(Leaping) Limbless Lizards!

A new variety of lizard has been discovered by Sushil Kumar Dutta, the head of the zoology department at North Orissa University, India.

The slithery species looks more like a snake than a lizard, but such is the case for some species belonging to the Scincidae family of lizards, also known as “skinks”. Over 30 species of skinks have undergone partial or complete limb loss, including Brachymeles, Isopachys, Typhlosaurus ,and Acontias. This particular species has tentatively been placed in the Sepsophis genus, a group containing other limbless lizards.



How did these evolutionary distinct groups come to possess a common phenotype (i.e. physical form)? Well, typically when things are lost in biology, it is to specialize at doing something no one (or at least not many) other species are doing. For example, would large ears be beneficial for burrowing or would they get caught on debris? The same could be argued for legs: it costs less energy to burrow a smaller hole for a legless individual than a legged one. Essentially, this is the contending hypothesis for snakes evolving from lizards during the Paleocene, approximately 65 million years ago (although another hypothesis exists that is less convincing at present).

As exciting as this new discovery may be, it has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Thus it still remains to be fully described and annotated with respect to its closest genetic relatives.