Rock Dragons, Group 2

In his book "Biology and Evolution of Australian Lizards", Allen Greer sorted the lizards I study, the genus Ctenophorus, into different groups based on where they live: those that live in burrows, those that live in rock crevices, and those that live in vegetation. Looking at the phylogenetic relatedness of the Ctenophorus dragons, there are two groups of each: two groups of burrowers, two groups of rock-dwellers, and two groups of vegetation-dwellers. I thought it'd be fun to put up pictures and descriptions of all these groups, since I have a large pile of pictures from my fieldwork. Here is my first post, on the first group of rock-dwellers. Here is my second, on the first group of burrowers. Here is my third, on the first group of vegetation-dwellers.

The second group of rock dragons is my favourite group of Ctenophorus. This is a clade of six dragon species that all live on rocky outcrops and they are primarily South Australian. The males are generally gorgeously and gaudily coloured in oranges, reds, blues and greens while the females are gorgeously and subtly coloured in browns and tans. These species are mostly allopatric, meaning that their ranges do not overlap, making for a very pretty map:

Distributions of the six members of rock dragon group 2. The rusty dragon (Ctenophorus rufescens) is in dark blue; the ochre dragon (Ctenophorus tjantjalka) is in light blue; the peninsula dragon (Ctenophorus fionni) is in purple; the red-backed dragon (Ctenophorus vadnappa) is in red; the tawny dragon (Ctenophorus decresii) is in green; and the border ranges dragon (Ctenophorus mirrityana) is in puke. Maps courtesy of the Atlas of Living Australia.

There are some range-overlaps, so they are not completely allopatric. The most well-known overlap is between the red-backed and tawny dragons in and around Gammon Ranges National Park. However, a friend of mine who's doing her PhD on tawny dragons went looking for tawnies around the Gammon Ranges and couldn't find a single one, though she found many red-backed dragons. Another interesting overlap is just north of Marla on the Stuart Highway, were the ranges of the rusty and ochre dragons supposedly meet. If this is true, and both species are present there, it would be an excellent place to visit. Both species otherwise inhabit very harsh, remote terrain and are therefore very difficult to come across in the wild (despite being very common in the remote areas where they live). However, I have my doubts about this overlap because, as with the netted dragons, there are some glaring inaccuracies in this map. For example, Adelaide has clearly erroneous (or escapee) records of peninsula and rusty dragons. There are records of tawny, rusty and red-backed dragons on the Eyre Peninsula that, to me, are clearly misidentified peninsula dragons. However, there are other, more insidious inaccuracies. The purple dot at the very northern tip of Lake Torrens (the northernmost purple dot) looks like it could be just on the edge of the range of the peninsula dragon. Actually, the animals that live there are red-backed dragons that have been misidentified. I know this because a herpetologist at the South Australia Museum looked at those specimens and told me they were misidentified, and also because I went there and collected red-backed dragons at that exact spot! Misidentifications like this make it difficult to know where the precise contact zones are between the different species.

Tawny Dragon (Ctenophorus decresii)

The tawny dragon is the most well known of this group of rock dragons and a popular research subject. This is most likely just circumstance, it's found around the most populated area of South Australia (Adelaide). The tawny dragon comes in three distinct lineages: a southern lineage (Kangaroo Island and the Adelaide Hills), a central lineage (southern Flinders Ranges) and a northern lineage (northern Flinders Ranges). The central lineage comes in distinct colour morphs, each of which seems to have a slightly different personality. The northern lineage is the one that no-one, including my friend who studies them, has heard from recently, and as a result no-one knows much about this lineage.

We caught our tawny dragons from the central lineage, around Burra and Hawker, South Australia. Chasing lizards near Burra was a surreal experience for many reasons, not the least of which was that we were wandering through rolling, grassy sheep pastures that looked more like something out of pastoral England or New Zealand than somewhere you might expect to find a semi-arid rock-dwelling dragon. But there they were, basking on rocks in the dried creek beds in between rolling hills. One day I will have to do a post of just pictures and stories from Burra.

Male Tawny Dragon (Ctenophorus decresii). Burra, South Australia, 2011. Photo by Tobias Hayashi.

Female Tawny Dragon (Ctenophorus decresii). Mount Remarkable National Park, South Australia, 2011. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Red-backed Dragon (Ctenophorus vadnappa)

Male red-backed dragons are spectacular. Their backs are a vividly patterned mix of red, blue and green, and their throats are a gorgeous yellow. We visited the westernmost known population of these guys, at the northern tip of Lake Torrens, and we also visited another spot in the core of their distribution, near Gammon Ranges National Park. This species was one of the first rock dragons we went searching for, and gave us our first taste of our most hated habitat type: granite rock outcrops. Huge granite boulders are a terrible thing to try to walk across all day, let along chase tiny, fast lizards across. They are rough, sharp and sometimes even unstable, and have impressively worn down my brand-new heave-duty hiking boots. It was also at Lake Torrens, chasing red-backed dragons, that volunteer Mitch invented and perfected the art of noosing lizards out from under boulders. 

Male Red-backed Dragon (Ctenophorus vadnappa). Arkaroola Station, South Australia, 2011. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Female Red-backed Dragon (Ctenophorus vadnappa). Arkaroola Station, South Australia, 2011. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Peninsula Dragon (Ctenophorus fionni)

The peninsula dragon, unfortunately, also lives on granite outcrops. This species is found all over the Eyre Peninsula, and also along the west coast of Lake Torrens. It gets more and more colourful as you move away from the coast (a similar thing happens with the ornate dragon). Near the coast, males are mostly black and grey, but as you move inland they gain oranges, yellows and blues. We did our peninsula dragon chasing near the northwestern-most limit of their range, in between lakes Edward and Gairdner. Both of these are salt lakes, lest anyone get the impression there is a drop of fresh water around this area, and the region is impressively dry and foreboding. I remember hot, lonely days (because each volunteer took their own section of terrible granite outcrop) wandering around searching for lizards, not seeing any for hours. But for some reason I had fun the whole time. Something about the landscape, the emptiness, the adventure and the challenge made it all worthwhile.

Male Peninsula Dragon (Ctenophorus fionni). Kokatha Station, South Australia, 2012. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Female Peninsula Dragon (Ctenophorus fionni). Kokatha Station, South Australia, 2012. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Ochre Dragon (Ctenophorus tjantjalka)

The ochre dragon is extremely poorly known. This dragon lives in some of the most remote, arid country in Australia, not far from where the Australian weather bureau had to add new colours to their heat map after the temperature went off the charts, literally. They were completely new to science in the 1970's and officially described as a new species in 1992. The locations we visited were part of the southern ochre dragon population, which was only discovered in 1995. The cattle rancher who told us where to find them and how to get there (and helped us fix a flat tyre) was the same one who accompanied the guy who found them in the first place. He even claimed to have caught the first individual! The southern ochre dragons differ from the northern ones in that the males are patternless and powder blue (as opposed to grey). Both populations have salmon (or ochre) on their flanks. 

Male Ochre Dragon (Ctenophorus tjantjalka). Anna Creek Station, South Australia, 2012. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Female Ochre Dragon (Ctenophorus tjantjalka). Anna Creek Station, South Australia, 2012. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Rusty Dragon (Ctenophorus rufescens)

The rusty dragon is almost as poorly known as the ochre dragon, though it has been known to science for a lot longer. This species is the only member of rock dragon group 2 in which males and females look similar, to the point where I couldn't tell a male from a female for the longest time. Males are not gaudily coloured like in all the other species, instead they are brown and tan like the females. This was also the most challenging species of rock dragon for us to catch. They are fast devils, with longer legs and tails than the other species, and would hide in the most impenetrably narrow crevices. Tearing across granite boulders in the midday heat day-in, day-out, while catching very little was a frustrating endeavour, especially in a location where the closest pub was 200km away by dirt road, and the closest grocery store over 500km!

Male Rusty Dragon (Ctenophorus rufescens). Victory Downs Station, Northern Territory, 2012. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Female Rusty Dragon (Ctenophorus rufescens). Mulga Park Station, Northern Territory, 2012. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Border Ranges Dragon (Ctenophorus mirrityana)

The border ranges dragon was only described last year! Up until then, it was thought to be a distinct population of the tawny dragon. This is the only member of rock dragon group 2 that is not native primarily (or exclusively) to South Australia. They are endemic to far western New South Wales, where they are endangered. They are also the only species of rock dragon that I have never seen in the wild. Their endangered status means that it would be very unwise of me to go and collect some for my research. Luckily, they are common in Mutawinji National Park, so I should be able to go out at some point and check them out in the wild. However, an even easier option than driving 13 hours into the desert is to head to Sydney. The Taronga Zoo has a male on display in their reptile house! So if you want to see Australia's newest dragon species AND Australia's newest endangered species, it's really very easy, and you can admire a baby komodo dragon at the same time.

Male Border Ranges Dragon (Ctenophorus mirrityana). Taronga Zoo, Sydney, New South Wales, 2014.

I don't have a picture of a female border ranges dragon, so instead here's a picture of a baby komodo dragon that you can visit along with the male border ranges dragon at the Taronga Zoo. Sydney, New South Wales, 2014.

Vegetation-dwelling Dragons, group 1 (The Interlopers)

In his book "Biology and Evolution of Australian Lizards", Allen Greer sorted the lizards I study, the genus Ctenophorus, into different groups based on where they live: those that live in burrows, those that live in rock crevices, and those that live in vegetation. Looking at the phylogenetic relatedness of the Ctenophorus dragons, there are two groups of each: two groups of burrowers, two groups of rock-dwellers, and two groups of vegetation-dwellers. I thought it'd be fun to put up pictures and descriptions of all these groups, since I have a large pile of pictures from my fieldwork. Here is my first post, on the first group of rock-dwellers. Here is my second, on the first group of burrowers.

There is one group of dragons in Australia that, despite being small and unobtrusive, have been subjected to a pretty convoluted taxonomic history, mostly in the last thirty years. At one time or another, they were placed in four different genera of Australian dragon. They've been divided amongst different dragon genera. They've been split, lumped and resplit differently. They've been one species, two species, two species each with two sub-species, and four species. Currently, and conclusively, they are part of the genus Ctenophorus, the genus of dragons I have spent my PhD studying. These are what I've referred to as "the interlopers" because they are Ctenophorus without really acting like Ctenophorus. I wasn't going to say anything about them, but their taxonomic history is just so ridiculous I decided to dive into it. Each paragraph is titled based on new taxon or taxa discussed in the paragraph. 

Amphibolurus muricatus adelaidensis

The first of these dragons to be described was, unsurprisingly, the species that lives around Perth and Adelaide (rather than the species that live in the desert in the middle of nowhere). The very first record of these critters in the scientific literature is in a report George Grey (Gray? spelling is mixed, sometimes even in the same paper!) sent to the British Annals of Natural History in 1840. Grey described them as a variant (what we would now call a subspecies) of the jacky dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus), a resident of eastern Australia. Amphibolurus muricatus adelaidensis was originally described as "inhabits Western Australia, Adelaide". Ironically, the animals that live close to Adelaide are no longer members of the species adelaidensis, which is now restricted to the west coast of Australia, around Perth.* But we'll get to that.

*Species names are weird. Antaresia perthensis, a species of python, isn't found anywhere near Perth.

Amphibolurus adelaidensis

In 1885, the great George Boulenger was cataloguing the specimens held in the British Museum, including the specimens Grey had brought back from Australia.  It was Boulenger who gave Amphibolurus adelaidensis full species status, splitting it from the jacky dragon. He listed their range as "South Australia". In reality, what Boulenger was calling Amphibolurus adelaidensis lives across a lot more territory in Western Australia than South Australia. It lives along the west coast of the continent, including around Perth, and along the south coast of Australia from the southwest corner almost all the way to Adelaide. The name stuck for a while after that, and so it was just Amphibolurus adelaidensis for a good 80 years, until 1964.

Tympanocryptis parviceps

In 1964 the second species in this group was described. A year before becoming the Curator of Herpetology and Ornithology at the Museum of Western Australia, Glen Storr described a curious little lizard from Ningaloo on the mid-west coast of Australia. It had a partially covered tympanum, which is the external part of the lizard ear. Because of this, Storr classified as it as a member of the Tympanocryptis (genus name self-explanatory). Tympanocryptis are adorable little desert-dwelling pebble-mimics. Scare the crap out of them and they just duck down, curl their tail around, and hope you can't tell the lizard from the pebbles. Despite placing this new species of lizard in Tympanocryptis, Storr noted at the time that his new species was very similar to Amphibolurus adelaidensis and might prove to be more closely related to Amphibolurus adelaidensis than to the Tympanocryptis.

Amphibolurus parviceps butleri and Amphibolurus adelaidensis chapmani

In 1977 Storr revisited these dragons. In one fell swoop, he moved Tympanocryptis parviceps into Amphibolurus and described two new subspecies, one for parviceps and one for adelaidensis. The new subspecies of parviceps, A. p. butleri, "bridged the [morphological] gap" between parviceps and adelaidensis, convincing Storr that parviceps was more closely related to adelaidensis than to the Tympanocryptis. Amphibolurus parviceps parviceps (Storr 1964) is found the furthest north, from Dirk Hartog Island in the south to Exmouth in the north. From Shark Bay south to Kilbarri you get Amphibolurus parviceps butleri (Storr 1977). Then from Kilbarri to Perth is the territory of Amphibolurus adelaidensis adelaidensis (Boulenger 1885). Along the south coast of Australia, from Albany to the tip of the Yorke Peninsula, is where the fourth taxon, Amphibolurus adelaidensis chapmani (Storr 1977), lives. So now we have the four taxa of this group, three on the west coast of Australia and one on the south coast. That there are four taxa of dragon in this group, and that they are distributed like this, is never again contested. The only thing that kept changing from 1977 onwards was what people thought these four taxa should be called.

Rankinia adelaidensis, Rankinia chapmani and Tympanocryptis butleri

Up to now, all the taxonomic changes I've described are pretty standard stuff. In biology, as we get better at figuring out what the tree of life looks like and how the different branches are connected, taxonomy changes to reflect our improved understanding of the world around us and the animals in it. This generally makes things clearer for biologists. Sometimes, however, taxonomic trolls come along and make everything more opaque and confusing.

In 1984 Wells & Wellington threw a real spanner in the works (Australian expression) by self-publishing a non-peer reviewed paper, which was essentially a glorified list of all the species of reptile in Australia. They "started" their own journal in order to publish it, and to date these lists are the only thing the "journal" has ever published. The major problem with this list of Australian reptiles is that they decided to use it to describe a whole bunch of new species. They described them very very poorly, to the point that it's nigh-on impossible, if you have an animal in hand, to tell what species Wells & Wellington think that animal belongs to. This kind of crap is often referred to as taxonomic vandalism and, for whatever reason, Australian reptiles seem to be its greatest victims. Here is an excellent rundown of this problem from the scientific literature, and here is an equally excellent one in the popular literature.

One thing Wells & Wellington did was invent the genus Rankinia based on, as far as I can tell, almost nothing. They elevated chapmani to species level, based on actually nothing. Literally, all they say is "Rankinia chapmani (Storr, 1977): Herein formally elevated to specific status; confined to the western Nullarbor Plain."*  They did a similar thing with Tympanocryptis butleri, which, less than ten years earlier, in a paper Wells & Wellington cite, was moved into Amphibolurus. So Wells & Wellington moved butleri and parviceps back into Tympanocryptis without any justification, elevated butleri and chapmani to species status without any justification, and invented the genus Rankinia for adelaidensis and chapmani for no good reason.

*Side note: What Wells & Wellington call Rankinia chapmani is not confined to the western Nullarbor plain. It's found from Albany in Western Australia to the tip of the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia.

Rankinia butleri and Rankinia parviceps

In 1985, Wells & Wellington self-published another non-peer reviewed glorified list, this time of the reptiles and amphibians of Australia. In this new list they put butleri and parviceps in their invented genus Rankinia. The most impressively ballsy part of this is that they don't even point it out. They make absolutely no attempt to indicate that they've moved these species, let alone some kind of justification for it. Moving species from one genus to another usually involves entire papers worth of justification.

Various combinations of Amphibolurus, Rankinia and Tympanocryptis with adelaidensis, butleri, chapmani and parviceps

What followed is 20 years of chaos. These lizards are rather obscure, that goodness, so as far as I can tell there hasn't been a large body of scientific literature published on these species. Part of the problem of taxonomic vandalism is that is makes it very difficult to do thorough literature searches. You can never be sure you've seen all the papers on your creature of interest as maybe someone has published something relevant using a different taxonomy.

I tried to figure out what, if anything, had been published in the scientific literature since Wells & Wellington. I did literature searches for just the species names (i.e. no genera) and various words I thought were relevant, such as "agamidae" "lizard" or "Australia". For example, I did searches for "parviceps Agamidae" and "chapmani Australia". I wasn't able to come up with much. Most of what I found were biodiversity surveys that turned up one of the four taxon. The papers I did turn up used a mixture of genera for the different species, as well as referring to butleri and chapmani as subspecies or species.

Perhaps a better example of the chaos is the variation in taxonomy used by the highly respected experts who have published books on Australian reptiles and amphibians since Wells & Wellington. The 1983 edition Reptiles and Amphibians of Australia by Harold Cogger uses Amphibolurus adelaidensis and Tympanocryptis parviceps and doesn't list subspecies. The 2000 edition of the same book uses Tympanocryptis  for both adelaidensis and parviceps  and lists both butleri and chapmani as subspecies. The Biology & Evolution of Australian Lizards by Allen Greer (1989) uses Rankinia adelaidensis, Rankinia chapmani, Tympanocryptis butleri and Tympanocryptis parviceps. A Complete Guide to Reptiles of Australia by Steve Wilson & Gerry Swan, published in 2003, uses Rankinia for both adelaidensis and parviceps and lists butleri and chapmani as subspecies.

Ctenophorus adelaidensis and Ctenophorus chapmani

Finally, along comes the hero of our story. In 2001, Jane Melville & colleagues published a study that used the Ctenophorus phylogeny to look at ecological diversification in agamid lizards in Australia. A small side-result of the project was the discovery (which appears to be rather unexpected, though it's hard to tell from dry scientific literature) that what Jane et al. call Rankinia adelaidensis is actually a Ctenophorus. So these lizards didn't belong in any of the three genera that they kept being bounced between, but in a genus nobody predicted! Based on this result, Melville et al. suggest moving adelaidensis and chapmani into Ctenophorus.

Ctenophorus butleri and Ctenophorus parviceps

In 2008, this whole ugly mess was finally put to bed. Jane Melville & colleagues published a thorough analysis of the genetics and morphology of all four taxa. They show that each taxa is its own species and that the four species belong in the genus Ctenophorus. So now we have Ctenophorus adelaidensis, Ctenophorus butleri, Ctenophorus chapmani and Ctenophorus parviceps. Whew.

Originally I intended to not say anything about these lizards, and yet I seem to have said more about them than any other thing here. Despite being members of the Ctenophorus they are not part of my PhD. Which is lucky, because they're apparently not that easy to find. We were within range of Ctenophorus chapmani for a week in October 2013 and we didn't see a single one. That's despite spending the entire time looking for small, ground-dwelling dragons. Oh well. My next post will have more pictures and fewer words, promise.

House Possum

There used to be a small family of common brushtail possums ("brushies") living in the walls of my house in Canberra. They squabble quite a bit (or at least it sounds like squabbling), so we knew when they were home. We never did anything to discourage them from living with us, but lately it's been pretty quite and I think they've moved house. Nonetheless, they're still around. The mother has always been the tamest of the family, and when I hang my laundry outside after dark she'll often come up to me and give me a sniff. She's pretty happy being patted as well, as long as I move slowly and don't do anything to spook her. Someone probably feeds her, but I don't.

A member of the brushtail family feeding around my house. A visiting researcher who had spent four months in Australia without seeing a brushy can be seen in the background, fulfilling her dream on her last night in Canberra.

A member of the brushtail family feeding around my house. A visiting researcher who had spent four months in Australia without seeing a brushy can be seen in the background, fulfilling her dream on her last night in Canberra.

Recently, the mother brushy had a new baby emerge from her pouch. Brushies are marsupials, so babies are born tiny, pink, and useless. They mature in their mother's pouch, protected from the harsh world and consuming only their mother's milk. Once they have eyes, fur, and various other things possums need to survive, they leave the pouch and ride around on their mother's back for a while. That's what I saw when the mother brushy came running up to me while I was hanging laundry last night.

Burrowing Dragons, group 1

In his book "Biology and Evolution of Australian Lizards", Allen Greer sorted the lizards I study, the genus Ctenophorus, into different groups based on where they live: those that live in burrows, those that live in rock crevices, and those that live in vegetation. Looking at the phylogenetic relatedness of the Ctenophorus dragons, there are two groups of each: two groups of burrowers, two groups of rock-dwellers, and two groups of vegetation-dwellers. I thought it'd be fun to put up pictures and descriptions of all these groups, since I have a large pile of pictures from my fieldwork. Here is my first post, on the first group of rock-dwellers. 

Since I started with a small group, why not continue the trend? The first group of burrowers also consists of only two species. In sharp contrast to the two rock dragons, however, these two look almost identical. They're both called "netted dragons" because it looks like someone's taken a plain-coloured dragon and tied a fish-net stocking over it. I guess they're rather kinky fellas. 

Though they're both named for their geographical distributions, as the central and western netted dragons, in reality their ranges overlap quite extensively. The central netted dragon is found over a huge swath of Australia, as can be seen in the map below which I screen-grabbed from the Atlas of Living Australia. The western netted dragon is more restricted to southwest Australia, but is still found over a huge area. The atlas is not perfect, and some of these points are almost certainly erroneous. For example, the central netted dragon record from Brisbane and the western netted dragon record from Katherine.

The ranges of the central (in green) and western (in brown) netted dragons, according to the records of the Atlas of Living Australia.

Central Netted Dragon (Ctenophorus nuchalis)

The central netted dragon (Ctenophorus nuchalis) is one of Australia's most recognisable and ubiquitous lizards. The only lizards I can think of that beat the central netted dragon in these two categories are the bearded dragons (Pogonas vitticeps and barbata). Maybe the bluetongues of the genus Tiliqua. Though central netted dragons may not be quite as ubiquitous or famous as those critters, they share many of the same characteristics. They are tough as nails, live happily in the harshest habitats Australia offers, and make wonderful pets. They are easy to breed in captivity and are regularly available in the pet trade in Australia.

A hatchling central netted dragon that was bred here at the ANU. Central netted dragons are easy to breed and make excellent pets. Photo by Lisa Schwanz.

Central netted dragons are found across a wide variety of habitats here in Australia, but they seem to be at their densest in red sand country. Driving along a dirt track in a sandy area of central Australia can give you the impression that these guys exist in plague proportions. Because they are so common, they are well known to the people who live in the Australian outback. When I showed some cattle ranchers what we were looking for, they knew the lizards quite well and referred to them as "gumby lizards" apparently because of their dumpy heads. They love to sit along the side of dirt tracks, on that little elevated mound of dirt made by the grater as it smooths out the road (about the same thing as what a snow plow used to leave on my driveway back in Canada, after I'd already shovelled it.) Being burrowers, they'll usually have a little burrow in the mound, which they'll duck back into if they feel threatened. 

A red dirt track with sand ridges makes perfect central netted dragon habitat. Henbury Station, Northern Territory, 2012.

Western Netted Dragon (Ctenophorus reticulatus)

The other species in this group of burrowers, the western netted dragon (Ctenophorus reticulatus), looks very similar to the central netted dragon, to the point where you have to examine the shape of their femoral pores to be sure of which species you're looking at. However, western netted dragons are a heck a lot rarer than central netteds. We spent a fair amount of time in western netted dragon territory during my fieldwork, and in that whole time, every netted dragon we ever caught was a central. In 2013 we spent a week doing research outside the range of the central netted dragon, so every netted dragon we saw was pretty much guaranteed to be a western. In that week, I saw two lizards I was pretty sure were netted dragons. Both times we failed to catch the dragon, so I'll never know for sure if I've ever seen a western netted dragon. Good thing we didn't need them for my PhD!

Rock Dragon Group 1

About a month ago (!) I decided to start putting up pictures of the dragons I study, sorting them into the habitat groups originally described by Greer in the 1980's. This is a useful way to think about the dragons because, according to their evolutionary relationships, there are two phylogenetically conserved clades of each habitat group: two groups of vegetation-dwellers, two groups of rock-crevice dwellers and two groups of burrowers. By going through these groups one-by-one, it gives me a nice way of posting some lizard pictures, some habitat pictures, and breaking it all up into decent-sized chunks.

Let's start with a small group. This is the small group of rock dragons, with only two species. They also, despite being each other's closest living relatives, look almost nothing alike. 

Ornate Dragon (Ctenophorus ornatus)

Ornate dragons are colourful - the ones we were catching looked almost purple, especially the males - intricately patterned and extremely laterally depressed. These were the flattest out of all the species we chased. They used their particular flatness to wedge themselves into the most impossibly narrow crevices in the granite rocks on which they lived. Granite weathers in this peculiar way where the water trickles just underneath the outmost surface of the rock, creating "exfoliations" that are rather like dissecting an onion one layer at a time. The very very narrow crevices created by the exfoliations are the primary means of shelter for these dragons, making them very difficult to catch.

Ornate dragons are incredibly common on granite outcrops in southwest Western Australia. Their ubiquitousness has made them a model organism for studying optic regeneration in lizards. In any animal, if you sever the optic nerves that connect the eyes to the brain the animal becomes blind. This is despite the animal still having fully functional eyes and fully functional vision-processing brain regions. In mammals, this blindness is frustratingly permanent as the optic nerves don't regenerate, leaving the eyes permanently disconnected from the brain. In lizards, however, the optic nerve does regenerate, reconnecting the eyes with the brain. But here's the weird part: the lizard never regains its vision, despite the reconnection, and eventually the connection degenerates again. How very, very strange. Unlocking the mechanisms behind the reconnection, and trying to figure out how to get vision up and running again in these lizards may be the first step to helping people with this particular form of blindness get their sight back.

Ring-tailed Dragon (Ctenophorus caudicinctus)

Ring-tailed dragons look more like what I think of as a standard, normal-looking dragon compared to the ornate dragons. For example, they have square heads and are not particularly flat. Yet they still live in rocky areas and shelter in rock crevices. The rocky outcrops they live on, however, seem to weather into liftable-sized chunks rather than large, flat exfoliations, and as a result the crevices they shelter in are not nearly as narrow. That's because, at least where we were looking for ring-tails, they live on rocky outcrops made of sandstone instead of granite. This makes them quite easy to catch, but it turned out during my fieldwork that though catching ring-tailed dragons was not an issue, finding them was.

Ring-tailed dragons occupy a huge swath of central and western Australia, and I used to think of them as being quite common. They're the only species of Ctenophorus I'd seen before starting this PhD. That's because they're very easy to find in Watarrka and Kakadu National Parks, two very popular vacation spots I visited as a tourist in 2005. So when we started my fieldwork in 2012, I was not expecting to have a problem finding them. It turns out, however, that ring-tails are not so easy to find outside of national parks. We scoured rocky outcrops, struggling to come up with any dragons. We did eventually find all the lizards we needed for my project, but it took a heck of a lot longer than I was expecting, and we spent a lot of time driving huge distances checking out possible locations. It's extremely hot out there, and spending all day scrambling over rocks, searching for tiny brown lizards that you just can't find, is pretty disheartening. When we did start finding them, we got pretty excited: