If these lizards were larger, they'd look like featherless
dinosaurs: With spiky spines and gleaming red eyes, two newly
described species of wood lizard look a bit like
evil stegosaur-velociraptor hybrids.
The lizards, reported
on 15 March in ZooKeys, live in the Peruvian
mountains and belong to the
genus Enyalioides, which includes 10 previously
described species. After comparing the lizards' morphology and
genetic sequences with known wood lizards, a team of scientists
concluded that they could add two new members to a group most
commonly found in Central and South America.
One of the lizards is now named E. azulae, after the
Cordillera Azul mountain range in northeastern Peru, where it was
first discovered in 2010. The 10-centimetre long lizard lives in
montane forests at 1,100 metres elevation, near the Rio Huallaga
basin. Males are flecked with bright green, while females are more
dusty brown and resemble juveniles in colour.
The other newly described lizard is E. binzayedi,
after Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi
and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates, who
created a conservation fund to support international conservation
projects. This 12-centimetre long lizard bears more pronounced
dorsal spikes, and is more colourful, than E.
azulae -- though not as colourful as E.
rubrigularis, another species described by several of the same authors in 2009.
This story originally appeared on Wired.com
Image: P.J. Venegas