It's #WorldLizardDay! Let's have a thread about Madagascar's magnificent lizards!

First though, a technicality out of the way: snakes are lizards too, so in the following, I am including snakes when I talk about how awesome Madagascar's lizards are.
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Madagascar has a whopping 425 lizard species (of which 101 are snakes). So about 4% of the world's squamates are found only on Madagascar!

Bear in mind, Madagascar is 0.4% of the world's land surface area.

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Let's have a breakdown of the groups of squamates in Madagascar!
Sanziniidae (4 species), an endemic family of booidean snakes. Very mysterious. Very beautiful. Very convergent evolution with Neotropical and Australasian taxa. Wow.

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Pseudoxyrhophiidae (81 species) a nearly-Madagascar-exclusive family of colubroid snakes. Hot shit. Occupy ALL the niches, all without significant venom. Eggs? Hognose. Frogs? Treesnake. Hard-bodied lizards? Hinged teeth. Fuck yeah.
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Typhlopoidea has two Madagascar-endemic blind-snake families, Madatyphlopidae (12 species) and Xenotyphlopidae (monotypic). Mysterious. Probably loads of undescribed and unknown species. Occasionally you find them in trees and lose your shit.
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More legs from here on out, though not always.
Scincidae (80 species), the skinks. So. many. species. Practically all endemic to Madagascar, most at genus level. Big ones, small ones, aquatic ones, arboreal ones, leggy ones, slithery ones. What more do you want?
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Gerrhosauridae (19 species), the plated lizards, are often confused with skinks. Madagascar has two genera, Zonosaurus and Tracheloptychus. Some are huge, some are canopy dwellers, and many can shed scales to escape predators.
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Opluridae (8 species) are Madagascar's 'iguanas'. They're a Madagascar-endemic, VERY old family, and are very into punk rock. Their closest relatives are in South America. Yeah. Old. Some species have an extremely pronounced parietal eye.
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We're down to the last two groups of lizards in Madagascar! The geckos, and the chameleons. Buckle up, this is where shit gets wild.
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Chameleons, Chamaeleonidae (96 species), might have originated on Madagascar—the jury is still out. Madagascar has five genera, ranging from the cat-sized Furcifer oustaleti to the TINY Brookesia micra and relatives. New species are discovered all the time.
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But the most speciose group of squamates on Madagascar are the geckos, Gekkonidae (121 species, with new species coming out every year). Madagascar was colonised AT LEAST TEN TIMES by geckos, and they diversified like CRAZY.
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I mean, come on. You've got to be kidding me.

This is Uroplatus finaritra, a species my colleagues and I described last year.

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Chameleons are not to be outdone, of course.

This is Calumma marojezense, a very cryptically coloured species endemic to a small massif in the northeast of Madagascar.

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In summary: Madagascar's lizards are amazing, and worthy of your love and respect. We don't know nearly enough about them.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

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CLARIFICATION: in each post above, where I gave the number of species, that is only species in Madagascar, not the total representatives of the family, except where the two are the same.

I’ve been informed by @Yara_Haridy that there were not enough chameleons in this thread. Here are a few more.
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And more. #WorldLizardDay

And more #WorldLizardDay

And more #WorldLizardDay

And more! #WorldLizardDay

Two corrections:
• Madagascar has four chameleon genera (Calumma, Furcifer, Brookesia, and Palleon), not five. This was a brain fart.
• Madatyphlopinae is a Madagascar-endemic subfamily of family Typhlopidae. Xenotyphlopidae is an endemic family.