All posts tagged: lizard

New Mars rover could swim through sand like a desert lizard

New Mars rover could swim through sand like a desert lizard

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. To effectively travel on Mars, rovers need to deal with a lot of sand. German engineers have created a new kind of ground rover that uses swimming motions to push through sand that may otherwise cause the  wheels to get stuck. Its inspiration: the African sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard known for burrowing into the Sahara Desert and literally swimming through its sand like a fish. It’s one of the animal kingdom’s strangest methods of propulsion, but it may help shape the future of Mars exploration. A video of the rover, released this week by the University of Würzburg, shows a mini-fridge-sized, silver rover making its way through a sandy, Martian-mimicking test floor. Rather than rolling forward, each of its four wheels cuts through the sand in what looks like a figure-eight motion. The rover pushes on several yards and then cuts a corner and returns to where it started. Sandfish-inspired rover “The wheels mimic the animal’s [sandfish’s]characteristic interaction …

The hidden forest lizard that forced scientists to rethink reptile classification

The hidden forest lizard that forced scientists to rethink reptile classification

Published by Jenni Sidey

A slender reptile slips beneath damp leaf litter in Taiwan’s mountain forests, rarely seen and often mistaken for a snake. For more than a century, scientists have argued over what, exactly, it is. That question has now been settled, at least for the moment. A study in the journal ZooKeys concludes that Taiwan’s elusive legless lizard represents its own distinct species, Dopasia formosensis, rather than a variant of a more widespread mainland species. The work, led by Si-Min Lin at National Taiwan Normal University, also restores a name that had effectively disappeared after its original reference specimen was lost during World War II. A Taxonomic Puzzle That Wouldn’t Settle Confusion around these lizards dates back to 1909, when the first specimen from Taiwan was collected near what is now Yangmingshan. Early researchers debated whether the animal belonged to an existing species, Dopasia harti, or represented something new. Sample localities in this study: 1 = Yangmingshan, Taipei; 2 = Hinokiyama (type locality in 1930); 3 = Baling, Taoyuan; 4 = Siling, Taoyuan; 5 = Mingchi, Yilan …

Frostbitten lizard found in Rhode Island is healing

Frostbitten lizard found in Rhode Island is healing

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. While shoveling his driveway during yet another winter storm, a man in Providence, Rhode Island found something rather unexpected—a very cold giant lizard. Fortunately, the animal rehabilitation experts at the New England Wildlife Center found that besides being very dehydrated and having frostbite on its tongue and toes, the female tegu named Frankie was doing okay.  Tegus are large South American reptiles, so how did Frankie end up in the middle of a snowstorm in New England? Tess Gannaway, a veterinarian at the wildlife center who treated Frankie, tells Popular Science that she was probably someone’s pet.  “Given their size they often roam folk’s homes like dogs or cats and there is a chance that in warmer months Frankie escaped and was surviving on her own outside until the weather got too cold for her to manage,” Gannaway explains. There’s also the more unfortunate possibility that the lizard was recently abandoned. The black on the tip of Frankie’s tongue …