When you purchase through links on our site , we may earn an affiliate commission . Here ’s how it works .
" If they do n’t have legs , how amount they ’re not serpent ? " I ’m ask that doubtfulness a lot when explaining my Ph.D. research , which focalise on a mintage of legless lounge lizard discover throughout Australia and New Guinea .
The response , of path , dwell in ancestry . Legless lizards are not snakes . Rather , functional limblessness has evolved severally perhaps a dozen prison term in the squamate reptile — lizards , snakesand amphisbaenids , or worm lizards — suggesting that the consistency plan offers many advantage .
The Bakersfield legless lizard (Anniella grinnelli), which today ranges from downtown Bakersfield in the southern San Joaquin Valley to the Carrizo Plain National Monument 30 miles to the west.
serpent are just the most successful of the blood line that went limbless , radiating over clip into roughly 3,000 species that have exploit nearly every available habitat , from the crown to the subject sea to the ground beneath our feet .
Indeed , limblessness is particularly associated with a burrowing lifestyle . Manylegless lizardsspend their lives underground , and the leading hypothesis for the blood line of snakes posit that they evolved from fossorial ancestors ( although some scientists think the forerunners of serpents were aquatic reptilian known as mosasaurs ) .
All this being said , there are a few ways to tell snakes apart from the absolute majority of leglesslizards . For good example , snakes tend to have comparatively farseeing bodies and shorter tails than their limbless reptilian cousins . Further , snake do n’t have eyelids or external pinna , while most lizards do . And many " legless " lizard actually have petite vestigial limbs , while ophidian generally cavort no external appendages at all .
There also tend to be heavy bionomical divergence between Snake River and limbless lizard . Most serpents take relatively big prey item on an infrequent basis , while lizards lean to eat declamatory numbers of small creatures such as insects .
But you ca n’t always bank on these guideline . python and boas , for example , have underlying hind limbs that males use during suit and mating . And the species that I analyze in grad school — Burton ’s legless lizard , Lialis burtonis — has no eyelids , just like a Snake River . It eats like a snake , too , set on other lounge lizard up to one-half of its own weight unit , choking them out and swallowing them whole . ( Yes , Lialis burtonisis a somewhat amazing little fauna . )
