With only its head and front legs poking out of its crotch, the Mexica mole lizard could pass for a slender, pink lizard until it fully emerges, its body etched with one worm-like perforation after another. But despite its regular lizard-like appearance, the reptile does not have high legs. To the initiated, this creature shaped like a lizard on top and a worm at the bottom appears to be some kind of snake scepter.
As striking as it is, the lizard’s appearance wasn’t what surprised Sara Rúae, a professor of evolutionary biology and herpetology at Rütgers University-Newark, who discovered a trap in mid-June on a teaching trip to Baja California. a course with the conservation group Islas & Seas.
“I was digging around [inside the trap], I pulled this out and I started screaming and screaming and backing up the two meters to where the people we were with had set up camp and it shocked me,” Rυae told Live Scie. EC. [Αlbυm: strange frogs, lizards and salamaпders]
(Image credit: Sara Rυaпe)
Initially, she doubted herself only because she considered a Mexica mole lizard to be “some kind of mythical thing to find,” she said. She neither speaks nor is she a lizard nor is she a worm, the Mexica mole lizard, Bipes biporυs , shares the Αmphisbaeìiaÿ border along with three other species of bipedal birds.
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The creature, in fact, has inspired a dark story that some people share in its group: the creature is said to sneak out of toilets and into the ethereal regions of bathroom-goers, with the help of its suppository-shaped heads. , the herpetologist. Lee Grismer explains in the book, “Amphibians and Reptiles of Baja California, Illustrating Its Pacific Islands and Islands in the Sea of Cortez” (University of California Press, 2002).
Indeed, “there is some truth to [the story],” Rúae told Live Sciece in an email.
In real life, Mexican mole lizards, which grow slightly shorter than the length of a spaghetti strip (9.4 inches, or 24 centimeters), restrict their exploration to growth. But, because its spines are also the perfect proportion for small rays, scientists suspect that rays are the Mexica mole lizard’s biggest threat.
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Luckily, reptiles have a clever way to block the hungry rays: they can self-amputate their coma tail. This could be a way to cover the forehead while the threatened Mexica mole lizard escapes, the researchers speculated in an article published in the journal The Occasional Papers of the Califoria Αcademy of Scieces in 1982.
The problem is that since they can’t regenerate their queues, this trick only works in the office.
