professor of anatomy and paleontology at Oklahoma State University, told Live Science. "They can be active into the night. And so it's an evolutionary strategy in that you can be foraging for food when other animals can't, because they're too cold and slow." 

Related: What happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid slammed into Earth?

Birds generally have a higher metabolism than similarly sized mammals and keep their body temperatures up — between 106 and 109 degrees Fahrenheit (41 to 43 degrees Celsius). Hummingbirds, which flap their wings 720 to 5,400 times per minute, need to consume about half their body weight every day, or eat every 10 to 15 minutes. 

In contrast, cold-blooded animals, or ectotherms — like most modern reptiles and fish — rely on their environment to change their body temperature. Because they don't expend as much energy heating themselves, they don't need to eat as regularly; alligators, for example, can go more than a year without food. 

For years, researchers assumed that because most modern reptiles are ectothermic, ancient reptiles must have been, too. 

"So often, if you look at living animals and make an assumption about the ancestral state based on the current condition, it will lead you wrong," Jingmai O'Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago, told Live Science. 

Views started changing around the late 1960s, with the discovery of a bird-like specimen called Deinonychus. Since then, researchers have found physical characteristics that indicate many dinosaurs, including ancient birds, were warm-blooded. The presence of feathers is one such indication — feathers help animals conserve body heat, which isn't needed in ectotherms. 

In her lab, Woodward has been looking at another proxy: bone tissue microstructure. She's found that endotherms have much different bones than ectotherms, mostly because ectotherms usually grow more slowly. This growth rate is reflected in the bones' mineral component, which she described as "little fibers."

"I imagine them kind of as Pick-up sticks: If you're growing really slowly, those fibers tend to orient themselves parallel to each other, and so they become flat," Woodward said. "But if you're growing faster, the fibers are just sort of a jumble," which is the type of structure she tends to see in warm-blooded bones. 

Her observations have shown that dinosaurs' bone structures are more similar to birds' and mammals' than to crocodiles'. 

Exactly when warm-bloodedness first popped up is unclear. All dinosaurs (including birds) and crocodiles share a common reptilian ancestor, and both Woodward and O'Connor said there's good evidence this ancestor was warm-blooded — meaning endothermy arose prior to dinosaurs. Cold-blooded dinosaurs would have appeared later. 

But it's possible endothermy showed up even earlier. If both mammals and most reptiles were endothermic, perhaps their common ancestor, which lived about 310 million years ago, was also endothermic. However, endothermy most likely evolved independently in mammals, O'Connor said. 

Future research could challenge these ideas, though. "We make so many assumptions," O'Connor said, "and then the data proves us wrong."

Snakes have a supercharged evolutionary clock that enables them to adapt at far faster rates than other reptiles, scientists have discovered. This ability has helped them become evolutionary "winners" and spread across the planet.

"Snakes are like the Big Bang 'singularity' in cosmology — a dramatic expansion of diversity in species and their ecologies, linked to some event that might have occurred early in the evolutionary history of snakes," lead author Pascal Title, a evolutionary macroecologist at Stony Brook University in New York, said in a statement.

In a new study, published Thursday (Feb. 22) in the journal Science, the researchers investigated what makes animal groups evolutionary winners — in particular, why certain groups are able to diversify into more species and appear better at surviving events like mass extinctions — study author Daniel Rabosky, an evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan, whose research focuses on macroevolution, told Live Science in an email. 

The scientists looked at squamates, the order of reptiles that includes snakes and lizards and includes over 11,000 species. In this group, snakes, in particular, are widely diverse — the roughly 4,000 known snake species vary from venomous sea snakes, giant constrictors and hooded cobras to tiny threadsnakes that burrow to feed on ants and termites. 

Related: The biggest snake in the world (and 9 other giant serpents)

To find out why snakes are such an evolutionary success story, the researchers carried out a huge study of the genomes of almost 1,000 snakes and lizards. They also examined dietary preferences by looking at the stomach contents of over 60,000 museum specimens and field observations. With this data, they built up a comprehensive evolutionary tree of bodily and dietary changes in the group over time. They then used mathematical and statistical models to look at how snakes and lizards evolved. 

Their findings suggest that snakes underwent several evolutionary explosions and evolved three times faster than lizards, in terms of diversity. After likely first emerging about 128 million years ago, there was a huge burst at some point between then and 70 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), and another major pulse after the dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. 

This fast rate of evolution continues to this day, the team's models show. 

"Compared to lizards, they have changed relatively rapidly, and they've continued to do so through time," Rabosky said. "So we would also say that the continued 'evolutionary explosion' of snakes is still ongoing today and appears partly driven by the fact that the rate of evolution — their 'evolutionary clock' so to speak — is just ticking a lot faster than many other groups of animals. This fast-ticking-evolutionary-clock is really important because it lets snakes evolve new traits quickly that can take advantage of opportunities that come up." 

Snakes' evolutionary flexibility enables them to change their body shape and diets "very quickly," he said. The initial "singularity" that led to snakes' success appears to have started with them developing limbless bodies, flexible skulls and advanced chemical-detection systems. 

These changes enabled them to target a huge array of prey, providing the framework for individual species to develop and specialize. Previous research published in 2021 shows the diversity in their diets exploded after the dinosaurs went extinct, with snakes quickly evolving new adaptations to take advantage of the new world they found themselves in — a dinosaur-less world in which mammals were starting to gain a foothold. 

But why snakes ended up with a fast evolutionary clock in the first place is still a mystery. "This is the big question for us," Rabosky said. "We can’t really explain this yet … But this is the nature of science, right? Usually, solving a mystery goes hand-in-hand with raising new questions that you have to answer." 

And snakes are likely continuing to adapt and evolve in super-quick time. "This is obviously speculation, but we don’t see any signs that the rapid evolution of snakes is slowing down," Rabosky said. "Snakes seem to be continuing to evolve new ways of life, and I have every expectation that this would continue into the future."

In dramatic new footage, a chameleon erupts in stunning colors while in the throes of death. Using time-lapse photography, researchers captured the colorful last few hours of the reptile's short life — and the remarkable changes that took place in that time. 

"In her last moments, her skin erupts with color, as if uttering her last words," narrator Bumper Robinson said in the clip. 

The Labord's chameleon (Furcifer labordi) was filmed in the Kirindy Forest in western Madagascar. This species has one of the shortest known life spans of any four-legged vertebrate, living just four to five months after hatching; they spend longer developing inside an egg (around eight to nine months) than they do outside it. 

In the new PBS series "Big Little Journeys," filmmakers followed the female Labord's chameleon as she laid her eggs and covered them with sand to protect them from the effects of the approaching dry season. 

Related: Pangolin courtship ritual and birth of a 'pangopup' captured in incredible, rare footage

"The females put all their energy into producing eggs that need to get through the long drought while underground," series producer Valeria Fabbri-Kennedy and scientist Chris Raxworthy, a herpetologist at the American Museum of Natural History, told Live Science in an email. "They die within just a few hours of having laid them, as they have few resources left."

The team had hoped to capture the full life cycle of this little-known species — and realized one individual "had slowed and seemed to be fading," they said. They set up a time-lapse camera, and when they returned two hours later, they found the chameleon dead. 

"On reviewing the footage, we were amazed and moved by the colorful spectacle they had filmed — something that the scientists have never observed in the wild before," Fabbri-Kennedy and Raxworthy said. 

Chameleons' skin changes color by expanding and contracting special cells that contain nanocrystals — a process that alters how they reflect light. In the clip, the chameleon's skin twinkles and changes color like a fireworks display. 

"During death, nervous signals continue to transmit and to change the shape of the skin cells, creating the chaotic technicolor patterns that were captured," Fabbri-Kennedy and Raxworthy said.

This extreme survival strategy of programmed death — in which females die after laying eggs — is seen in many other species, including octopuses and moths. 

Among Labord's chameleons, the males also die before the dry season arrives, having expended all their resources fighting for the chance to reproduce. This means that for two-thirds of the year, the entire population exists in eggs buried underground. "Adults have not evolved to survive it [the dry season]," Fabbri-Kennedy and Raxworthy said.

Researchers in Australia have rediscovered a secretive lizard with tiny legs that they thought may be extinct after it evaded detection for more than 40 years.

A team from the Queensland Museum and James Cook University spotted Lyon's grassland striped skinks (Austroablepharus barrylyoni) — which haven't been seen since 1981 — at several sites near Mount Surprise in northeastern Australia, according to a statement.

The researchers also saw two other threatened lizards: Mount Surprise sliders (Lerista storri) and limbless fine-lined sliders (Lerista ameles). All three species are members of the skink family, known for their snake-like features and tiny, sometimes non-existent, limbs.

"It was an exciting moment to find all three skinks, but to find the Lyon's grassland striped skink was an amazing discovery," expedition leader Andrew Amey, the collection manager of amphibians and reptiles, herpetology at Queensland Museum, said in the statement.

Related: Earless monitor lizards: The 'Holy Grail' of reptiles that looks like a mini dragon

Lyon's grassland striped skinks are very small, measuring just 2 inches (5 centimeters) long from the tips of their snouts to the base of their bright-orange tails, according to a report by the Australian government. Little is known about the highly elusive species, but they probably hunt insects in long grass and seek shelter from the sun and predators in soil cracks.

Mount Surprise sliders have small stumps as their back legs, while limbless fine-lined sliders don't have any legs at all. The sliders' reduced limbs enable them to "essentially swim through the soil," Amey said.

All three lizards have tiny distributions in the Mount Surprise area, which means they are particularly vulnerable to disturbances such as bushfires, droughts and disease. Having found these creatures still exist, the researchers want to learn more about the skink populations to help protect them, according to the statement.

"We need to know if these skinks have healthy populations or if they are declining," Amey said.  "We can't take effective action to protect them if we don’t know where they occur and what threats are impacting them," he added.

"The only way to get this information is go and look for them."

Name: Earless monitor lizard (Lanthanotus borneensis)

Where it lives: Borneo, near streams in lowland rainforests 

What it eats: Earthworms, crabs and fish  

Why it's awesome: Earless monitor lizards are dragon-like reptiles that are so rare they're dubbed the "Holy Grail" of herpetology — the study of reptiles and amphibians. 

The species is the only known member of its family, Lanthanotidae, which means researchers haven't found anything else quite like them alive today. The most recent common ancestor of this lizard is thought to have diverged in the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago).

Earless monitor lizards grow up to 1.6 feet (50 centimeters) long, with slender bodies, tiny limbs and tails they can grasp things with. Their heads lack external ears, hence the earless monitor lizard moniker, and their lower eyelids — which they close when underwater — are translucent.

Scientists still don't know much about these mysterious lizards, but they believe the animals' adaptations suit a subterranean lifestyle, according to a 2014 report by TRAFFIC, a wildlife organization focused on the trade in wild species. 

Related: Watch this monstrous 'sea devil' goosefish walk along the bottom of the ocean off the Galapagos Islands 

Earless monitor lizards spend their days burrowing underneath vegetation and rocks on the banks of rocky streams, coming out at night to find food on land and in the water, according to a 2013 article published in Herpetological Review. Dirt sticks to their lumpy scales, so when they do come out, they have camouflage. 

It is thought they use their tails as an anchor, wrapping them around stones and roots to avoid being swept away in floods. They mate in water, with sessions lasting for hours.

According to Animal Diversity Web, earless monitor lizards' unusual appearance led scientists to think they were a missing link between snakes and lizards, but this was later refuted.  

They are endemic to Borneo, where they are threatened by a combination of deforestation and the pet trade, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.  

Scientists have named an ancient species of giant sea lizard with "angry eyebrows" and a stumpy tail after Jörmungandr, a sea serpent from Norse mythology.

The fearsome creature, Jǫrmungandr walhallaensis, lived 80 million years ago in an ancient sea in what is now North Dakota. 

"If you put flippers on a Komodo dragon and made it really big, that's what it would have looked like," lead author Amelia Zietlow, a postdoctoral student in comparative biology at the American Museum of Natural History's Richard Gilder Graduate School, said in a statement. 

Related: 94 million-year-old fossilized sea monster is the oldest of its kind in North America

Zietlow and colleagues discovered the almost-complete skull, jaws, cervical spine and several vertebrae of the 24-foot-long (7 meters) mosasaur in 2015 in Walhalla, North Dakota. The team described the sea monster in a paper published Monday (Oct. 30) in the journal Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. 

Their analysis showed that J. walhallaensis contained many of the same features as two known mosasaurs: the smaller Clidastes and the much larger Mosasaurus, which it predates. Like its giant cousin, J. walhallaensis lived during the Cretaceous period (roughly 145 million to 66 million years ago) alongside dinosaurs and had massive flippers and a "shark-like tail" that helped it glide through the water. It also had a bony ridge on its skull that resembled "angry eyebrows," according to the statement.

Paleontologists still don't agree on whether mosasaurs are more closely related to lizards or to snakes. However, this newly described species offers researchers more insight into these elusive sea creatures.

"As these animals evolved into these giant sea monsters, they were constantly making changes," Zietlow said. "This work gets us one step closer to understanding how all these different forms are related to one another."

Extreme weather events and mass extinctions are some of the most serious effects of climate change, but a warming world is having many other— and less obvious — effects on our planet. From bumpier plane rides to sex-changing lizards, here are 15 of the most unexpected effects of a warming world.

Baseball home runs increase

Home runs in Major League Baseball seem to be increasing as temperatures rise. In a study published April 7 in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, researchers said that as warmer air is less dense, baseballs fly farther after being batted away. 

They found that, between 2010 and 2019, more than 500 homers — accounting for 1% of home runs — could be put down to unusually hot days as a result of global warming.  They also predicted home runs could be 10% more common by 2100, compared with averages between 2010 and 2019. Playing more games at night when temperatures are milder could help counter the impact on the sport, the scientists suggested. 

Shrinking frogs croak in higher pitches 

As the world warms, male coquí frogs (Eleutherodactylus coqui) in Puerto Rico are croaking in higher pitches. In a study presented on May 8 at the 184th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers revealed how rising temperatures are causing these amphibians to shrink, raising the pitch of their croaks. 

Male coquí frogs call to mark their territory and warn off rivals. The scientists found that frogs living nearer the base of a mountain, where it is warmer, croaked in higher pitches than larger frogs living at higher altitudes, where it is cooler. When researchers returned to the same slopes two decades later — when global temperatures had increased — they found that frogs were calling in higher pitches no matter where they were on the mountain.

Airplane turbulence getting worse 

Climate change is making plane rides bumpier as air streams shift. In a study published June 8 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists compared climate data from 1979 to 2020 with air turbulence data in the North Atlantic. They found that severe turbulence — which is caused by colliding streams of air that are traveling at different speeds — jumped by 55% from 17.7 hours in 1979 to 27.4 hours in 2020. Moderate levels of turbulence rose by 37% over the same time period. Climate change is likely behind this increase because hotter air means wind speeds and directions are changing more strongly, the researchers wrote in the study.

Sleep loss

By 2010, people had already lost around 44 hours of sleep each year because of hot nights associated with global warming. This could rise to 58 hours of lost sleep per year by 2100 under a high carbon emissions scenario, researchers estimated. In a study published in May 2022 in the journal One Earth, scientists compared sleep data collected using sleep-tracking wristbands from 48,000 people in 68 countries, and found that people sleep later and wake earlier on hotter nights.

Rise in dog bites

Humans are known to commit more violent crimes when the heat ramps up. Now, a study published June 15 in the journal Scientific Reports indicates that canine aggression also rises with the temperatures, with more dog bites recorded on hotter days. By analyzing data on 69,525 dog bites in eight U.S. cities — Dallas, Houston, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Chicago, Louisville, Los Angeles and New York City — the team found an 11% increase in dog bites on days with high UV and a 4% rise when temperatures were high.

More wildfire lightning 

Global warming will alter lightning patterns around the world — and this may result in more wildfires. In a study published Feb. 10 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers examined "long-continuing current lightning" — a type of lightning known to be the main cause of lightning-induced wildfires. They estimated these strikes will  become 10% more common with each 1.8 degree Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) temperature rise. This could amount to a 40% increase in these strikes by the end of the century under a worst-case-scenario climate change projection. 

Related: Yellowstone's geysers at risk of extinction from climate change, tree skeletons reveal

Fewer babies

Hotter days have been linked to a dip in birth rates. In a study published 2018 in the journal Demography, researchers found that days with an average temperature above 80 F (26.7 C) were linked to a 0.4% decrease in birth rates roughly nine months later — the average length of pregnancy —  compared with days with temperatures of between 60 F (15.6 C) and 70 F (21.1 C). Rather than causing a dip in sex drive, the scientists think high temperatures could lower fertility — some studies have found that hot conditions can impair how well sperm swim.

Lizard sex change 

Rising temperatures mean central bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) in Australia are changing sex. For some reptiles, sex is influenced by the temperatures their eggs are exposed to as they develop, with higher temperatures linked to more females. In a 2015 study published  in the journal Nature, scientists described how 11 of 131 lizards captured in the wild had male sex chromosomes but warm incubation conditions caused them to develop a female anatomys, with sex-reversed lizards able to lay eggs.

Worse allergies

Rising temperatures are causing earlier and longer springs, which are propelling more pollen into the air, making life that little bit harder for people with allergies like hay fever. In a study published in 2021 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists found that the sneezing season is getting longer in North America, having increased by 20 days between 1990 and 2018. They also found pollen levels increased by 21% in the same time period. The changes are probably due to global warming and are already worsening allergies, the team wrote. 

Dimmer Earth 

In a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in 2021, scientists analyzed the amount of sunlight reflected from Earth onto the moon between 1998 and 2017 and found our planet appears to be getting dimmer. Their findings revealed that hotter seas have reduced the amount of reflective low-lying clouds above the eastern Pacific Ocean, causing less sunlight to bounce off our planet. As this traps more light energy on the Earth, it could further increase global warming.

Erupting volcanoes 

Many of Earth's volcanoes are covered in ice, but as more of this ice melts due to global heating, the released water could mix with the hot rock and magma beneath to cause more frequent violent explosions. Melting ice reduces pressure on the magma, enabling more bubbles to form inside it. This bubbling magma then puts more pressure on the Earth’s crust above, until the molten liquid explodes through cracks in the crust. This idea was backed up by a study published 2017 in the journal Geology, in which researchers found that between about 4,500 and 5,500 years ago, the number of volcanic eruptions in Iceland dropped significantly when the climate cooled, compared with hotter periods.

Less coffee  

Climate change could halve the amount of coffee-growing land by 2050, a study published Jan. 26 in the journal PLOS One suggested. By modeling three different climate scenarios that limited global warming to either 2.7 F (1.5 C), 4.3 F (2.4 C) or to 7.2 F (4 C), scientists found that the number of regions highly suited for growing coffee — such as areas of Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia and Colombia — could decline by 50%. 

Shrinking goats

Goats in the Italian Alps are getting smaller as our planet gets hotter. In a study published in the journal Frontiers in Zoology in 2014, researchers analyzed the body mass of juvenile Alpine chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra) living on the mountains between 1979 and 2010 and found they had shrunk by around 25%. Over the study period, the region warmed by 5.4 F to 7.2 F (3 C to 4 C). The scientists said the animals' reduced size appears to be down to the chamois spending more time resting and less time feeding during hot periods.

Deteriorating mummies

After remaining well-preserved for more than 7,000 years in the Atacama Desert, some of the world's oldest mummies have started to degrade while being kept in a museum. These mummies were prepared by hunter gatherers called the Chinchirro. Rising humidity levels amid climate change are thought to have spurred the growth of bacteria that digest the mummies, causing some to turn into a black ooze, according to a report by the Harvard John A. Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Sciences. By testing mummy samples in the lab, scientists identified humidity levels in the museum that would best preserve the historic objects.

Faster tree growth 

Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have spurred trees to grow faster in Central Europe. In a study published in the journal Nature Communications in 2014, scientists found that Norway spruce (Picea abies) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica) trees grew more than twice as fast in 2010 compared with 1960, amid rising levels of carbon dioxide. This greenhouse gas is a key ingredient for photosynthesis, the process by which plants use light energy to produce sugar and oxygen. This sugar can then be combined with oxygen in the process of respiration to release energy for growth.

Researchers in Australia have discovered a new species of gecko with beautiful psychedelic eyes. The stunning lizards evaded detection for decades due to their similarities with a closely related species. 

The new species, called the lesser thorn-tailed gecko (Strophurus spinula), is about 2.4 inches (6.1 centimeters) long and has a dappled pattern of white and gray scales, which is also mimicked in its eyes. The camouflaged geckos live in woodland areas across the south of Western Australia, though researchers are unsure exactly how large the newfound gecko’s population is.

S. spinula is the 21st species to be identified in the genus Strophurus, all of which are endemic to Australia. They are collectively known as spiny-tailed geckos because they have small spines on their tails and occasionally above their eyes.

S. spinula was thought to be part of the closely related species S. assimilis, also known as the Goldfields spiny-tailed gecko. But in the new study, published in the journal Records of the Western Australian Museum, researchers conducted a widescale genetic analysis of the genus and discovered the new species.

Related: Desert geckos glow neon green in the moonlight, scientists discover 

A closer examination of S. spinula showed the newfound species can be physically distinguished from S. assimilis and other spiny-tailed geckos by its unusually straight and unevenly spaced spines along its body and enlarged spines on its tail, researchers wrote in the paper.

The genetic analysis also revealed that despite looking most similar to S. assimilis, the new species is actually more closely related to the eastern spiny-tailed gecko (S. intermedius), the soft spiny-tailed gecko (S. spinigerus) and the Exmouth spiny-tailed gecko (S. rankini), the researchers wrote. 

Like all other spiny-tailed geckos, S. spinula can secrete a harmless and foul-smelling chemical from glands near its tail to deter potentially predatory birds from landing in overhead shrubbery, where they normally attack from. 

S. spinula appears to prefer woodlands dominated by the mulga tree (Acacia aneura), which grows in extremely arid conditions. The researchers now want to find out why the new species prefers this habitat type.

For thousands of years, six ancient Egyptian coffins have been sealed to the outside world, their contents unknown. Now, scientists have used technology to peer inside the coffins, which are now housed at the British Museum in London, for the first time since their burial, revealing the mummified remains of several animals, including a complete lizard skull.

The coffins, which range in length from approximately 2 inches (50 millimeters) to 12 inches (300 mm) and date to between 664 B.C. and 250 B.C, were unearthed in the ancient cities of Naukratis (also spelled Naucratis) and Tell el-Yehudiyeh (or Tell el-Yehudiya) in 1885. They were constructed using copper compounds and feature figures of lizards, eels and cobras on their exteriors. (The provenance of two of the coffins is unknown.) 

One of the boxes is topped with a human-headed part-eel, part-cobra creature wearing a crown that may be associated with Atum, an ancient Egyptian primordial god. The ornate imagery hints at the boxes' contents, which were revealed in a study published Thursday (April 20) in the journal Scientific Reports.

Because the coffins were constructed of metal, scientists used a method called neutron tomography — a noninvasive technology that, unlike X-rays, isn't affected by metal — to look inside the coffins for the first time since their burial. 

Related: Ancient Roman residences with 'pigeon towers' discovered in Luxor, Egypt

Inside one coffin, the scans revealed the complete intact skull of a lizard "similar to a group of wall lizards" whose species are found in North Africa to this day. Two other coffins contained fragments of animal bones wrapped in cloth, possibly linen, according to a statement. 

"While animal burials were commonplace in ancient Egypt, it's quite rare to have coffins that are still sealed," lead author Daniel O'Flynn, an X-ray imaging scientist at the British Museum, told Live Science. "Because these boxes are made out of metal, it's very difficult to look through them with X-rays, so what we were able to do with this study was to look inside a small group of coffins using neutrons. This is the first time that we've been able to confirm for these objects at the British Museum that there are actually animal remains inside of them."

In addition to the bones, scientists discovered lead in three of the coffins; the metal may have been used to distribute weight during the burial process or to fix a hole in the side of one of the coffins. The exteriors of several of the boxes were also affixed with loops, which could've been used to suspend them from shrine or temple walls or to carry them during religious processions, according to the statement.

"The lead was an interesting finding," O'Flynn said. "We found quite a lot of lead in three of the boxes. We're not entirely sure of its purposes. It could've been something purely practical. But another interpretation is that it could've been included due to its status in ancient Egypt as a magical material, and we know from previous research that lead was used in the protection of mummified remains as well as in love charms and curses."

The study was inconclusive about whether the animals were sacrificed.

"It's possible that they were sacrificed, but they could also represent offerings to the gods," O'Flynn said. 

A palm-size lizard with teeth as sharp as butcher knives is so old that it shifts the origins of modern lizards and snakes back by 35 million years, a new study reveals. 

Paleontologists found the fossilized remains of the tiny, razor-toothed reptile embedded in a rock hidden in storage at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London. It had been held there since being pulled from a quarry near Bristol, England, in the 1950s. Little was known about the fossil, which had been labeled (incorrectly) "Clevosaurus and one other reptile."

For the new study, researchers analyzed the fossil and found that the lizard dates to around 202 million years ago, from the latter part of the Triassic period (237 million years to 201 million years ago); and that the remains included a partial skeleton, skull and mandibles. A computed tomography (CT) scan of the fossil helped researchers determine that they were looking at a type of Squamata — the largest order of reptiles, encompassing lizards, snakes and a group of legless lizards called amphisbaenians, or "worm lizards."

The fossil is small enough to "fit in the palm of your hand" and includes a 1.2-inch (3 centimeters) skull with a jaw full of sharp teeth, said Michael Benton, the study's co-author and a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol.

Because of the fossil’s small size, the researchers had to use less invasive techniques to study the lizard; such methods weren’t around when it was first discovered. 

Related: Lizards with multiple tails are more common than anyone knew

"Traditional methods of cleaning using a needle just caused havoc, and CT scanning reveals all the tiny details as well as hidden portions inside the rock, and without damage," Benton said. "[We] needed to see this level of detail of the skull bones to determine its detailed anatomy and [to] make comparisons with modern and fossil forms."

Using the CT scans as a guide, the researchers created a 3D reconstruction of the lizard and found that it would have been nearly 10 inches (25 cm) long — half of which was its long, thin tail, according to the study. 

But despite the lizard's small stature, its sharp teeth would have delivered a menacing bite, which inspired the paleontologists to name it Cryptovaranoides microlanius; the species name means "small butcher," while the genus means "hidden" and "lizardlike," a nod to the decades it spent languishing unnoticed in NHM storage. When C. microlanius was alive, it likely preyed on arthropods and small vertebrates on the limestone-rich islands that once surrounded what is now Bristol, according to the study.

C. microlanius’ age rewrites the origins of modern-day lizards and snakes, revealing that squamates were alive more than 30 million years earlier than previously thought. This discovery "helps complete the picture" of squamate evolution, Benton said.

"A key question in modern biology is to understand the really successful groups, like squamates (lizards and snakes) with over 11,000 species," Benton said. "How did they get so successful and how do they respond to climate change? So, checking back in time we need to know just when, where and how that huge modern group originated — our fossil now re-calibrates the whole shebang and draws it back 35 million years."

The findings were published Dec. 2 in the journal Science Advances.

Lizards are a diverse and ancient group of reptiles that live around the world today. There are thousands of lizard species, and each has special adaptations and traits. There are lizards with frills, lizards with horns, and lizards with wings. Most lizards have four legs, but some get by on two legs and others have no legs at all. 

The name "lizard" doesn't correspond to a single scientific group. Lizards belong to the order Squamata, which they share with snakes. There are several subgroups within Squamata that are commonly called lizards, including geckos, iguanas, worm lizards and Autarchoglossa, according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), a partnership of North American agencies, organizations and taxonomists that provides taxonomic information. All lizards are sometimes grouped under the suborders Lacertilia or Sauria, but ITIS doesn't consider these to be valid scientific groups. 

Are lizards dinosaurs?

Though they are reptiles, lizards are not dinosaurs. Body plan, and therefore movement, is a key difference between the two groups. Lizards' legs are sprawled out, and they walk in a side-to-side motion. Dinosaurs, on the other hand, had an upright stance with their legs positioned underneath them, according to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. 

Lizards have been around for hundreds of millions of years and lived through multiple mass extinction events, including the asteroid strike that caused the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs 66 million years ago (though avian dinosaurs survived as birds). Lizards likely predate the dinosaurs, which first emerged about 230 million years ago during the Triassic period (251.9 million to 201.3 million years ago). 

"Based on a new estimate of the rate of evolution of lizards, we can now place the origin of these reptiles in the late Permian period, about 260 million years ago," Alessandro Palci, a research associate in evolutionary biology at Flinders University in Australia, wrote in The Conversation in 2018. 

Related: 'Strange beast' in amber is a very weird lizard

Types of lizards

Lizards come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors. The largest and heaviest lizards are Komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) from Indonesia. They weigh 154 pounds (70 kilograms), on average, and the largest Komodo dragon on record reached 10.3 feet long (3.1 meters), according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

It's clear that Komodo dragons are the biggest lizards. Because the smallest lizards are so tiny, however, it's harder for scientists to be sure which species is the smallest. Jaragua lizards (Sphaerodactylus ariasae) in the Caribbean held the record for the smallest lizards on Earth when they were described in a 2001 study published in the Caribbean Journal of Science. With an average body length of 0.6 inch (16 millimeters), excluding the tail, the lizards were also smaller than any known bird or mammal at the time. 

But a challenger arrived for their tiny crown in 2021, when a chameleon called Brookesia nana in Madagascar was described in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports. B. nana males are smaller than S. ariasae, growing to only about 0.5 inch (13.5 mm). However, the females of this species are longer than Jaragua lizards, at 0.75 inch (19.2 mm).

"Given that the general body plan of reptiles is rather similar to that of mammals and humans, it is fascinating to see how miniaturized these organisms and their organs can get," lead study author Frank Glaw, a herpetologist at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich, told Live Science in an email at the time.

Size isn't the only feature that makes some lizard species stand out. Members of the Draco genus are often called "flying dragons" because they glide from tree to tree in Southeast Asia using a thin membrane that stretches between their front and back legs like a pair of flat wings. Meanwhile, basilisk lizards in the genus Basiliscus from Central and South America run so fast on their hind legs that they can run on water, with the help of specialized foot scales. They do this to escape predators, and it's earned them the nickname "Jesus Christ lizard," according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo. 

If lizards are nabbed by a predator, they can break off or "drop" their tails to avoid being eaten. They can regrow their tails if this happens, but the new tails aren't perfect copies. The bones in the original tail don't grow back, so the new tails are mostly cartilage, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Developmental Biology. 

Related: World's smallest reptile fits on your fingertip

Where do lizards live?

Lizards live all over the world and occupy all kinds of habitats. For example, in North America, Texas horned lizards (Phrynosoma cornutum) spend a lot of their time in loose sands in open, arid or semiarid areas of northern Mexico and the south central U.S., including most of Texas — hence their name, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. In contrast, eastern fence lizards (Sceloporus undulatus) tend to live in areas with trees. Ranging as far north as New York, as far south as northern Florida, and as far west as Arkansas, these lizards use the trees to escape predators such as snakes and birds, according to the National Wildlife Federation.  

Some lizards, such as basilisk lizards, spend a lot of their time in and around water. Lizards usually make use of freshwater habitats, but marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) from the Galápagos Islands dive into the ocean to feed off algae, according to the Natural History Museum in London. 

Lizards are ectothermic, which means they rely on the external environment to stay warm and can't regulate their own body temperature as endothermic animals, such as mammals, do. This means that, like frogs and snakes, they are commonly called "cold-blooded." As a result, most lizards are active during the day and can be seen basking in the sun to warm up. 

Lizards may be territorial, and they spend most of their time alone or live alongside dozens of other lizards of the same or different species. Lizards typically don't spend time with others of their species, except to mate, but there are exceptions. For example, desert night lizards (Xantusia vigilis) live in family groups, according to research by the University of California, Santa Cruz.

What do lizards eat?

Many lizards eat other animals. Komodo dragons are capable of consuming up to 80% of their body weight in a single sitting and eat other reptiles, birds, eggs and mammals, according to the Zoological Society of London. Some lizards have a much wider diet that includes a mix of meat, insects and vegetation. For example, central bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) in Australia eat fruit and leaves, alongside invertebrates such as ants and vertebrates such as smaller lizards, according to the Australian Museum in Sydney. Then there are lizards with specialized herbivorous diets, such as the algae-eating marine iguanas, although they've also been observed eating insects and crustaceans.  

Related: Watch: First-ever footage of a lizard breathing underwater

Are lizards poisonous?

Lizards aren't poisonous, or harmful when ingested, but a few species are venomous, meaning they inject harmful venom. For example, Gila monsters (Heloderma suspectum) living in southwestern U.S. states and northwestern Mexico use venom to hunt prey or defend themselves against predators, according to the American Museum of Natural History. A Gila monster may bite onto another animal for several minutes, transferring venom through teeth grooves in its lower jaw. The venom is extremely painful, but not fatal, to humans. 

Do lizards lay eggs?

Many lizards lay eggs, and some give birth to live young. Lizard breeding typically begins when a male lizard tries to attract a female mate with a display, sometimes bobbing its head and flashing its colorful neck. Frilled lizards (Chlamydosaurus kingii) from northern Australia and southern New Guinea are so named because of the frills around their necks, which they spread out during mating displays or when they want to scare away predators. These lizards lay up to 23 eggs between November and February and bury them underground, according to the Northern Territory Government in Australia. In contrast, common lizards (Zootoca vivipara), which are found across much of northern Europe, give birth to up to 10 live young in July, according to the Woodland Trust, a woodland conservation charity in the U.K.

Most baby lizards are self-sufficient from birth and can walk, run and feed on their own. Young lizards reach maturity at different ages, ranging from 18 months to 7 years, depending on the species, according to the San Diego Zoo. Lizards' life spans also vary greatly. Labord's chameleons (Furcifer labordi) may live only months in their native habitat of Madagascar, while other lizards can survive for decades. The longest-living lizards, Grand Cayman blue iguanas (Cyclura lewisi) of the Cayman Islands, often live more than 50 years. One captive Grand Cayman blue iguana is estimated to have lived 69 years, according to Guinness World Records. 

Related: There be dragons: 6-foot-long lizard terrifies Florida family

Are lizards endangered?

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) completed a comprehensive assessment of the world's reptiles in 2022 and determined that 21% of reptiles are at risk of extinction, including many lizards. The biggest threats to reptiles around the world are habitat loss due to agricultural expansion, deforestation and urban development. 

Both the largest and the smallest lizard species could disappear in the near future. Komodo dragons are endangered because of threats such as residential and commercial development and climate change, according to the IUCN. Meanwhile, the study authors who described B. nana in 2021 recommended that the IUCN list the species as critically endangered because it lives in a small area that's shrinking due to deforestation and agricultural expansion. 

The IUCN hasn't yet assessed B. nana, but there are plenty of critically endangered lizards listed on the organization's website, including the Campbell's alligator lizard (Abronia campbelli) from Guatemala, Bojer's skink (Gongylomorphus bojerii) from Mauritius and Atalaye curlytail lizard (Leiocephalus pratensis) from Haiti. 

Lizards are popular in the pet trade, which poses a threat to species that are sourced from the wild. Even lizards that are commonly bred in captivity, such as Tokay geckos (Gekko gecko) from Southeast Asia, are sometimes caught in the wild to supply the trade, according to TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring charity in the U.K.

Additional resources

For a map of where lizards and snakes live around the world, including the U.S., check out the Encyclopedia of Life website. To see how a Draco lizard attracts a mate, watch this short YouTube video from the Smithsonian Channel. To learn more about the different lizard families, check out "Lizards of the World: A Guide to Every Family" (Princeton University Press, 2021). 

This article was originally written by Live Science contributor Alina Bradford and has since been updated. 

About 251 million years ago, groups of pig-size herbivores with tusks and beaks huddled together, died, shriveled up and then fossilized looking like squashed roadkill, with impressions of their pebbly skin still present in the rocks around them. 

These strange layers of fossils suggest that recurring drought was a big problem for the animals, which were members of the genus Lystrosaurus, meaning "shovel lizard" in ancient Greek. Lystrosaurs were rare survivors of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, a period of runaway climate change 252 million years ago that killed an estimated 70% of land vertebrates and 96% of marine animals. 

The newly analyzed fossils suggest that Lystrosaurus may have been surviving but not thriving. The climate change that killed off so much of life on Earth likely caused severe droughts on the supercontinent Pangea, which could have caused the deaths of this particular group of animals. 

"As we are observing today with global warming, it seems that [warming] increases the likelihood of extreme events," said Pia Viglietti, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth Sciences at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. "That may have been what was happening in the earliest Triassic, that there were these repeated drought events happening more frequently."  

Live fast, die young

The researchers first found the fossils 11 years ago in the desert Karoo region of South Africa. During an excavation, they unearthed 170 tetrapods, or four-footed animals in about 6.5 feet (2 meters) of sandstone, including multiple clusters of these lystrosaurs. These odd creatures were like no animal alive on Earth today. They were part of a group called therapsids, an extinct order of reptiles that includes mammal ancestors (mammals are the only therapsid descendents that still persist today). They were shaped a bit like a "bulldog with a beak and some tusks," Viglietti told Live Science.

Lystrosaurs were herbivores and probably used their beaks to chew tough vegetation. They seem to have experienced a population boom before and during the end of the Permian, about 252 million years ago. While everything else was busy dying, lystrosaurs were all over the place. But they may not have been living their best lives. The new fossils come from the earliest Triassic, right after the end of the Permian. Most of the dead lystrosaurs were juveniles, which tend to be more susceptible to disasters like droughts, Viglietti said. 

Related: The 5 mass extinctions that shaped Earth history

Lystrosaurs might have been dying early immediately after the mass extinction, Viglietti said, and they may have made up for their reduced lifespans by reproducing earlier — a sort of "live fast, die young" way to survive a global cataclysm. (Previous studies have suggested they also slept through it.)  

 Dying together 

The fossils suggest that the young lystrosaurs may have clustered together before they died, probably on a floodplain where they had hope of finding water and vegetation. This sort of behavior is still seen today during droughts in sub-Saharan Africa, Viglietti said, where animals gather around dwindling sources of water and food before succumbing to thirst and starvation. 

Two of the fossils found in the Karoo sandstones left skin impressions in the surrounding rock, indicating that the animals may have dried out and mummified rapidly after death, before being buried and fossilized. These two "mummies" were fossilized next to each other, their limbs sprawled out.

"They were both spread-eagled, almost like they had died while going somewhere," Viglietti said. "Literally stopped in their tracks."

Lystrosaurs didn't go extinct for another few million years. The fact that they lived at all when so many other species perished is sometimes held up as evidence that the planet recovered fairly quickly from the climate mess at the end of the Permian, which was caused by huge Siberian volcanoes belching gasses into the atmosphere. But the discovery of a population struggling under the stress of repeated droughts suggests that Earthdidn't recover quickly at all, Viglietti said. 

This finding gives an insight into how Earth could react to the current climate crisis, Viglietti added.

"If we don’t mitigate our climate crisis, things won’t just bounce back, not even within the lifetime of our species or possibly other species that follow us," Viglietti said. "Recovery from these events can take a long time."

The findings are in press in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists have found one of the world's rarest chameleons "clinging to survival" after fearing it had become extinct since its initial discovery in the 1990s because of massive deforestation, a new study finds. 

Researchers discovered a population of Chapman's pygmy chameleons (Rhampholeon chapmanorum) surviving in small patches of rainforest in southern Malawi in southeastern Africa. 

A research team from the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) and the Museums of Malawi made the discovery in 2016. They saw the first chameleon on the edge of a forest.

"When we found it we got goosebumps and just started jumping around," lead author Krystal Tolley, a herpetologist from SANBI and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, said in a statement. "We didn’t know if we would get any more, but once we got into the forest there were plenty, although I don’t know how long that will last.”

Related: In photos: Clever chameleons stick out their tongues

Chapman's pygmy chameleons grow to just 2.2 inches (5.5 centimeters) long and walk on the forest floor. They disguise themselves by matching the pattern of dead leaves. They were first discovered in a dwindling rainforest in the Malawi Hills in 1992 and were later released into a separate forest 59 miles (95 kilometers) away near Mikundi, also in Malawi, to increase their chances of survival, according to the statement.   

The team compared modern satellite images of the Malawi Hills forest to those taken in the 1980s and estimated that the forest has declined by 80%. The researchers identified areas where the chameleons could still be living and surveyed them by walking along forest trails at night with torches when they are easier to spot.

They found 17 adult chameleons across two forest patches in the Malawi Hills, and 21 adult chameleons and 11 juveniles in one patch near Mikundi. More chameleons may well exist in other forest patches that the team was not able to survey, according to the study.

The researchers took tiny tissue samples from the tails of some of the adult chameleons, before placing the chameleons back where they found them, and analyzed their DNA. The genetic sequences of chameleons from the three forest patches differed greatly, which suggests the chameleons are becoming isolated in their forest patches and unable to travel between them to breed and share genes. 

“The forest loss requires immediate attention before this species reaches a point from which it cannot return," Tolley said. "Urgent conservation action is needed, including halting of forest destruction and recovery of habitat to promote connectivity.”

Much of the Malawi Hills forest has been cut down and converted to agriculture. The team is calling for a comprehensive action plan to preserve the critically endangered chameleons so they don't become extinct.

The team published its findings on Monday (Aug.2) in the journal Oryx—The International Journal of Conservation

Originally published on Live Science.

A fossil locked in a piece of amber dating to about 99 million years ago belongs to a newfound and highly bizarre species of extinct lizard. The fossil also helped scientists revise the lineage of another amber-locked discovery, also dating to that part of the Cretaceous period (145.5 million to 65.5 million years ago), that was originally thought to be the smallest known ancient bird.

When researchers described the hummingbird-size Oculudentavis khaungraae in March 2020, it was hailed as the tiniest dinosaur ever found (birds are a lineage of dinosaurs that survive to the present). But the specimen had a number of features that hinted it might be a lizard, and the journal retracted the study in July 2020, Live Science previously reported. 

The new find, dubbed Oculudentavis naga, is a more complete specimen than O. khaungraae, having an intact skull and part of its spine and shoulders. After analyzing O. naga bone by bone, scientists determined that despite having some birdlike features it was a lizard — albeit a very strange lizard — and so was its "bird" cousin, according to a new study.

Related: In photos: Amber preserves Cretaceous lizards

Amber fossils form after an animal or plant becomes trapped in sticky resin from a coniferous tree. Over time, as the resin hardens into amber around the organic matter, it seals the organism away from oxygen and bacteria, and protects it from decay and environmental wear, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley. 

These fossils often retain soft tissue, such as the feathered wings torn from a bird, a feathered dinosaur's tail and an ancient lizard's tongue. Amber can also preserve rare instances of animal behavior — a 41 million-year-old insect sex romp, for instance.

Many amber fossils dating to the Cretaceous come from Kachin province in Myanmar — both Oculudentavis specimens came from the province's Aung Bar mine, according to the new study. Indigenous people there managed the amber deposits and mining prior to 2017, but after the Myanmar military seized control of the mines, their operations displaced thousands and are linked to human rights abuses, New Scientist reported in 2019. 

However, the O. naga amber specimen was acquired legally and exported from Myanmar prior to 2017 by study co-author Adolf Peretti, a gemologist with GRS Gemresearch Swisslab, the scientists reported.

Birdlike lizard or lizardlike bird?

O. naga's skull measures just 0.6 inches (14.2 millimeters) in length, and its long, tapering snout tipped with elongated nostrils is more like a bird's beak than a lizard's nose, according to the study published Monday (June 14) in the journal Current Biology.

When compared side-by-side with O. khaungraae (which measures 0.7 inches or 17.3 mm), the O. naga skull looks quite different: Its crown is flatter; it has a broader snout; and the eye opening, though large for a lizard, isn't quite as big as O. khaungraae's. Yet the animals are more closely related than those preserved skull shapes suggest, and that relationship — and their identification as lizards — became clearer when researchers X-ray scanned the skulls, created digital 3D models and examined them one bone at a time, said study co-author Edward Stanley, an associate scientist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, and director of the museum's Digital Discovery and Dissemination (3D) imaging lab.

Both specimens had teeth with long roots that were attached to the jaw. Known as pleurodont dentition, these teeth are common in lizards and "don't look like dinosaur teeth," which are seated in sockets, Stanley told Live Science. 

"There's a bone at the back of the jaw called a quadrate that attaches the lower jaw to the top of the skull and the braincase — that's also very lizardlike in both specimens," Stanley said. "The roof of the mouth, while unusual for a lizard, is much more lizardlike than birdlike," Stanley added. A skull bone that's shaped like a hockey stick, called a jugal, ticked yet another box on the lizard list of features for both animals, the scientists wrote in the study.

Yet O. naga and O. khaungraae also both had "a strange-looking bone" directly in front of the eye socket that was unlike anything seen in most lizards, Stanley said. 

"The fact that a lizard skull — the first specimen, the holotype of Oculudentavis khaungraae — could be misidentified as a bird is a good indication that this reptile is a really unusual one," said lead study author Arnau Bolet, a research fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona's Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology.

Deformed by time

One explanation for why the specimens look so different from each other — and why O. khaungraae had a more birdlike appearance, with a rounder skull and pointier snout — could be that the skulls were deformed by fossilization. As O. naga was a more complete specimen, it provided the scientists with a clearer picture of the bones. After scanning the skulls with computed X-ray tomography (CT), the researchers digitally reversed deformation in the models, revealing that the two species were more similar than they first appeared.

"We used CT data to try to isolate all the individual bones piece by piece, so we really broke it down into its component parts," Stanley said. "When you do that, it becomes a lot clearer: Not only is this thing a lizard, but these things are very closely-related weird lizards."

O. naga was less laterally deformed than O. khaungraee, making it "less prone to interpretation as a bird," Bolet told Live Science in an email. Nevertheless, the fossil "still shows that Oculudentavis deviates from the standard lizard morphology in some aspects, rendering it a highly interesting animal," Bolet added. "They show that there is much to be learned about the evolution of species in the past, and give us a glimpse of the way different groups — in this case, lizards — diversified to occupy different roles in the ecosystem."

While Oculudentavis' status as a bizarre lizard genus is now clearer, its exact position on the lizard family tree is still unknown, the scientists reported. But with all the CT data now available for free at MorphoSource, an online repository for 3D scientific data, other researchers will have the opportunity to try to solve this intriguing evolutionary puzzle.

"You can 3D-print this model or use a computer simulation to test things like bite force, or jaw angle — that might tell a little more about what this animal was doing in life. You can isolate the inner ear of the specimen, that might tell you about the type of environment it lived in, whether it lived up in trees or on the ground," Stanley said. "We're keen to work on it, and we're keen for other people to work on it as well."

Originally published on Live Science.

A man attempted to smuggle 74 protected chameleons through an Austrian airport by hiding the animals in socks and empty ice cream containers in his luggage. 

The man was caught at customs control in Vienna after traveling from Tanzania via Ethiopia, The Associated Press reported. After authorities confiscated the colorful reptiles, the chameleons were taken to Vienna's Schӧnbrunn Zoo, but three of the animals did not survive. The zoo identified all of the chameleons as originally being from the Usambara Mountains in Tanzania.

People regularly harvest Tanzanian chameleons from the Usambara Mountains to sell in the exotic pet trade, but not all do so legally. Legal trade of the animals requires permitting and authorities limit the number of chameleons that can be collected and exported, according to a 2011 report in the journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology. The animals face rampant habitat loss, so if too many chameleons are taken from the region, they could ultimately be driven to extinction. 

Related: Chameleon facts 

Most chameleons are protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Article II, which requires various certificates to legally trade the animals. For illegally stowing chameleons in socks and ice cream tubs, the man caught in Vienna will face a fine of up to 6,000 euros (about $7,300), the Austrian finance ministry said in a statement, according to The Associated Press. 

The zoo did not note which species of chameleon the man tried to smuggle, but they said the lizards ranged from 1-week-old babies to full-grown adults.

Photos of the recovered chameleons can be seen in the AP article. 

 Originally published on Live Science.

A desert gecko from Namibia has brilliant glow-in-the-dark markings that shine neon green by the light of the moon. The mechanism that produces its glow has never been seen before in land animals with backbones.

Web-footed geckos (Pachydactylus rangei) have translucent skin with large, yellowish markings: stripes on their sides and rings surrounding their eyes. But those markings light up brightly when they absorb the moon's bluer light.

Fluorescence — when light is absorbed and then emitted at a longer wavelength — has been found in other reptiles and amphibians, produced by their bones or by chemical secretions in their skin. However, web-footed geckos generate their light using skin pigment cells that are filled with guanine crystals. These cells, called iridophores, have previously been linked to color display in geckos and lizards, but this is the first evidence that they also enable geckos to glow in the dark.

Related: The 7 weirdest glow-in-the-dark creatures

Web-footed geckos, which live in dry riverbeds and dunes in the Namib desert, measure about 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) in length, according to Animal Diversity Web (ADW), a wildlife database maintained by the University of Michigan's Museum of Zoology. The geckos use their large, webbed feet to burrow through fine sand, and they are mostly active at night, ADW says.

In 2018, the study authors had found that chameleons have bones that glow through their skin. That discovery prompted the scientists to look for hidden glows in other reptiles and amphibians, said study co-author Mark Scherz, a postdoctoral researcher with the Adaptive Genomics Group at Universität Potsdam in Germany.

David Prötzel, lead author on this study and a doctoral candidate at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology (ZSM) in Munich, kept P. rangei geckos at home, and got "an incredible surprise" when he shone a UV light on his web-footed geckos and discovered that they glowed neon green, Scherz told Live Science in an email. The researchers then tested 55 P. rangei specimens from ZSM under UV light, finding evidence of fluorescence in adults of both sexes and in juveniles.

In other fluorescent amphibians, such as the polka-dot tree frog (Boana punctata), the glow comes from a chemical that circulates through its lymph system. And reptiles such as chameleons and saddleback toads in the Brachycephalus genus display fluorescent bones through body regions where their skin is very thin. 

"Actually it turns out quite a few other species, including geckos, have sufficiently transparent skin that their bones' fluorescence can be seen through it under a sufficiently strong UV light," Scherz said.

But in the web-footed geckos, the bright neon-green glow came from iridophores. Though iridophores were not previously associated with fluorescence in geckos, they are known to fluoresce in some species of reef fish, according to the study. The web-footed gecko is the first known gecko to possess two types of iridophores: one that fluoresces, and one that doesn't.

The glow that these cells produce is brighter than the glow emanating from chameleons' bones and is among the brightest examples of fluorescence in land animals, the study authors reported. Such luminous markings along the lower body and around the eye would be highly visible to other geckos, "but would be hidden from predators with higher vantage points, such as owls or jackals," Scherz said. 

While scientists don't know how most animals use their fluorescence, the location and brightness of these markings, as well as their visibility in the geckos' arid desert environment, where there isn't much vegetation, suggests that fluorescence plays a role in the geckos' social interaction, according to the study.

"We have observed in captivity that, although these animals are largely solitary, they do run up to one another to greet each other after a short period of separation," Scherz said. "They also lick condensation from each other's bodies. So there are lots of reasons that being able to see each other over long distances would be useful for these geckos," he said.

The findings were published online Jan. 11 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Originally published on Live Science.

More than a century after it was last seen, a spectacularly colorful chameleon is back. 

Conservationists announced the rediscovery of the Voeltzkow's chameleon (Furcifer voeltzkowi) on Oct. 30 in the journal Salamandra. The animal, endemic to Madagascar, was last seen in 1913 — and until now, no one had ever seen a female Voeltzkow's chameleon. The females turn out to be a striking sight. They can change colors, and at their most brilliant display a pattern of red dots and a streak of purple against a background of black and white. 

"The Voeltzkow's chameleon adds color and beauty to the planet, and reminds us that even when all seems lost, a great adventure can rekindle hope even for species we haven't seen since Woodrow Wilson was president," Don Church, the president of Global Wildlife Conservation, said in a statement. "Now we have so much to learn about this extraordinary reptile, including how we can best save it from extinction."

Related: Photos of the amazing animals that call Madagascar home

Lost species

Global Wildlife Conservation spearheaded the expedition as part of its Search for Lost Species program, an attempt to rediscover species that have not been observed by scientists for at least a decade. The goal is to use the discoveries to promote conservation of not only those elusive species, but of their broader habitats and ecosystems. 

The Voeltzkow's chameleon was a particularly obscure quarry. Little is known about the chameleon's lifestyle, but its close relatives live fast and die young. For instance, the Labord's chameleon (Furcifer labordi), another Madagascar native, hatches in November, matures, lays eggs and is dead by March. Researchers knew that Voelzkow's chameleons would not only be small, they'd be present for only about half the year if they were like the Labord's chameleon. 

The expedition team headed into the forests of northwestern Madagascar in April 2018. At first, they didn't have much luck. 

"I thought we might have a good chance of rediscovering Voeltzkow's chameleon, but I was surprised that it took so long and that it was so difficult," Frank Glaw, head of the Department of Vertebrates at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology, who led the expedition, said in a statement. "Our efforts were entirely unsuccessful during most of the trip to find it where we thought it would most likely be."

Finally, days before the trip was to end, Angeluc Razafimanantsoa, a professional guide from Montagne d'Ambre in northern Madagascar, spotted one of the chameleons. Ultimately, the team discovered three males and 15 females. 

Flashy colors

Female Voeltzkow's chameleons are smaller than males, the researchers discovered, growing to about 5.9 inches (150 millimeters) tip-to-tail. Males can be up to 6.5 inches (164 mm) long. Males are light green, but flash darker green stripes when angry or stressed. 

Related: Photos: How chameleons change color

When relaxed, females are green with darker green stripes and red dots along their sides. When they get stressed, those dark green stripes turn black and a purplish streak appears along the chameleon's sides. Between the black stripes, the female chameleon's' skin goes white, except for their throats, which can flash a bright orange. 

The chameleons were found climbing trees on the grounds of a bungalow-style hotel called Madame Chabaud in the town of Katsepy. The owner there told the researchers that the distinctive chameleons are abundant around the hotel at the peak of the wet season in January through March. Nevertheless, the researchers wrote in Salamandra, the chameleons might qualify as endangered because they live in such a small geographical region, and because their habitat has become fragmented. 

Though the researchers were elated to find the Voeltzkow's chameleons, they could not find Furcifer monoceras, another chameleon they had hoped to see on the expedition. This species is known from only one specimen, collected in 1905, and has not been recorded since. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Lizards that lose and regrow their tails can go overboard and grow back more than one tail — and sometimes they sprout as many as six. Those haywire multiple tails appear a lot more often than you might think, scientists recently discovered.

Numerous reports from around the world mention multi-tailed lizards, and some sightings date to hundreds of years ago. But these cases are typically isolated and scattered, making it difficult to tell how widespread this runaway tail growth really is. 

Now, for the first time, scientists have compiled reports of "abnormal regeneration" in lizard tails, in which lizards that lost their tails grew back two, three or more appendages. To do this, researchers combed through hundreds of records of more than 175 species and spanning more than 400 years; they combined scientific studies with non-peer-reviewed descriptions to create the first global database for sightings of multi-tailed lizards. 

Related: Images: Exotic lizards pop out of the ground in Florida

Many lizard species can shed part or all of their tails when a predator attacks, in a process called caudal autonomy; a detached tail creates a decoy that distracts predators and can allow the lizard to escape, the scientists reported in a new study, published online June 25 in the journal Biological Reviews.

Lost tails are regrown as cartilage rods, and sometimes the mechanism gets its signals crossed and the lizard acquires more than one new tail. Lizards can end up with two tails of equal length, or "twin tails," according to the study. But other outcomes are even more bizarre-looking, with multiple small tail "branches" emerging from the original stump. In 2015, in a study published in the journal Ecologica Montenegrina, researchers described a blue-throated keeled lizard (Algyroides nigropunctatus) from Kosovo that grew three new tails after losing the original one. 

Another extreme example of multiple tails, also documented in 2015, was an Argentinian black-and-white tegu (Salvator merianae) that grew six tails after its original tail was partially detached due to an injury. Researchers reported this extraordinary case in the journal Cuadernos de Herpetología.

When the authors of the new study evaluated these and other descriptions and sightings — 425 in all, from 63 countries — they found that this phenomenon isn't rare or unusual. Based on the number of instances of multiple tails they reviewed, the scientists estimated that as many as 3% of lizards worldwide are likely to have extra tails.

"This is quite a surprisingly high number, and it really begins to make us wonder what ecological impacts this could have, especially noting that to the lizard, an extra tail represents a considerable increase in body mass to drag around," said lead study author James Barr, a doctoral candidate in the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

Having two or more tails could be life-changing for lizards in a number of ways — from hindering future escapes from predators to affecting social interactions with other lizards, said study co-author Bill Bateman, a behavioral ecologist and an associate professor at Curtin University. 

"For example, could having two tails potentially affect their ability to find a mate, and therefore reduce opportunities for reproduction? Or on the contrary, could it potentially be of benefit?" Bateman said in a statement.

"Behaviorally testing out these hypotheses would be an interesting and important future research direction, so biologists can learn more about the lifestyles of these multiple-tailed lizards," he said.

Originally published on Live Science.

People who lived 15,000 years ago in what is now Israel feasted on snakes and lizards, archaeologists have discovered.

Prior excavations in the Levant, a geographic region that historically included Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and parts of Syria and Jordan, unearthed thousands of bones belonging to lizards and snakes. Animal bones are usually found where ancient people once lived if the animals were being eaten. But it was unknown if lizards and snakes were part of the human diet or if their bones were left behind by other predators.

By experimenting on the bones of modern squamates — the group that includes lizards and snakes — researchers developed visual references for different types of surface damage, such as erosion, burning or digestion by birds of prey. When the scientists compared these patterns to damage in squamate bones from the el-Wad Terrace, a cave site near Israel's Mount Carmel that was occupied by humans between 11,500 and 15,000 years ago, they determined that many of the ancient bones there had been eaten by people.

Related: Photos: Ancient burial and metal tool from southern Levant 

Human communities in the Levant at this time were known as Natufian. They were primarily hunters and foragers and are considered the first non-nomadic society; the semi-sedentary habits of Natufian culture were likely a precursor to humans settling down and becoming farmers.

At the el-Wad Terrace settlement, the site was densely layered with animal remains, of which "a high percentage" belonged to lizards and snakes, the researchers reported in a new study, published online June 10 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

The quantity of squamate bones at the site was astonishing; that alone hinted at human consumption as a possible explanation, said lead study author Ma'ayan Lev, a doctoral candidate in archaeology at the University of Haifa in Israel.

"I have worked on various zooarchaeological assemblages and have not encountered such large numbers before," Lev told Live Science in an email.

Thousands of bones

Nearly 3,000 squamate remains — mostly vertebrae — were collected at el-Wad, making up about 33% of all the animal remains at the site. The most common squamate species was the legless European glass lizard (Pseudopus apodus), followed by the large whip snake (Dolichophis jugularis) the eastern Montpellier snake (Malpolon insignitus) and the common viper (Daboia palaestinae). 

When archaeologists examine animal bones, they look for certain telltale marks that indicate the animals had been butchered and eaten by humans. Detecting such evidence in the small bones of snakes and lizards is difficult, and other types of damage such as erosion can make those marks even harder to spot, according to the study. 

To more accurately interpret the different types of damage affecting bones at el-Wad, the researchers conducted "weathering experiments" where they observed how modern bones were damaged through digestion by birds of prey; weathering from erosion; burning and trampling.

These experiments enabled the scientists to observe how weathering changes the surface of squamate bones. It also helped them to spot digestion marks "even when overlapping processes such as weathering and erosion by sediment occurred," Lev explained.

"The most surprising find was the butchery marks on several large whip snake vertebrae," which appeared in identical locations on different bones and even on the same side of the bones, Lev said in the email.  

In addition to cut marks, most of the bones from large whip snakes and glass lizards showed no signs of being digested by raptors, and "were most probably consumed by the inhabitants of the site," the study authors wrote. Other squamate species — "mostly the eastern Montpellier snake, the viper, and small lizards and snakes" — likely fell prey to raptors or died naturally, according to the study.

This discovery provides valuable clues about eating habits in the Levant's Natufian culture, as humans adapted to more agrarian lifestyles, Lev told Live Science. 

"We hope that this study will shed light on the importance of squamate remains in the Natufian, and will provide a tool to discern between cultural and natural squamate accumulations in other zooarchaeological Natufian studies," Lev said.

• Photos: 5,000-year-old stone monument in Israel 
• In photos: 130,000-year-old evidence of humans in California 
• Back to the Stone Age: 17 key milestones in Paleolithic life

Originally published on Live Science.

A greasy, sandy diet left a northern curly-tailed lizard with a belly distended by a heavy ball of unpassable poop. The mass was so large that it made up nearly 80% of the animal's body weight — a record-breaking body-to-poop ratio, according to a Florida biologist.

As the lizard gulped down insects and other small reptiles near a pizza parlor in Cocoa Beach, Florida, it also swallowed particles of grease-soaked sand. Over time, the grains stuck together to form a lump that was too dense for the lizard to excrete, said Natalie Claunch, the researcher who found the lizard, and a doctoral candidate in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Florida  in Gainesville.

And the more that the constipated lizard ate, the bigger the poop mass grew. 

Naturally, when Live Science's editor-in-chief heard about this, she responded: "Dump everything and write." 

Related: Images: Exotic lizards pop out of the ground in Florida

If only the unfortunate lizard had had that option. But by the time Claunch found the reptile, it was unable to excrete the tightly-packed, sandy mass. All nutrients had been sucked out of the dense ball in its gut, and the lizard was nearly out of room to eat anything more; it was slowly starving to death and was therefore humanely euthanized, Claunch wrote in the March 2020 issue of the journal Herpetological Review.

When Claunch picked up the pear-shaped lizard — a female — she recognized right away that the mass stretching its belly wasn't a cluster of ready-to-lay eggs. 

"Eggs feel like large jelly beans, and you can feel them individually," she told Live Science in an email. "This was a semisolid putty-like mass."

Dissection showed that the lizard's internal organs were so squeezed that they had atrophied, particularly its ovaries and liver. The mass was so dense that it was even visible in computed X-ray tomography (CT) scans, said Edward Stanley, an associate scientist in the Florida Museum of Natural History's Department of Herpetology.

When Stanley performed the scans, he was "a bit nervous" about handling the delicate, bloated body "because it was so full," he told Live Science.

"I was concerned that unless I was careful, I might pop it," he said.

The lizard weighed about 1 ounce (28 grams), and the mass alone weighed 0.8 ounces (22 grams), or about 78.5% of the lizard’s total weight. This represents "the largest feces-to-body mass ratio recorded in a living animal," Claunch reported. To put that into perspective, scientists previously documented a Burmese python (Python bivittatus), a species known for digesting enormous meals (and excreting huge poops), that produced a fecal mass representing a mere 13% of the snake's body weight, Claunch wrote.

Inside the bolus were the remains of an earlier meal — the skull of an anole, which are part of the lizard’s natural diet, said Stanley.

Northern curly-tailed lizards (Leiocephalus carinatus) are native to the Bahamas and other Caribbean islands; they were introduced in southeastern Florida in the 1940s, when a Palm Beach resident released several dozen of the lizards on his property to combat insect pests, said Hank Smith, a professor at Florida Atlantic University and a wildlife biologist for the Florida Park Service. 

In the decades since their release, the voracious invading lizards have replaced many of the smaller native lizard species — some of which have become the curly-tailed lizards' prey.

"They're the T. rex of our little ground critters," Smith told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 2006.

This isn't the first curly-tailed lizard with pervasive poop problems; Claunch and her colleagues have found three other individuals with fecal masses that were 30% or more of their body weight. 

"We had actually found a curly-tailed lizard similar to this one the year prior, near the same location, with a fecal mass nearly 40% of its total body mass," Claunch said.  However, it's unclear how long it may take these sand-packed masses to accumulate in a lizard's gut.

"There is no good way to tell because we don’t have studies on 'normal' digestion in the species to compare to, yet," Claunch said.

• Photos: Gorgeous Shots of the Adorable Horned Lizard
• Album: Bizarre Frogs, Lizards and Salamanders
• Image Gallery: Acrobatic Tricks of Lizards & Robots

Originally published on Live Science.

A newfound species of parasitic worm wiggles its way into the brains of baby lizards long before the reptiles hatch. 

How do the nematodes break into developing lizard brains? They sneak in through the lizard mothers' ovaries, a surprising new study finds.

Parasitic nematodes that prey on mammals can sometimes jump from mother to offspring through the placenta in utero or through breast milk after birth, the study authors noted in an article-in-press to be published in the May 2020 issue of the journal The American Naturalist. But until now, no one thought that reptiles could pass down their parasites from mother to offspring; evidence suggested that, because they lay eggs, animals like lizards are less vulnerable to certain routes of parasitic transmission. 

But much to scientists' surprise, the discovery of worms in lizard embryos suggests that reptilian eggs aren't as impenetrable as once thought.

Related: 8 awful parasite infections that will make your skin crawl

"I was shocked when I saw something moving in the embryo's brain, despite having dissected many lizard eggs before," lead author Nathalie Feiner, an evolutionary biologist at Lund University in Sweden, said in a statement. While studying common wall lizards (Podarcis muralis) across Europe, Feiner and her colleagues routinely dissect and examine developing lizard embryos and find most to be worm-free. However, one population of common wall lizards in the Pyrenees mountain range turned out to be riddled with nematodes.

Wondering where the worms came from, the researchers examined the lizard mothers and found nematodes wriggling in the animals' ovaries. Typically, nematodes invade the intestines of common wall lizards, but the authors hypothesized that this newfound species adapted to thrive in the reproductive system of females. The worms in the ovary infiltrate the embryos of the the developing lizards and enter their brains before a hard egg shell forms around the animal. 

The authors allowed several infected lizard embryos to develop to maturity, noting that "infected lizard embryos develop normally and hatch with nematodes residing in their braincase." The animals appear healthy when first hatched, parasites aside, but the researchers did not monitor the lizards further to see how their health and behavior might be affected as they mature, the authors added. 

"It would be exciting to know if this vertical transmission [between mother and embryo] is unique to the nematodes we found in the common wall lizards or if this occurs in other species, as well," Feiner said. "It would also be interesting to find out if the lizard’s behavior is affected by having worms in their brains."

• The 10 most diabolical and disgusting parasites 
• Ick! 5 alien parasites and their real-world counterparts 
• 7 strange facts about the 'mind-control' parasite Toxoplasma gondii 

Originally published on Live Science. 

Chilly winter weather brings a chance of snow, ice ... and falling iguanas? It does in Florida, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

On Tuesday (Jan. 21), predictions of low temperatures in southern Florida prompted NWS Miami to issue an unusual warning in a tweet: "Falling Iguanas Possible Tonight." 

However, those tumbling lizards won't be dead, merely stunned by the cold. When temperatures dip into the 40s (degrees Fahrenheit) or lower (single digits in degrees Celsius), iguana metabolisms slow down so much that the animals become immobile and can drop out of trees; prior historic cold snaps in the southern part of the Sunshine State led to bouts of "raining iguanas" in 2008 and 2018, Live Science previously reported.

Related: See Photos of the World's Most Bizarre Lizards

"This isn't something we usually forecast, but don't be surprised if you see Iguanas falling from the trees tonight as lows drop into the 30s and 40s. Brrrr!" NWS representatives tweeted.

Iguanas — and most reptiles — are ectothermic, which means they rely on external temperatures to regulate their own body temperatures. If the weather becomes too cold, iguanas enter a state known as torpor, a type of hibernation in which they conserve precious heat by dramatically slowing down their metabolic functions. 

In a video clip shared on Twitter yesterday (Jan. 22) by Ginger Zee, chief meteorologist at ABC News, a frozen iguana plummets from a branch in Miami, its limbs stiff and immobile as it falls. At the time, the temperature was 33 F (1 C), Miami's coldest temperature in nine years, Zee wrote.

Eric Zerkel, a managing editor at the Weather Channel, noted on Twitter that a graphic in the NWS tweet resembled oven mitts, and he jokingly queried if people should wear mitts to try to catch falling iguanas. Zerkel asked the NWS to "Please advise," and the agency was quick to clarify that the mitts in the image were not for lizard catching.

"Those are more for covering your hands ... but interesting take. We didn't think of that!" they said in the tweet.

Green iguanas (Iguana iguana) are common in southern Florida, but they aren't native to the state and are recognized as an invasive species, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). Male iguanas may grow to be up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) in length and can weigh up to 17 lbs. (8 kilograms); and females can lay up to 76 eggs at a time, the FWC says.

Once temperatures rise, the frozen iguanas' normal bodily functions should resume. Until then, people should leave the fallen, rigid lizards where they lie; iguanas can revive fairly quickly, as one Florida man found out to his dismay in 2018. He had collected a number of cold, stiff and seemingly dead iguanas and loaded them into his car, but soon after he was back on the road the lizards warmed up and "started running around," causing an accident, NPR reported.

• Images: Exotic Lizards Pop Out of the Ground in Florida
• Album: Bizarre Frogs, Lizards and Salamanders
• Image Gallery: Acrobatic Tricks of Lizards & Robots

Originally published on Live Science.

In recent years, dozens of people in the United States who bought prepackaged salads at their local grocery stores found unexpected extra ingredients mixed in with their kale and romaine: frogs, lizards, rodents and even a bat.

In 10 instances, the animals were still alive. (Perhaps, that made the encounters less gruesome … or infinitely worse.)

Researchers recently reviewed reports of these animal discoveries dating back to 2003, describing their findings in a new study. They presented 40 examples of bagged salads purchases in 20 states that included unwelcome wildlife stowaways; 38 of these encounters took place during the past decade. [9 Disgusting Things That the FDA Allows in Your Food]

The scientists collected data on incidents that had been covered by news outlets online, noting details such as the date and location of the animal discoveries; the type of produce; whether the produce was boxed or bagged; and the animal species — and if it was dead or alive. For the dead animals, the scientists recorded "whether the animal was whole or partial," they wrote in the study, published online July 20 in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Of the animals found in salad, about 53% were frogs and toads, and most of the frogs were in the treefrog group. Around 23% of the salad animals were reptiles, while nearly 18% were mammals and the rest were birds, the scientists reported. Most of the mammals were rodents, but the one instance of a bat in salad — a Brazilian free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis) found in Florida in 2017 — received significantly more media attention than other animals, likely because bats are known vectors for many diseases that affect people, the researchers explained.

They also noted that animal appearances were three times more common in bags of conventional vegetables than in organic greens.

And though this study focused on animals with backbones, the researchers found "numerous instances" of invertebrate life in packaged salads.

"Pending a thorough review, these may in fact outnumber the vertebrate cases," they wrote. It's also possible that wildlife ends up in packaged salad even more frequently than their findings suggest, as some incidents may have gone unreported or were covered only in print media, which was not included in this study, the scientists added.

Prepackaged salads have surged in popularity since their introduction in the 1980s, and the industry's rapid growth and increasing reliance on automated production pipelines could explain how small, wild animals could bypass safety features and end up sealed inside a salad bag, the study authors reported.

This is the first study to address these recurring instances of small vertebrate wildlife in salad, and "it remains unclear whether these occurrences indicate a food-safety crisis or a complaint against food quality," according to the study. Further observations of the harvesting and production process will be necessary in order to pinpoint when and how the animals find their way into salad bags, and what steps might be taken to keep them out, the authors concluded.

• 15 'Disgusting' Foods Will Have Your Taste Buds Begging for Mercy
• Nature's Most Bizarre Frogs, Lizards and Salamanders
• 40 Freaky Frog Photos

Originally published on Live Science.

About 120 million years ago, a small dinosaur gulped down a lizard, swallowing the reptile whole. The wee lizard's story might have ended there, but the dinosaur died soon after and was preserved as a fossil. Millions of years later, paleontologists discovered the scaly meal in the dinosaur's belly.

Scientists found the lizard when they examined the fossil of a feathered dinosaur named Microraptor zhaoianus, a small carnivore from the early Cretaceous period (145.5 million to 65.5 million years ago) in what is now northeastern China. In Microraptor's abdomen was a near-complete skeleton that the researchers identified as a previously unknown lizard species.

This "exceptional specimen" paints a clearer picture of the animal diversity in this region during the Cretaceous, and it hints at what was on the menu for dinosaur predators like Microraptor, the scientists reported in a new study. [In Photos: Amber Preserves Cretaceous Lizards]

Microraptor belongs to the theropod (meat-eating) dinosaur group known as the dromaeosaurids — small to medium-size bird-like dinosaurs — which also includes Velociraptor and Deinonychus. It had flight feathers on its front and back limbs, and it could likely glide or even fly, according to the study.

The fossilized lizard's skeleton was still whole and nearly complete, and it appeared to belong to a juvenile. Its position inside the dinosaur's gut showed that it was gulped down head first, "consistent with feeding behavior in extant carnivorous lizards and birds," the study authors wrote.

They dubbed the ingested lizard Indrasaurus wangi: The species name honors paleontologist Yuan Wang, director of the Paleozoological Museum of China, and Indrasaurus refers to a legend from ancient Indian texts about the deity Indra, who was swallowed whole by a dragon.

Close examination of the lizard's teeth revealed that they were widely spaced, short-crowned and nearly square. They were unlike the teeth in other Cretaceous lizards, and their unusual shape suggests that the lizard may have had a diet that differed from that of its close relatives, the scientists said in the study.

Microraptor and its lizard lunch provide a rare glimpse of direct interactions between predators and prey in ecosystems that vanished millions of years ago. They were found alongside other Microraptor fossils that hold the remains of mammals, fish and birds in their bellies, according to the study.

Using these fossils and others from more than two dozen animal groups, the researchers reconstructed a food web showing who ate whom in the Jehol Biota; this site in Liaoning, China — where Microraptor was discovered in 2005 — holds a diverse array of exceptionally preserved fossils dating from 133 million to 120 million years ago.

The findings were published online July 11 in the journal Current Biology.

• Tiny Dino: Reconstructing Microraptor's Black Feathers
• Images: Dinosaurs That Learned to Fly
• Image Gallery: 25 Amazing Ancient Beasts

Originally published on Live Science.

This ancient reptile was an archosaur — part of the same group that would later include dinosaurs, pterosaurs and crocodilians. Scientists recently discovered a partial skeleton of the lizard dating to 250 million years ago, a time when Antarctica was bursting with plant and animal life.

Not only does the fossil of this former "king" provide a sharper picture of the forest landscape in long-ago Antarctica, it also helps to explain the evolutionary landscape following the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history, scientists reported in a new study. [Antarctica: The Ice-Covered Bottom of the World (Photos)]

Though the lizard fossil was incomplete, researchers were able to tell from the fused vertebrae that the animal was an adult reptile, and it likely measured about 4 to 5 feet (1.2 to 1.5 meters) in length. They dubbed it Antarctanax shackletoni: The first part of its name comes from the Greek words for "Antarctic king;" the second part is a nod to pioneering British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, who named the Beardmore Glacier — where many Antarctic fossils, including Antarctanax, have recently been found — following an expedition in 1908.

Subtle features in the bones of the lizard's spine and feet indicated that it was a new species, and its foot shape suggested that it lived on the ground, scampering over the forest floor, lead study author Brandon Peecook, a Meeker Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, told Live Science.

"It doesn't have any adaptations in its feet that would make us think it lived in the trees or that it's a burrower," Peecook said.

"Widespread forests"

Those trees might be hard to picture if you imagine Antarctica as it is today: a frozen, mostly lifeless, ice-covered desert. But hundreds of millions of years ago, Antarctica hosted a warm, wet environment where temperatures rarely — if ever — dipped below freezing, the study authors reported.

"We have evidence of widespread forests all over the place, and big rivers moving through those forests," Peecook said. Roaming among the trees and rivers were amphibians, mammal relatives called cynodonts, other mammal-like predators called dicynodonts that had tusks and beaks, and reptiles like Antarctanax, he added.

But this fossil also contributes to an important evolution story. With the discovery of this previously unknown ancient reptile, researchers are piecing together the unexpected archosaur diversity that arose shortly after the Permian mass extinction — a cataclysmic event about 252 million years ago that wiped out around 96 percent of all marine species and approximately 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrates. Scientists previously thought that after that global extinction event, it took many millions of years for animals to diversify and fill the planet's empty niches. But Antarctanax shows that archosaurs began diversifying within just a couple of million years after the Permian extinction, according to the study.

"If you look in the earliest rocks of the Triassic, archosaurs and other groups are radiating explosively," Peecook told Live Science. While Antarctanax's iguana-like body may not seem especially dramatic, some Triassic reptiles evolved to soar through the skies as pterosaurs, while others returned to the seas and eventually evolved into enormous ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs — and their ancestors were likely emerging at the same time as Antarctanax, he explained.

"The existence of Antarctanax in the early Triassic implies that all these other crazy lineages must have existed at this point already, even if we don't have a good fossil record of them from this time," Peecook said.

The findings were published online today (Jan. 31) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

• In Photos: Fossil Forest Unearthed in the Arctic
• Extreme Living: Scientists at the End of the Earth
• Image Gallery: Life at the South Pole

Originally published on Live Science.

Lizards can't breathe underwater — or can they?

Footage of a river anole that was recently filmed in Costa Rica revealed that the species — Anolis oxylophus — possesses a highly unusual ability. The anoles breathe stored oxygen while underwater, something that has never been seen or documented before in lizards.

Biologists and filmmakers Neil Losin and Nate Dappen caught this remarkable behavior while shooting the anole-centric documentary "Laws of the Lizard" for the Smithsonian Channel. Costa Rican river anoles were known for disappearing underwater for minutes at a time, but scientists thought that the elusive reptiles were just very good at holding their breath. However, the truth turned out to be far stranger, as Losin and Dappen found a previously unknown behavior in the group. [Images: Exotic Lizards Pop Out of the Ground in Florida]

For more than a year, the filmmakers traveled to locations around the world to film "Laws of the Lizard," which tells the surprisingly complex story of anoles, a lizard group found across the American tropics. Anoles are small and colorful, and they are equally at home across a diverse range of habitats, from rainforests to suburban backyards.

Though these lizards may seem common and uninteresting, scientists are fascinated by the creatures, publishing thousands of studies on anoles over the past 50 years, Losin told Live Science. And because anoles are so well-researched, they present scientists with the chance to ask highly nuanced questions about anoles' evolution, biology and behavior, Dappen explained.

One of those deep-diving questions was about the diving Costa Rican river anole and what exactly was happening after they jumped into the water, remaining there for as long as 15 minutes. Herpetologist Luke Mahler, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto, urged the filmmakers to look closely at their underwater footage when they filmed the anoles, to see if they could identify any clues that would explain what the river anoles were doing.

While Dappen and Losin didn't see anything out of the ordinary when they first reviewed the video, they watched it more closely after they returned to the United States. That was when they noticed something remarkable.

"We saw this re-breathing behavior that hadn't been documented or described before," Losin said.

What they observed was astounding. As a submerged female anole crouched on the river bottom for nearly 10 minutes, a tiny bubble repeatedly expanded and contracted at the top of her head. The lizard appeared to be recycling her air, much as a human diver would draw on oxygen from a tank.

Presumably, re-breathing stored air would enable river anoles to remain underwater long enough for them to outwait threats on land, Dappen explained. Drawing on air caches is known to occur in some invertebrates, such as diving bell spiders and diving beetles, but this may be the only example of re-breathing in land animals that have backbones, Losin said.

How the river anoles accomplish this feat is still uncertain, but Mahler and his colleagues are currently investigating the mechanics of the behavior, Losin told Live Science.

"It demonstrates one of the things that biologists often find, which is that there's so much we don't know about nature," Dappen said.

By showcasing this anole species — and its numerous cousins across the Americas — "Laws of the Lizards" may help viewers finally understand why scientists think these lizards are so special.

"I would love for people to come away from the film seeing that even the most seemingly mundane creatures in their backyards can be fonts of scientific knowledge — if someone just takes the time to look," Losin said.

"Laws of the Lizard" airs Dec. 26 at 8 p.m. (local time) on the Smithsonian Channel.

• Photos: Gorgeous Shots of the Adorable Horned Lizard
• Album: Bizarre Frogs, Lizards and Salamanders
• Image Gallery: Acrobatic Tricks of Lizards & Robots

Original article on Live Science.

By studying the arm movements of two distant relatives of T. rex — the domestic turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) and the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) — researchers have learned that T. rex and other theropods (a group of mostly meat-eating, bipedal dinosaurs) could likely turn the palms of their hands toward their chests.

In essence, "they may have been able to rotate the palm of the hand inward and upward in such a way that the palm would face the chest when the elbow was flexed," study co-researchers Christopher Langel, an undergraduate student of geology, and Matthew Bonnan, a professor of biology, who are both at Stockton University in New Jersey, told Live Science. [Photos: Newfound Dinosaur Had Tiny Arms, Just Like T. Rex]

This adds to the popular saying that "T. rex was a clapper not a slapper," in the way that it held its hands. In other words, the dinosaur likely kept its hands in a clapping position (palms facing inward) rather than a slapping stance (palms facing downward). But the dinosaur king wasn't limited to clapping: the new research suggests T. rex and other theropods could turn their palms inward and upward if they so desired.

As for why this would be advantageous, it's hard to say for certain without seeing a ferocious, nonavian theropod in action, the researchers said. "But we might speculate that such a movement (rotating the forearm and hand in toward the chest) could allow some theropods to bring prey in close for a bite,"Langel and Bonnan told Live Science in an email.

In fact, the next step of the scientists' research may shed light on this question. The team plans to examine the shapes of the forelimb bones in the theropod Allosaurus and compare them with those of alligators and turkeys "to help us narrow down whether this could actually occur in a theropod dinosaur," said Langel and Bonnan. The two presented their research here at the 78th annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting yesterday (Oct. 17). The research has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Turkey time

The researchers couldn't simply study a T. rex arm, because soft joint tissues rarely fossilize. "As a consequence, we are missing information on what the shapes of the [theropod] joints actually looked like and how far apart the bones were when the predatory dinosaur was alive," Langel and Bonnan said.

To investigate, then, the researchers looked at the ulna and humerus in the alligator and turkey with a technique called X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology, or XROMM. First, the investigators attached each wing and arm to a plexiglass platform between two devices that generated X-ray movies. Then, the researchers used fishing wire to tug on the elbow of each specimen, causing the wing and arm to fold up, the researchers said. [Image Gallery: The Life of T. Rex]

Finally, "we used the two X-ray views of each elbow to reconstruct how the bones moved in three dimensions by precisely matching virtual models of each bone to the movies," the researchers said.

The results showed just how complex turkey and alligator elbows are. In humans, "when we flex our elbows, both forearm bones follow the hinge joint to fold in toward the upper arm," the researchers said. "Our hands often rotate palm side up when we flex our elbows, because one forearm bone pivots around the other."

On the other hand (so to speak), in alligators and turkeys, "the elbow joint is more complex, and both bones in the forearm not only pivot around the joint, but [also] rock sideways toward the upper arm bone as the elbow is flexed," the researchers said. "Unlike our elbows, both forearm bones [in alligators and turkeys] cause the palm of the hand to turn inward and somewhat upward."

These results were somewhat unexpected, the scientists said.

"It was especially surprising to see how much the forearm bones could rock side to side at the elbow, a movement that is essentially off limits to mammals like us," Langel and Bonnan said. "In essence, alligators and turkeys can turn the palm of the hand inward and upward like we do, but [they do it] by using more-complex movements of the bones at the elbow. Once again, Mother Nature has solved the same problem in different ways." [Dinosaur Profile: Tyrannosaurus Rex (Infographic)]

Other paleontologists were impressed with the team's approach.

"If we just look at bones without considering cartilaginous reconstructions, we could potentially slip into different results as to how we reconstruct the movement of limb joints," Viktor Radermacher, a master's student of paleontology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who wasn't involved with the research, told Live Science. "And that has very big downstream implications for how we interpret ancestral things that then evolve into more specialized forms and understanding that transition."

Matthew Inabinett, a graduate student of paleontology at East Tennessee State University, who wasn't involved with the research, agreed. "It's easy to forget how much of a part soft tissue and cartilage play" in the movement of creatures that died so long ago, Inabinett told Live Science.

Originally published on Live Science.

A Florida family is afraid to use their swimming pool — and with good reason. Earlier this week, the family spotted a giant monitor lizard the size of an adult human lurking on their property.

The Lieberman family in Davie, Florida, discovered the uninvited visitor roaming around their backyard, Miami-Dade's Local 10 News ABC reported on Aug. 29. Parents Zack and Maria Lieberman told reporters that the lizard was so big, they feared for the safety of their two young children. [See The World's Most Bizarre Lizards]

The enormous reptile — which was identified as an Asian water monitor (Varanus salvator) — measures approximately 6 feet (2 meters) long, according to Local 10 News. Over several days, the scaly invader made repeated appearances near the Lieberman home, but has thus far managed to evade capture by local trappers and wildlife authorities, the Miami Herald reported.

On Aug. 29, a neighbor visited the Liebermans, claiming that the lizard was an escaped pet, the family told Local 10 News. But because the lizard had not been reported as missing, anyone with a permit could trap it, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) told 7 News Miami.

A dog working with the trappers briefly detected a scent that led searchers to a promising-looking burrow, but the hole turned out to be empty, according to the Miami Herald.

Massive invaders

Monitor lizards in the genus Varanus are a group of predatory reptiles with long necks, forked tongues, and muscular tails and bodies. They are native to Asia, Africa and Oceania, though some have become established in the Americas as an invasive species. The genus includes the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), which is the world's biggest lizard, capable of growing up to 10 feet (3 m) in length.

Fortunately for Floridians, Komodo dragons are found only in the island habitats of Indonesia, but a number of its monitor cousins have made Florida their home, after they were brought to the U.S. as exotic pets and escaped or were released into the wild. Monitor species found in Florida include crocodile monitors, water monitors, savannah monitors, peach-throated monitors and two species of black-throated monitors, according to the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida.

Another monitor species, the semiaquatic Nile monitor (Varanus niloticus), is the most persistent and problematic of these reptilian invaders, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) reported.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the wayward Asian water monitor continues. Alongside the FWC, Mike "Trapper Mike" Kimmel, a wildlife trapper with Martin County Wildlife Trappers and Removals, is on the lookout for the elusive lizard, trying to lure it with chicken thighs, 7 News Miami reported.

Original article on Live Science.

The Turks and Caicos anole is a small brown lizard found running through the undergrowth in the Turks and Caicos Islands. It’s an endemic species, meaning these few islands are the only place to find Anolis scriptus anywhere in the world. Despite the species being fairly common there, scientists know relatively little about its behavior, diet, detailed physical appearance or habitat preference.

Last summer, my colleagues from Harvard University and the Paris Natural History Museum and I took trains, planes, cars and boats to get to two barely inhabited islands called Pine Cay and Water Cay in Turks and Caicos. There, in contrast to most visitors, we turned our backs on the miles of white sand beaches and headed into the low, dense, scrubby undergrowth to fill those knowledge gaps on this lizard species.

After a week of walking, catching, measuring and videotaping, we were ready to leave the island – just as Hurricane Irma was brewing far over the horizon to the south and east. The skies were still blue as we headed to the airport, but you could feel a charge in the air from the thrum of activity as everyone prepared for the storm. Four days after we left the islands, the massive Category 5 eye of Hurricane Irma passed directly over our study sites.

I realized that my team and I had the last look at those lizards before they were hit by the storm, and we might have a unique, serendipitous opportunity to revisit and see if there were any patterns to who survived.

Were some more suited to survive a hurricane?

There are a handful of examples of extreme climate events like droughts, cold spells and heat waves driving evolutionary changes in affected populations.

What about hurricanes? Hurricanes are so severe and fleeting that it seemed entirely possible to us that survival would just be random – there could be no physical attributes of a 3-inch-long lizard that helped them weather the catastrophic storm.

But what if survival was not random and some lizards were better suited to hanging on for their lives? This would mean the hurricanes could be agents of natural selection. In this scenario, we predicted survivors would be those individuals with particularly large adhesive pads on their fingers and toes or extra-long arms and legs – both physical features that would enable them to grab tight to a branch and make it through the storm.

As we were preparing our revisit, another monstrous hurricane, Maria, hit Turks and Caicos. So it was six weeks and two hurricanes after our initial survey that we returned to Pine Cay and Water Cay to retake the same measurements that we had previously on the surviving lizards.

What we found surprised me. Indeed, the surviving populations on both Pine Cay and Water Cay had significantly larger toe pads, on average, than the initial populations had before the hurricanes. We went one step further and used a customized meter to measure the pull of the lizards on a standardized smooth surface and confirmed that large-toepadded animals did have a stronger grip than those animals with smaller toepads.

We also found that, on average, the surviving lizards had longer arms relative to the lizards we’d measured before the hurricanes.

This pattern was repeated on both islands, suggesting these patterns weren’t flukes – hurricanes can be agents of natural selection.

Contrary to our expectations, though, we found that the back legs of the lizards were shorter on our second visit. This was a head-scratcher for us, as we’d predicted they would be longer among the survivors. So why were stubbier legs an advantage at a time when the lizards were presumably clinging to trees with all their might to avoid being blown away by hurricane winds?

Longer legs more likely to blow away

As we were planning our second visit, we realized we had some basic questions about what the lizards did during the hurricanes. Obviously, no scientists were out there in ponchos following the lizards during the storms. We imagined they’d try to ride things out in tree branches. It was possible they’d head to tree roots but that’s not necessarily a safe strategy. Hurricanes often bring storm surge and deluges of rain that would drown a lizard just as sure as the wind would blow them away.

We decided we needed a way to simulate hurricane force winds in the field. So we bought the strongest leaf blower we could find, packed it in our luggage and – despite some very confused customs agents – set it up in our makeshift laboratory on Pine Cay. We then videotaped about 40 lizards as they clung to a perch while we slowly ramped up the leaf blower wind speed, until they were blown, unharmed, into a safety net.

What we saw was unexpected: The lizards situated themselves on the perches with their elbows tucked in close to their bodies but their back legs jutting out from either side of the branch. As the wind speed increased, their legs, particularly their thighs, caught wind like a sail, eventually resulting in their hindquarters being blown off the perch. Once half their body was aloft, they soon lost grip altogether. This might be the reason lizards with shorter hind legs survived the hurricanes. Shorter legs mean less surface area to catch the wind like a sail, resulting in all four legs staying in contact with a perch.

Our study, recently published in the journal Nature, suggests that hurricanes could change the evolutionary trajectory of these lizard populations. This is an important insight because hurricanes are getting stronger and more frequent due to climate change and so may play an important role for the evolution of many other populations in their path. Our study is the first to indicate that hurricanes may indeed be agents of natural selection. We’re still waiting to see whether future generations of these island lizards – descendants of hurricane survivors – will carry forward the advantageous physical features that were helpful when the 2017 storms hit. My colleagues and I hope to head back to find out very soon.

Colin Donihue, Postdoctoral Fellow in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

HBO's "Game of Thrones" features a "Mother of Dragons," but a fossil that's hundreds of millions of years old was recently identified as the "mother of all lizards" (and snakes, too).

This ancient lizard was the direct ancestor of approximately 10,000 species alive today that have inhabited the planet for more than 240 million years.

Paleontologists initially described the tiny reptile, Megachirella wachtleri, in 2003. But recent scans revealed features in the fossil that were hidden, enabling scientists to identify Megachirella as the oldest known ancestor in the squamate lineage — the reptile group that includes lizards and snakes.

Megachirella, which predates the fossils previously thought to belong to the earliest squamates by around 75 million years, bridged the gap between the oldest known squamates and the estimated origins of this reptile group derived from molecular data, researchers reported in a new study. [In Photos: Amber Preserves Cretaceous Lizards]

The Megachirella fossil was found in the Alps in northern Italy. It was estimated it to be about 240 million years old and scientists thought it belonged to a lepidosaur, a type of primitive reptile. But certain lizard-like features hinted that the fossil might provide valuable and unique clues about squamates, lead study author Tiago Simões, a doctoral candidate in biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, told Live Science in an email.

"It deserved further attention — especially in the form of CT [computed tomography] scanning — to provide greater anatomical details and an improved data set, to understand its placement in the evolutionary tree of reptiles," Simões said.

The researchers used CT scans to build 3D computer models of the fossil reptile, and found a number of features linking Megachirella to squamates. Two of those features were unique to the squamate group: a part of the braincase and a collarbone structure. Together, those elements identified Megachirella as "the first unequivocal squamate from the Triassic," according to the study published online today (May 30) in the journal Nature.

Molecular and skeletal clues also indicated that geckoes, rather than iguanians (which includes iguanas, anoles and chameleons), made up the earliest squamate group to arise, the researchers reported.

Their evidence provided a critical and "really satisfying" missing piece of an evolutionary puzzle, by providing fossil evidence to support what molecular data suggests about squamate origins, Chris Raxworthy, curator-in-charge of the Department of Herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, told Live Science.

"Scientists always love it when we see different types of data coming up with the same answer," said Raxworthy, who was not involved in the study.

However, a large gap persists in the fossil record between Megachirella, which lived 240 million years ago, and other fossil squamates that appeared no earlier than 168 million years ago. This leaves much to be unraveled about the diversity of these ancient snakes and lizards and what they may have looked like, Simões said.

"What we are discovering is the tip of the iceberg, and much further work needs to be done to understand the early evolution of squamates," he said.

Original article on Live Science.

If you ever examine the innards of a green-blooded skink, you might take a second (or even a third) look: The muscles, bones and even the tongues of these lizards have a bright, lime-green color — not from their diet, but because of the copious amount of green bile that's in their blood.

But how did these lizards evolve to have all this green bile — which is usually toxic at high concentrations — in their systems? A new investigation, published online today (May 16) in the journal Science Advances, finds that skinks likely evolved to have green blood a total of four different times throughout history, suggesting that this trait is evolutionarily advantageous.

Moreover, green-blooded skinks likely evolved from a red-blooded ancestor, the researchers found. [Photos: Gorgeous Shots of the Adorable Horned Lizard]

"We were excited by the complex history of these animals and surprised by the breadth of green-blooded lineages across lizards," study lead researcher Zachary Rodriguez, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University, said in a statement.

Their research focused on Prasinohaema, a genus of skink (a type of lizard) that is native to New Guinea. These skinks' green blood comes from high levels of biliverdin, a green bile pigment that, when converted to bilirubin, causes jaundice. The excess of green bile pigment essentially eclipses the normal ruddy hue of their red blood cells. However, even though animals in the Prasinohaema genus have levels of biliverdin that are 40 times greater than the lethal concentration in humans, the skinks are surprisingly healthy, the researchers said.

"In addition to having the highest concentration of biliverdin recorded for any animal, these lizards have somehow evolved a resistance to bile pigment toxicity," Rodriguez said. "Understanding the underlying physiological changes that have allowed these lizards to remain jaundice-free may translate to non-traditional approaches to specific health problems."

To understand the evolutionary history of the green-colored blood, Rodriguez and his colleagues did a genetic analysis of 51 species of skink, including six species that have green blood (two of which were previously unknown to science).

Their results indicate that Prasinohaema lineages evolved to have green blood four different times, all independently of one another. The fact that animals in this genus evolved so many times suggests that green blood may be advantageous, the researchers said. For instance, previous studies show that bile pigment can act as an antioxidant that destroys free radicals — atoms that are associated with disease. But it's still unclear what role biliverdin plays in the skinks, the researchers noted.

That mystery may soon be solved. Chris Austin, a biologist at Louisiana State University, and colleagues, plan to study the potential effects of green blood pigment on malaria and other parasites that infect these skinks, study co-researcher Susan Perkins, curator and professor at the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics and the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, said in the statement.

Original article on Live Science.

About 49 million years ago, a long-tailed monitor lizard perceived the world not with two but with four eyes, a new study finds.

The all-seeing lizard, called Saniwa ensidens, is the first jawed vertebrate on record to sport four eyes, the researchers said. These days, the jawless lamprey is the only known four-eyed creature with a backbone.

S. ensidens' third and fourth eyes sat on top of its head, where the lizard's pineal and parapineal organs were located. These eye-like photosensory structures also played a role in orientation and in circadian and annual cycles. [Image Gallery: 25 Amazing Ancient Beasts]

The eye-grabbing discovery is helping researchers understand the evolutionary history of the pineal and parapineal organs in vertebrates, the study's researchers said.

The photosensitive pineal organ is found in quite a few lower vertebrates, that is, vertebrates such as fishes and frogs that lay their eggs in the water, the researchers noted. This photosensitive organ was so widespread in lower vertebrates that scientists call it the "third eye."

"On the one hand, there was this idea that the third eye was simply reduced [disappeared] independently in many different vertebrate groups, such as mammals and birds, and is retained only in lizards among fully land-dwelling vertebrates," study lead researcher Krister Smith, a palaeoanthropologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany, said in a statement. "On the other hand, there was this idea that the lizard third eye developed from a different organ, called the parapineal, which is well-developed in lampreys. These two ideas didn't really cohere."

The newfound eyes in S. ensidens help clear up this mystery.

"By discovering a four-eyed lizard — in which both pineal and parapineal organs formed an eye on the top of the head — we could confirm that the lizard third eye really is different from the third eye of other jawed vertebrates," Smith said.

Smith and his colleagues made the discovery by taking a second look at two museum specimens of S. ensidens that were collected almost 150 years ago at Grizzly Buttes in Bridger Basin, Wyoming. The researchers popped the 4.3-foot-long (1.3 meters) lizard remains into a computed tomography (CT) scanner, which takes thousands of X-rays and then assembles them into 3D digital images.

The CT scans showed that the ancient monitor lizard, which went extinct about 34 million years ago, had spaces in its skull where a fourth eye would have sat, a finding that "I certainly did not expect!" Smith said.

The discovery reveals that the pineal and parapineal glands weren't paired like eyes in modern-day vertebrates. Moreover, the finding indicates that the third eye in lizards evolved independently of the third eye seen in other vertebrate groups, the researchers said.

However, despite the organs' photoreceptive abilities, there's "nothing mystical" about the pineal and parapineal organs, Smith said. Rather, these organs help some lower vertebrates sense light and orient themselves geographically, he said.

The study was published online today (April 2) in the journal Current Biology.

Original article on Live Science.

A team of scientists in Florida are on a three-month, $63,000 iguana-bashing spree.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission contracted the 15-member crew from the University of Florida to develop a set of best practices for killing the big lizards, according to a March 9 report in the Sun-Sentinel. So far, bashing their heads in seems to be a winning method.

Well-equipped team members sometimes use a captive bolt gun to destroy the critters' brains. (Picture a mobile version of the device often used to kill cows in slaughterhouses.) But, the Sun-Sentinel reported, bashing their heads against the sides of solid objects, like trucks or boats, works just as well. [Iguana Facts]

Given that the team is hoping their results will offer practical advice to homeowners, cracking some lizard skull against whatever hard object is handy might be a bit more practical than methods requiring bolt guns.

Iguanas, native to South America, are an invasive species in Florida, where they likely arrived via the pet trade, according to invasive iguana researchers. They feed on local plants and wildlife, the Sun-Sentinel reported, and may indirectly contribute to erosion. They also do weird things like freeze and fall out of trees when it gets too cold.

Head bashing may be "gruesome," the researchers told the Sun-Sentinel, but it's also the most humane of the effective methods they've come up with. Simply chopping the lizards' heads off turns out to be less humane, and the traps the team set have thus far only captured raccoons. Working in teams of two, sneaking up on the lizards in the dead of night and bashing 'em seems to be the best method.

Not all Floridians seem thrilled with the project, which has reportedly killed 249 of the lizards so far. The Sun-Sentinel quoted a local veterinarian who suggested sedating and euthanizing the iguanas, and "Gary Fishman, a Boynton Beach resident, [who] says he’s killed more than 100 iguanas with a pellet gun to protect his landscaping," who told the Sun-Sentinel that the iguana "needs to be eliminated," but that he's a bit uncomfortable with the whole head-bashing thing.

You can read more about the project, which runs until May, at the Sun-Sentinel.

Originally published on Live Science.

Blending seamlessly into one's surroundings is known as being "chameleon-like" for a good reason — chameleons shift the colors and patterns of their skin to hide from predators in plain sight, or to communicate during social interactions with other chameleons.

But there's a secret, illuminated layer to chameleons' colorful signaling: Scientists recently discovered that the lizards' bones, particularly on their heads and faces, fluoresce through their skin, creating glow-in-the-dark patterns.

"Chameleons are already famed for their exceptional eyes and visual communication, and now they are among the first known terrestrial squamates [scaled reptiles] that display and likely use fluorescence," the scientists wrote in the study. [Photos: How Chameleons Change Color]

Biologists have long known that bones glow under ultraviolet (UV) light, but the researchers were astonished to learn that chameleons could harness this characteristic to display visible fluorescent patterns through their skin, study co-author Frank Glaw, a herpetology curator at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology (ZSM) in Munich, Germany, said in a statement.

"That animals use this phenomenon to fluoresce themselves has surprised us and was previously completely unknown," Glaw said.

Fluorescence, in which special structures glow in the presence of light, differs from bioluminescence, a process that describes light generated by a chemical reaction between compounds in an animal's body. Fireflies, some types of fungi and numerous deep-sea creatures are bioluminescent, while fluorescent animals include scorpions, corals, jellyfish, a rare type of sea turtle, and now, chameleons.

The study's authors looked at 160 specimens representing 31 species in the Calumna genus, a group of chameleons native to Madagascar, and 165 specimens from 20 species of the Furcifer genus, found in Madagascar and parts of Africa. They photographed living animals in their habitats as well as preserved specimens, using UV light to illuminate the chameleons and reveal their glowing patterns.

Next, they turned to micro-computed tomography — 3D X-ray imaging on the microscopic level — to literally connect the dots, matching the glowing spots in the patterns to raised bumps in the lizards' bones known as tubercles, which provided the source of the glow.

Nearly all the species revealed previously unseen blue patterns on their skin when under UV light, the researchers discovered. Most of the lizards displayed patterning on their heads, but some showed fluorescent markings across their bodies, the study's first author David Prötzel, a ZSM doctoral student, said in the statement. The patterns appeared blue because the lizards' thin outer layer of skin serves as a filter, nudging the fluorescence toward the blue end of the spectrum, according to the study.

The thin skin stretched over the bumps serves as a window, allowing UV light to reach the bone and then enabling the shine to reflect through the skin. In shadowy, humid forest habitats, intermittently-visible fluorescent patterns could allow the lizards to signal each other without drawing the attention of predators, the study authors wrote.

Patterns tended to cluster around the chameleons' eyes and the front of their heads, areas known to be important for communication between individuals. On average, male specimens across species displayed more patterning than females; while it is still uncertain how the chameleons may use fluorescence, this male-skew suggests it may play a role in sexual selection, though further study will be required to say for sure, the scientists explained.

"Fluorescence in terrestrial vertebrates has been underestimated until now, and its role in the evolution of ornamentation remains largely unexplored, but this is a promising avenue for future research," the study authors reported.

The findings were published online Jan. 15 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Original article on Live Science.

You know what they say: When it rains, it pours — and when it snows in Florida, it hails frozen iguanas.

As a so-called bomb cyclone continues lashing the U.S. East Coast with historic cold temperatures, weird weather abounds. In south Florida, temperatures dipped below 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) on Jan. 3, giving Tallahassee its first measurable snowfall in 28 years. Yesterday (Jan. 4), Floridians reported an even stranger sight: frozen iguana bodies falling out of trees and littering the ground around the suburbs.

Photos posted on social media show the green reptiles lying belly-up and stock-still on lawns, seemingly dead. The good news: Most of them likely aren't dead — they're just really, really cold. [See The World's Most Bizarre Lizards]

"When the temperature goes down, [iguanas] literally shut down, and they can no longer hold on to the trees," Ron Magill, wildlife expert and communications director for Zoo Miami, told The New York Times. "Which is why you get this phenomenon in south Florida that it's raining iguanas." (This isn't even Florida's first iguana rain — a similar event occurred in 2008.)

Iguanas, like other reptiles, are ectotherms (also known as being "cold-blooded"), meaning the temperature outside strongly influences their body temperatures. When the outside temperature drops, preservation of an ectotherm's body temperature becomes the No. 1 priority. Creatures like iguanas and turtles thus conserve energy by slowing their metabolisms and almost entirely stopping moving; this can lead to the sort of self-imposed paralysis (known as torpor) seen in Florida.

"If it's just for a day or two, they'll just get to where they're completely frozen in time. They're still able to breathe. They're still able to do bodily functions, just very slow," Emily Maple, the reptile keeper at the Palm Beach County Zoo in Florida, told CNN affiliate WPEC.

As temperatures warm, the iguanas will thaw and eventually start moving again, Kristen Sommers, who oversees the nonnative fish and wildlife program for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, told the Associated Press. For this reason, it's recommended that people don't move or touch the critters.

In other ectotherm news, hundreds of sea turtles spotted near the Padre Island National Seashore near Corpus Christi, Texas, suffered a similar cold-paralysis outbreak earlier in the week. National Park Service researchers removed the turtles form the frigid water and placed them in a holding area (with some plastic kiddie pools) to revive.

Originally published on Live Science.

Across the continent

Currently, there are eight known families of lizards found across North America, with 155 identified species. These squamate reptiles first appear in the fossil record during the Triassic period some 251 million to 199 million years ago. Found on all continents except Antarctica, lizards thrive in arid regions at elevations from sea level to 16,000 feet (5,000 meters). Worldwide, they range in size from the less than 3-inch-long (7 cm) gecko species to the giant Komodo dragons, Varanus komodoensis, which can grow upward to 10 feet (3 m) in length.

Most intriguing

The horned lizard is found only in the western part of the United States, Mexico and Central America. In North America, horned lizards range from Arkansas to the Pacific Coast and from Guatemala to British Columbia. They are most commonly found in the vast arid desert regions but can survive in mountainous areas upwards to 10,000 feet (3048 m).

Not like the others

The body shape of the horned lizard is unique when compared to the sleek, tubular shape of other species of lizards. Horned lizards' body shape best resembles that of a toad or frog and gives rise to the often used common name for these reptiles — the horny toad. Their wide, flattened body shape is well adapted to their hot desert environment in which they frequently live.

Squirting blood

Another common feature of horned lizards are their body spines. These sharp spines act as defensive weapons against hungry desert predators. Some species of horned lizards are capable of inflating their bodies to twice the normal size until they resemble a spiny balloon. Some species too are capable of squirting a stream of blood from their orbital sinus into the mouth or eyes of a predator — surely one of the most bizarre defense mechanisms in all of the animal kingdom.

Hunter

Horned lizards are foragers. Their preferred food sources are the many species of ants that swarm the desert floor. But their foraging behavior often puts them at risk of being eaten by hawks, snakes, roadrunners, coyotes, ground squirrels, mice and other lizards. Their best defense mechanism is the skin color patterns that resemble the desert soil. If they remain still, flatten their body against the ground to eliminate their shadow and burrow under any loose sand and soil, potential predators often will pass the horned lizard by and continue to search for a more easily seen prey.

Cutie pie

Most species of horned lizards breed in the spring. They lay clutches of three to 45 eggs on the desert soil, which remain unattended. Interestingly, the egg shells tend to be a shade of white, are leathery and about 1/2 inch (1.27 cm ) in diameter. The hatchlings are less than 1 inch (2.54 cm ) in length and most immediately bury themselves into the soil upon hatching. Young horned lizards receive no parental care and must immediately begin to hunt in order to survive. The young are often referred to as "cute" and their young skins are relatively smooth. The high-elevation living, greater short-horned lizard, Phrynosoma hernandesi, bears live young as the low mountain temperatures would thwart egg development.

Survival instincts

There are 14 recognized species of horned lizards in North America. Each species has evolved to survive in the unique environmental regions of the continent. The Blainville's horned lizard, Phrynosoma blainvillii, shown here, is found along the Pacific coast from Baja California to the Bay Area and in the desert regions west of the Sierra Nevadas. Adults typically feed on ants, especially harvester ants. The Blainsville's horned lizard is suffering from a population decline because of the loss to their natural habitat.

Sun-worshipper

The Regal horned lizard, Phrynosoma solare and shown here, is found in northwestern Mexico extending into the southwestern regions of the United States at elevations from sea level to 4,800 feet (1,460 m).


They are commonly found in Upland Sonoran Desert scrub, Chihuahuan Desert scrub and Semidesert Grassland communities. They seem to prefer areas where the ground is relatively flat with many, open sunny patches. These diurnal predators are most active during the many warm spring and fall days. They burrow into the soil to seek shelter from the desert winter cold but will become active on unseasonably warm winter days.

Named for an explorer

The Hernandez's short tail horned lizard, Phrynosoma hernandesi, shown here, is also known as the greater short-horned lizard. It has the widest geographical distribution of all horned lizards as they range from southern Alberta, Canada, east into Kansas and as far south as Durango, Mexico. They are found in elevations up to 11,000 feet (3,353 m). Like all horned lizards, ants are their favorite source of food but other ground-dwelling insects, true bugs and other arthropods are readily consumed. The species name, hernandesi, is to honor Francisco Hernandez, 16th-century naturalist and physician to the King of Spain who first described the horned lizard during one of his explorations of the New World.

Unique markings

The round-tailed horn lizard, Phrynosoma modestum, shown here, is one of the smallest of horned lizards and most commonly found in the arid regions of the southern Great Plains south into central Mexico. Identification of this species is aided by the distinct banded striping found on their tails. They seem to prefer open habitats covered with small rocks/ pebbles. They are diurnal from April to September and hibernate in the soil during the remainder of the year. Ants, especially honey pot ants seem to be a favorite meal.

A big'un

The Texas horned lizard, Phrynosoma cornutum, shown here, is the official reptile of the state of Texas. It was once common from the south-central regions of the United States south into northern Mexico but loss of habitat and use of pesticides have resulted in this horned lizard being placed on the threatened species list. Identification of the Texas horned lizard is aided by a light line of scales running down the middle of its body from its head through its tail. It is the largest-bodied of all North American horned lizards with some females growing to a length of 5 inches (12.7 cm) .

Sacred to Native tribes

Many Native American tribes consider the horned lizard as a sacred animals. The Lakota call this lizard "Ptehe Agleska," and to the Lakota People, the animal represents mystery, secrecy and the keeper of precious secrets. In the oral traditions of the Navajo people, the horned lizard often appears in their teaching legends. The horned lizard has been long been depicted in petroglyphs found at many ancient sites across the American West and are also a common motif in many forms of Native American art.

Friend, not foe

Despite all their spines, the horned lizards of North America offer no threats to humans. They are easily captured and many have been made playmates and pets by children growing up in the arid regions in which they live. Their cuteness and gentleness when handled makes this common desert creature one of the most lovable of all species of reptiles.

In a case worthy of Sherlock Holmes, researchers are trying to figure out exactly when and where in the world a long-fingered lizard got trapped in the sticky sap of a tree.

Over time, that sap, or tree resin turned into amber, preserving the lizard's remains, including its textured skin. This unique lizard-amber block somehow came into the possession of a man who donated it to the Miller Museum of Geology at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, in the 1980s, but the man didn't report the artifact's age or provenance.

"The man who donated it died, unfortunately," said Ellen Handyside, an undergraduate student studying geological engineering at Queen's University, who is leading the research into the amber-encased lizard. "We are really starting from scratch" in determining its history, she said. [In Photos: Amber Preserves Cretaceous Lizards]

Handyside began looking for clues by reading as many studies about amber as possible.

Then, she and her colleagues analyzed the chemical composition of the small, 4.7-inch-long (12 centimeters) piece of amber, learning two key facts: First, the amber was real, meaning "it proved it wasn't a fake," an important point given that so little was known about the sample, Handyside told Live Science. And second, "we found it did match up quite well to a Dominican [amber] sample," although the results weren't conclusive, she said.

The researchers also analyzed the amber's carbon and hydrogen isotopes (an isotope is a variation of an element that has a different number of neutrons in its nucleus). Results indicated that the amber was formed from the sticky resin of a flowering tree, or angiosperm.

Moreover, the isotopic results suggested that the tree (and the lizard, for that matter) lived in an area with a lot of rainfall and dated to the Neogene, a period that lasted from about 23 million to about 2.6 million years ago.

"It was an angiosperm-dominated, warm and wet environment," Handyside said.

Next, the scientific team realized that the 2.7-inch-long (7 cm) lizard was likely a gecko, according to a detailed, 3D, digital model of the animal's anatomy that the researchers created from high-resolution X-ray microscopy scans.

"We looked at the skull — the teeth are in place, the ear bones are there [and] we've got some flesh," Handyside said. "It's fantastic."

She said she plans to examine the gecko's anatomy in minute detail in the coming months, with the hope that she and her colleagues can figure out how the creature fits into the gecko family tree. But for now, she's calling it Spike.

A quick look at Spike's anatomy shows that it has "extremely elongated digits" and curved, Handyside said.

"When you think of a gecko, you think of short, stubby, fat digits and sticky pads. That's not what we're looking at," Handyside said. "We have something that is more arboreal."

If the gecko was a tree-dwelling creature, then its demise actually makes sense. "It's in a tree — it gets stuck in tree sap," Handyside said.

The research, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, was presented Aug. 24 at the 2017 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Calgary, Canada.

Original article on Live Science.

Geckos are a type of lizard. Though there are about 1,500 species of geckos, they all have some similarities, including amazing tails, a simple diet and hairy skin.

Size

One thing they don't have in common is size. Geckos come in a wide range of sizes. The smallest gecko (and the smallest lizard) is the tiny dwarf gecko. It grows to miniscule 0.6 inches (1.6 centimeters) long and weighs around .0042 ounces (120 milligrams). Rhacodactylus leachianus leachianus, a subspecies of the New Caledonian giant gecko, is one of the largest gecko in the world, according to Reptiles Magazine. It can grow to 14 to 17 inches (35.5 to 43 cm), including the tail, and weighs 7 to 10 oz. (212 to 279 grams).

Habitat

Geckos are found on every continent except Antarctica, and live in almost every habitat, including rain forests, deserts and mountains, according to National Geographic. 

Habits 

The majority of geckos are nocturnal. This means they are awake at night and sleep during the day.  

Taking a bath is an interesting non-chore for geckos. Geckos have skin covered with hundreds of thousands of hair-like spines. These spines trap air and cause water to bounce off, according to a study published in Interface, the Journal of the Royal Society. 

"If you have seen how drops of water roll off a car after it is waxed, or off a couch that's had protective spray used on it, you've seen the process happening," Lin Schwarzkopf, a professor of vertebrate ecology at James Cook University in Australia and one of the researchers on the study said. "The wax and spray make the surface very bumpy at micro and nano levels, and the water droplets remain as little balls, which roll easily and come off with gravity or even a slight wind." [6 Crazy Skills That Prove Geckos Are Amazing]

With this built-in water defense, one would think it would be hard to get clean. When the water bounces off, though, it takes dust and other contaminates on the skin with it. In addition, they clean their clear eyelids or eyelid-less eyes with a quick lick of the tongue. 

Diet

Geckos typically eat fruits, insects and flower nectar. A gecko's tail saves fat that can be used later on when food is scarce. 

Offspring

Geckos give birth by laying eggs. The female can be pregnant with her eggs for years before she lays them. For example, the harlequin geckos' pregnancy lasts three to four years. When the eggs are ready, a gecko lays her eggs in leaves and bark. 

The newly emerged babies are called hatchlings. Some hatchlings are quite big, for lizards. For example, leopard gecko hatchlings can be 3 to 4 inches (8 to 10 cm) long.

Classification/taxonomy 

Here is the classification of geckos, according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS):

Kingdom: Animalia Subkingdom: Bilateria Infrakingdom: Deuterostomia Phylum: Chordata Subphylum: Vertebrata Infraphylum: Gnathostomata Superclass: Tetrapoda Class: Reptilia Order: Squamata Suborder: Gekkota Families: 

• Carphodactylidae — seven genera, 28 species
• Diplodactylidae — 19 genera, 117 species
• Eublepharidae — six genera, 30 species
• Gekkonidae — 52 genera, 950 species
• Phyllodactylidae — 11 genera, 117 species
• Pygopodidae (also known as flap-footed lizards, they have no forelimbs and only vestigial hindlegs) — seven genera, 41 species
• Sphaerodactylidae — 11 genera, 203 species

Conservation Status

Geckos are listed anywhere from least concern to endangered, depending on the species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. For example, the Bavayia goroensis is endangered. It is only found in two locations in New Caledonia, an archipelago in the South Pacific, and the population is decreasing as the expansion of mining activities reduces its habitat. 

Another example is the Bavayia ornata. It is also only found in two locations in New Caledonia, but there is no known data on how many are left or if the population is increasing. Its habitat is also shrinking due to mining and agriculture.

Other Facts

Geckos have score lines on their tails that allow them to snap off quickly if a predator grabs them. They then regenerate their tail.

These lizards have sticky feet that allows them to climb up slick surfaces. Their toes have microscopic hairs called setae that give them this sticky ability.

According to a study published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, when a gecko falls, it twists its tail to a right angle to enable it to land on its feet. This stunt takes 100 milliseconds. [Video: Geckos’ Talented Tails]

A gecko has been the mascot of the Geico insurance company since 1999. According to Geico, the idea for a gecko was inspired by a mispronunciation of the company's name. While the company does not say what species of gecko the mascot is, according to Reptiles magazine, it appears to be modeled after a species of the genus Phelsuma and is probably a giant day gecko (Phelsuma madagascariensis grandis).

Additional resources

• Animal Planet: Leopard Gecko Stats & Facts
• New Zealand Department of Conservation: Geckos
• Woodland Park Zoo: Leopard Geckos

Talk about an earache: When a man in China went to the hospital because of severe ear pain, doctors found a live gecko curled up in his ear canal, according to news reports.

The man woke up in the morning complaining of severe pain in his ear, as well as the feeling of something squirming around in there, according to the Deccan Chronicle, a South Indian newspaper. When doctors peered inside, they spotted a live lizard.

Initially, the doctors tried to remove the gecko with tweezers, but the lizard squirmed when it was touched, the Deccan Chronicle reported. [11 Weird Things People Have Swallowed]

But not all of the gecko was removed during the procedure: The Deccan Chronicle noted that the gecko appeared to be missing its tail, which the doctors could not find in the man's ear. It's possible that the lizard lost its tail before getting stuck in the man's ear canal. Some species of geckos can shed their tails as a means of self-defense, and a recently discovered species can even shed all of its scales to protect itself if a predator catches hold of it.

Geckos aren't the only unwanted visitors that have made their way into human ears; people have found spiders, fruit-fly larvae and flesh-eating worms residing in their ear canals.

Originally published on Live Science.

With just its head and front legs peeking out from its underground burrow, the Mexican mole lizard could pass for a slender, pink lizard — until it emerges completely, its body etched with ring after earthworm-like ring. But despite its regular lizard-like appearance, the reptile doesn't have any hind legs. To the uninitiated, this lizard-on-top, worm-on-the-bottom creature appears to be a sort of serpentine centaur.

As arresting as it may be, the lizard's appearance wasn't what shocked Sara Ruane, a professor of evolutionary biology and herpetology at Rutgers University-Newark, when she discovered one in a trap in mid-June on a trip to Baja California to teach a course with the conservation group Islands & Seas.

"I was digging around [inside the trap], pulled this thing out and started screaming and shrieking and ran back the couple hundred meters to where the people we were with had the camp set up and was just shocked," Ruane told Live Science. [Album: Bizarre Frogs, Lizards and Salamanders]

She initially doubted herself only because she considered a Mexican mole lizard "some sort of mythical thing to find," she said. Neither snake nor lizard nor worm, the Mexican mole lizard, Bipes biporus, shares the suborder Amphisbaenian along with three other species of two-legged burrowers.

The creature has, in fact, inspired a dark story that haunts some people who share its stomping ground: It's said that the creature will wriggle out of toilets into the nether regions of unassuming bathroomgoers, aided by their suppository-shaped heads, the herpetologist Lee Grismer explains in the book, "Amphibians and Reptiles of Baja California, Including Its Pacific Islands and the Islands in the Sea of Cortés" (University of California Press, 2002).

Thankfully, "there's no truth to [the story]," Ruane told Live Science in an email.

In real life, Mexican mole lizards, which grow to be a bit shorter than the length of a strand of spaghetti (9.4 inches, or 24 centimeters), restrict their burrowing to the ground. But, because their tunnels are also the prefect proportion for small snakes, scientists suspect snakes are the Mexican mole lizard's biggest threat.

Luckily, the reptiles have a clever way to block hungry snakes: they can self-amputate their tails on command. This might be a way to plug the burrow while the threatened Mexican mole lizard makes its getaway, researchers speculated in a paper published in the journal The Occasional Papers of the California Academy of Sciences in 1982.

The problem is, since they can't regenerate their tails, this trick works only once.

Original article on Live Science.

Tall and handsome

North America has 155 species of lizards classified into eight families native to the continent. A few of these species that arrived to the continent during the years of conquest are now considered established introduced reptiles. The evolutionary origin of all lizard species arose during the Triassic Period of geological time and lizards today make up the largest living group of the class Reptilia.

The tail of an adult collared lizard is usually twice the length of the body. Their tails tend to be thicker than wider. The tail of a male collared lizard is somewhat flattened. The tail is not easily broken off and if it is removed, does not grow back. Collared lizards are known for their robust bodies with a large head and powerful teeth-filled jaws.

Defining marks

Collared lizards are so named for the two large black bands that circle their necks. Adults range in size from 9 inches (23 centimeters) to 15 inches (38 cm). Males are colorful shades of blue, green, yellow and browns. Females tend to be duller shades of grayish blue-green or even beige. Collared lizards have back legs that are approximately three times longer than their front legs. These powerful back legs allow the collared lizards to "stand up" and run very fast for short distances. Some individuals have been clocked running faster than 16 miles per hour (26 km/h).

Lookout spot

The various species of collared lizards are found from western Missouri westward through the American deserts to the Pacific Ocean and into northern and the Baja regions of Mexico. They thrive in dry, rocky environments, especially along washes and in canyons. These diurnal lizards prefer to sun while sitting atop boulders, which also act as ideal lookout sites for both prey and potential competitors and predators. The rocky environment also acts as a place for the lizards to nest and hide. A Western Collared lizard is seen here perched on a large boulder at Arches National Park in Utah.

Flashy creatures

Collared lizards are extremely territorial and are thought to be the most visually oriented of all lizard species. The flashing of color and behavioral gestures are extensive and common. Body push-ups , head bobbing and open-mouthed displays are a daily behavioral ritual, especially during mating season. Collared lizards, like this reticulated collared lizard, (Crotaphytus reticulatus), shown here, will show a variety of displays using their colorful bodies to warn off potential mating rivals and territorial competitors.

Smooth and scaly

The skin of the collared lizard is not only colorful but smooth and granular. This texture makes for a body appearance that looks more like skin than scales. Their fine scales are almost circular in shape.

Family lines

Igunaidae is one of those native North American lizard families composed of 14 genera and 44 unique and colorful species. Iguanids can range in length from only 4 inches (10 cm) to an amazing 72 inches (183 cm). Most iguanid species are carnivorous, dining on insects, other smaller lizards and small snakes. Occasionally, they will make a meal composed of plant leaves and flowers. A sub-family of Iguanaidae are the Crotaphytidae species and are commonly known as Collared and Leopard lizards. The spectacular Western Collared Lizard, Crotaphytus collaris), is shown here.

Living on high

Collared lizards are commonly found at elevations ranging from sea level to 7,500 feet (2,290 meters). They thrive across the desert scrub biomes of the Sonoran, Mohave and Great Basin Deserts. Like all the plants and animals found in desert scrub biomes, the collared lizard has adapted well to the limited annual rainfall, between 10-20 inches (25 -51 cm) per year, and the extreme hot and cold temperatures found across the vast landscape dominated by a sea of scrubs.

Pack the power

The powerful jaws of the collared lizard allow them to be most aggressive and deadly hunters. With their quick burst of speed the lizard's jaws will quickly catch and clamp down on available arthropod, small snakes or other lizards including their own young. Some have suggested that they have become the modern day Tyrannosaurus rex of the desert shrub community. But these hunters often become the hunted by local hawks, roadrunners, coyotes and large venomous snakes. This collared lizard oversees his territory while sitting on a large trunk of petrified wood in Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona.

Playing the field

Mating of collared lizards begin each spring with the dominant males bobbing their heads rapidly in hopes that a female will accept their advances. Once mating has successfully occurred, the female will develop red/orange spots near her neck, indicating that she is gravid. A clutch of seven to 12 eggs are laid in damp, dark holes dug under a nearby boulder about 21 to 28 days after mating. Approximately six weeks later, the eggs will hatch and the young, vulnerable lizards are totally on their own to try and survive. Female collared lizards are capable of retaining sperm and several clutches of eggs can be laid each summer without mating again.

Staycation, here we come

When the warmth of the summer begins to wane, the cold-blooded collared lizards begin to prepare for a long winter of hibernation. They stop eating so that their gut is void of food, since any intestinal food would rot over the long winter months and poison the hibernating reptile. When the days of spring begin to lengthen once again, their still, dormant bodies will begin to release the chemicals and hormones to prepare both male and female lizards for another cycle of reproduction when they awake from their annual sleep.

Home to some

The great North American deserts are often portrayed as barren and bleak landscapes, void of color and beauty. But the many species of collared lizards that live in this land of little rain and extreme temperatures add an almost tropical splash of vivid colors to the dominant shades of brown that are so commonly found here. Famed environmentalist Edward Abbey wrote in his book "Desert Soltaire" (McGraw-Hill Education, 1968) that it is the unexpected found in nature that "startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful - that which is full of wonder." It's possible that the beautiful collared lizards of the North American deserts were on Abbey's mind at the time.

Poachers have been caught trying to illegally sell dried lizard penises online to unwitting customers looking to purchase a rare Indian root called "Hatha Jodi." The root looks like two praying hands and is thought to bring good luck.

Hatha Jodi is used in religious ceremonies and is marketed as a good-luck charm or as a way to ward off spirits. The rare plant root is found only in remote areas of Nepal and central India, according to researchers. A team of investigators and scientists from World Animal Protection, a London-based wildlife-advocacy group, discovered hundreds of desiccated monitor lizard penises that were part of the Hatha Jodi scam.

Monitor lizards are a protected species, and the Indian Wildlife Protection Act declares that any trade involving the lizard or its body parts is a national offense. The Bengal monitor lizard and the yellow monitor lizard are also protected under the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES). [The 9 Weirdest Animal Penises]  

"This international illegal trade is of major concern for the continued survival of the lizard species involved," Aniruddha Mookerjee, lead investigator with World Animal Protection, said in a statement. "Even a quick search reveals hundreds of items on sale, sometimes at prices over £200 GBP [$250 USD] apiece. If left unchecked, this demand could grow to the extent that it pushes some wild populations over the edge."

After being illegally poached from the wild, the lizards would have their skulls smashed or throats slit before their penises were removed, researchers said. Some lizards could still be alive when the castration begins, according to World Animal Protection.

Investigation into the illegal trade determined that along with dried specimens from monitor lizards, plastic molds of the animal's genitalia were also being peddled as Hatha Jodi.

"Given the photos being advertised online, we needed to get into the laboratory to confirm our suspicions that these dried 'plant roots' were in fact derived from Indian monitor lizards," said David Megson, a collaborating scientist from Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. "However, the plot thickened even further when tests revealed that some of these items are actually plastic moldings of monitor lizard genitalia."

The penises are being sold as Hatha Jodi on online retailers as varied as Amazon, eBay, Alibaba and Etsy, according to World Animal Protection. The organization said it is contacting all of the retailers to request they remove the illegal lizard body parts from their websites.

Original article on Live Science.

A long-lost relative of today's Komodo dragons lived in Europe as recently as 800,000 years ago.

These reptilians were much smaller than the predatory Komodo dragons that live today in Indonesia. But the discovery of their fossils at a site in Greece was a surprise, because monitor lizards were thought to have vanished in Europe around 2.5 million years ago as climate conditions gradually changed.

"It's a survivor, let's say," said Georgios Georgalis, a doctoral candidate in paleontology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the University of Torino in Italy. [In Photos: Rare Birth of 'Baby Dragons' at Slovenia Cave]

Persistant lizard

Monitor lizards are a big group. Scientifically, they're known as "varanids," and at least 70 species live today in Africa, Australia and Asia. The most famous species, the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), can grow to nearly 10 feet (3 meters) long.

Monitor lizards used to roam Europe, too, but they seem to vanish from the fossil record by the time of the Pliocene (5 million to 2.6 million years ago), when the climate took a turn for the cool and dry. The new specimen from near Athens is much more recent than that, dating back less than a million years.

"We [now] know that varanids survived at least until the middle Pleistocene," Georgalis told Live Science.

The new monitor lizard is known from only a few pieces of skull and jaw. Fortunately, Georgalis said, these specimens are a good basis for identifying varanids, because teeth and jaws vary widely between lizard species.

Miniature monitor

The fossil was found almost 30 years ago at a site called Tourkobounia outside Athens, Georgalis said. He discovered it in a collection on loan to the University of Torino.

"I was very, very surprised, happily surprised, when I saw this material, because it was highly distinctive," Georgalis said.

The biggest piece of bone is the right maxilla, or upper jaw, at just 0.7 inches (17 millimeters) long. Attached are two pointy teeth, which are only about 0.15 inches (4 mm) long. The second portion of the fossil is a piece of the lower jaw 0.6 inches (15.7 mm) long. One other tooth was detached from the jawbones.

Based on the anatomy, this monitor lizard was likely related to monitor lizards that had called Europe home in the Miocene, 23 million to 5 million years ago, when varanids were common on the continent. It was probably a relic of those old populations, Georgalis said, confined to the southeastern edge of Europe where the weather was still warm enough to support it.

Perhaps for that reason, the lizard was puny compared with today's Komodo dragons — much smaller than a comparable ancient European monitor lizard that measured 2 feet (60 centimeters) long, not counting its tail, Georgalis and his colleagues wrote May 12 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The lizard was also smaller than earlier European monitor lizards, Georgalis said, and the size reduction may have been an adaptation for surviving in a cooler climate. Alternatively, the fossil may simply have been a baby.

Georgalis and his team are now hoping to find other varanids from Pleistocene Greece.

"We're trying to understand when is their extinction date, and why they became extinct from Europe," he said.

Original article on Live Science.