Photos by Matt Bonnan
No time for an in depth post today, so I'm keeping the squamate theme going with a picture from my archives. This is a legless skink (Acontias gracilicauda)that happened to have made it home directly above an early Jurassic sauropod bone bed. So it had to be relocated. There is a moderate diversity of acontine skinks in southern Africa: they are just one of many lizard lineages, apart from snakes, that have beome completely limbless.
2 comments:
Was going to ask how you knew it was A. gracilicauda and not Percival's legless skink A. percivali, but then I can't see the animal's tail (A. percivali has a less tapering tail). I suppose range might also helped. Great photos.
It was ID'ed mostly on range. A. percivalli doesn't get anywhere near the Free State according to the rather old field guide I was using. Plus the photos of A. gracilicauda were spot on for our lizard whereas the other Acontias species just looked ever so slightly different (not a very good ID method - I know)
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