A nose-horned dragon lizard lost to science for over 100 years has been found
Nearly 130 years ago, Italian explorer Elio Modigliani arrived at a natural history museum in Genoa with a lizard he’d reportedly collected from the forests of Indonesia. Based on Modigliani’s specimen, the striking lizard — notable for a horn that protrudes from its nose — got its official taxonomic description and name, Harpesaurus modiglianii, in 1933. But no accounts of anyone finding another such lizard were ever recorded, until now. This illustration of Modigliani’s nose-horned lizard was made in 1933 based on the original lizard first found in 1891. That specimen turned pale blue due to how it was preserved.C.A. Putra et al/TAPROBANICA: The Journal of Asian Biodiversity, 2020, Annali del Museo Civico di storia naturale di Genova 56, pl. VI In June 2018, Chairunas Adha Putra, an independent wildlife biologist conducting a bird survey in a mountainous region surrounding Lake Toba in Indonesia’s North Sumatra, called herpetologist Thasun Amarasinghe. Near the lake, which fills the caldera of a supervolcano, Putra had found “a...