Either hoaxers are now circling Jupiter, or Mother Nature is going flat-out mad – whoever produced this pink lizard with the blooming flower head is a nut. Is there any chance that this is real? Or is there any association between a pink lizard and a flower? CryptoVille investigates!
One of my friends posted this on Facebook and I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a pink lizard with a flowering head, the Tasmanian Pink Lizard.
I searched high and low for pink lizards living in Tasmania and found none. So I turned back to the original photo of this blooming lizard and looked more closely at it. After searching around a bit, I learned that this image came from a Photoshop contest per someone whose Twitter handle is Alberta Fact Checker. It’s time to have a chat with Photoshop about these stupid contests …
Apart from that, there are plenty of lizards living in Tasmania. In fact, here’s a list of them courtesy of the Tasmanian Government Wildlife Management group:
Agamidae
Mountain Dragon (Rankinia diemensis)
Scincidae
Three-lined skink (Acritoscincus duperreyi)
She-oak skink* (Cyclodomorphus casuarinae)
White’s skink (Liopholis whitii)
Delicate skink (Lampropholis delicata)
Bougainville’s skink (Lerista bougainvillii)
Mountain skink* (Carinascincus orocryptum)
Northern Snow skink* (Carinascincus greeni)
Southern Snow skink* (Carinascincus microlepidotus)
Spotted skink* (Carinascincus ocellatus)
Pedra Branca skink* (Carinascincus palfreymani)
Tasmanian Tree skink* (Carinascincus pretiosus)
Metallic skink (Carinascincus metallicus)
Southern Grass skink (Pseudemoia entrecasteauxii)
Tussock skink (Pseudemoia pagenstecheri)
Glossy Grass skink (Pseudemoia rawlinsoni)
Blotched Blue-tongue lizard (Tiliqua nigrolutea)
Southern Water Skink (Eulamprus tympanum)
Endemic species are marked with an asterisk (*)
Here are photos of 3 of them.
Spotted Skink
Tasmanian Tree Skink
Blotched Blue-Tongue Lizard/Skink
None of the ones from that list are pink.
Hola Rosa Topo! (Hello Pink Mole!)
This is the closest I came to finding a pink lizard. In an article for Treehugger.com, Melissa Breyer writes, “You think you know lizards. And then, this appears out of nowhere: The ol’ Mexican mole lizard. Despite its appearance, it is not a worm, and it is not a snake. It is a legless lizard – but since everything about this creature is unusual, it is a legless lizard with legs. Even if they are just two little T-rex grabbers to help it effectively scoot about and dig.
University of California Berkeley graduate student Kaitlyn Kraybill-Voth along with herpetologist Sara Ruane from Rutgers University-Newark were out in Baja California, Mexico, setting traps for a general biodiversity survey. Since this candy-colored cutie – who is 9-inches long, by the way – rarely breaks the surface, the scientists were more than surprised to see it.
“It was shocking to see one in this trap, I couldn’t believe it was in there,” says Ruane.
Known to the science set as Bipes biporus, the animals belong to the family of amphisbaenians, a group of legless lizards that are more closely related to legged lizards than they are to snakes.”
Very interesting but notice there are no flowers blooming anywhere on it! Plus, it lives in Mexico.
Lizard Orchid
Then, unbelievably, I stumbled upon a flower called a Lizard Orchid, Burnettia cuneata. Ok, it doesn’t have arms or legs, or even a head, but it’s lovely!
According to Wiki, “[B. cuneata] is a leafless terrestrial, mycotrophic herb with one or two leaf-like bracts and up to seven flowers that are brownish on the back and pink or white inside. It is endemic to southeastern Australia where it grows in dense thickets in swamps.”
Later in their article, they note it was first discovered by John Lindley in 1840 from a specimen harvested in Tasmania.
So there you have it – one pink lizard, but it lives in Mexico and does not have a flower on its head. One beautiful orchid native to SE Australia (and Tasmania at some point) that for some reason was named after lizards.
We live in a crazy, fascinating world, don’t we?
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References
https://www.treehugger.com/blushing-pink-lizard-only-two-limbs-wonderfully-weird-video-4857131
https://dpipwe.tas.gov.au/wildlife-management/fauna-of-tasmania/reptiles-and-frogs/tasmanian-lizards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnettia