Climbing out of hiding

Wednesday, June 20, 2012 - 14:30 in Paleontology & Archaeology

As biological mysteries go, they don’t come much better than the proboscis anole. For decades, scientists have puzzled over the small lizard, whose defining feature is a horn on its nose, but have been stymied in their attempts to better understand it because it appeared to be all but extinct — until now. Two teams of researchers — one from Harvard, the other from the University of New Mexico — working with colleagues in Ecuador, have rediscovered the lizard, alive and well, in the forests of South America. As reported in a pair of papers published in Breviora, the journal of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), the work has shed new light on the lizard’s behavior, and is raising intriguing questions about evolution. “There are more than 400 species of anoles, but this species has always been very enigmatic,” said Jonathan Losos ’84, the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study...

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