20-year mystery solved as new species of fast-moving reptile captured
Since the early 2000s, experts had tried and failed to catch and study Ctenotus rungulla.
After avoiding capture for 20 years, a mysterious population of fast-moving Australian reptiles has been identified as a new species. Now experts are predicting the rocky sandstone habitat where the lizard was found could be home to even more previously undescribed animals.
The tiny skink, Ctenotus rungulla, was first spotted at the turn of the century. But because ecologists couldn’t get close enough to properly see it, they assumed it was another type of lizard that was already known to science.
"They're really fast, they're often very difficult to catch. People have seen them off and on, but everyone's just immediately called them this other species, Ctenotus brevipes, because they're similarly small, they have a very similar colour pattern," biologist Dr Stephen Zozaya told Yahoo News.
Zozaya, now a postdoctoral fellow at Australian National University, ventured into Queensland's Gregory Range around 2015, but he also failed to catch one.
"I didn't even realise they were much of a mystery. I just thought, that's weird, I couldn't catch them, and then stopped thinking about them," he said.
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Photograph 'ignites' mission to describe mysterious lizard
But two years later, his colleague Dylan Case achieved a new feat — he snapped a series of high resolution images of the lizards that revealed their features in detail — and this ignited their mission to find out more.
"It became immediately apparent that it was not the thing people thought they were," Zozaya said
Unlike Ctenotus brevipes, the lizard in the photos had comb-like lobes at the opening of its ears.
"The genus Ctenotus means comb ear, because that's a characteristic of most of these skinks. But Ctenotus brevipes was the only one out of almost 100 species that doesn't have ear lobules at all,” Zozaya said.
Excited by the images, Case returned to the Gregory Range and caught one. And DNA sequencing undertaken by Zozaya revealed it was "totally new" and not even closely related to Ctenotus brevipes.
The findings have been published by Zozaya, Case and Professor Conrad Hoskin in the Australian Journal of Taxonomy.
"I by no means discovered this species. The ecologist Keith McDonald is the first person we know of who saw these things and thought they might be new," Zozaya, the paper’s lead author, said.
"This was really a sort of serendipitous team effort of a bunch of people who'd seen a weird lizard out there for more than 20 years. And everything's aligned and we were able to describe it."
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The Gregory Range, where the lizard was discovered, is part of the Great Dividing Range, the fifth-longest land-based mountain chain in the world.
Zozaya has focused his studies around the Gulf Plains bioregion and the Einasleigh Uplands, which he described as being "relatively poorly explored".
"The landscape the skink lives in is spectacular, you have this sandstone plateau with heaps of spinifex. It’s a really wild looking place that hasn’t really been surveyed until the last decade," he said.
"But then a few of us started spending time out there and finding weird things. Ctenotus rungulla is the fourth species we've identified that is endemic or nearly endemic to the range.
"It's spectacular habitat for reptiles. And we've found more out in this region that we're now working to describe."
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