Just when we thought that scientists have found all the species they were going to, new species of lizards dubbed the dwarf dragons have been discovered in the Andes Mountains of South America.
The newly discovered species of wood lizards are called Enyalioides anisolepis, Enyalioides sophiarothschildae and Enyalioides altotambo. The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund said that the region in which the lizards were discovered was the epicenter of biodiversity of the area.
The area in question has 20,000 plants that cannot be found anywhere else and researchers have found about 1,500 terrestrial vertebrates, including both amphibians and birds.
Researchers from Peru and Ecuador, with the help of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, discovered the new species in the tropical Andes. The new species are unique among their relatives in regards to both color and their scale arrangements. The uniqueness of the species was further shown by a DNA analysis.
"During the last few years we doubled the number of known species of woodlizards, showing that the diversity of these conspicuous reptiles had been underestimated," Omar Torres-Carvajal of Ecuador's Museo de Zoologia and the study's lead author said in a statement. "That more than half of the diversity of a group of large, dragon-looking reptiles from South America has been discovered in recent years should be heard by people in charge of conservation and funding agencies."
"I am a very lucky guy," said study leader Omar Torres-Carvajal, curator of reptiles at the Museo de Zoología QCAZ at the Catholic University of Ecuador in Quito. "As I became more expert in the group, it became easier for me to suspect that something's weird or new."
The newly discovered wood lizards are rough-scaled and have the traditional features of a dragon. These new lizards have much in common with these mythological creatures differing only in their size.
The first specimen was discovered in 2005, but it took years before another one was seen. The area in which these new tiny dragons live is located in a region of Ecuador that isn't considered safe for scientists to conduct field research.
"These guys are usually more abundant. The reason we didn't find more is that we didn't actually look," Torres-Carvajal explained. "We just were too scared to go and look for more."
These latest findings make scientists believe that there are still even more species just waiting to be discovered and many experts wonder how many will simply vanish without humans ever getting to take a look at them.
