Russian scientists have discovered a supposedly new taxon of serpent lizards

Do you think geometry can be useful to a zoologist? It’s hard to imagine such a situation, right? Nevertheless, it was she who helped the scientists of the Zoom Museum of Moscow State University to identify a presumably new taxon of Iranian snake lizards.

To understand what happened – a little educational program. A taxon in biology is a group of organisms related to each other by a degree of kinship and at the same time isolated from others. Taxa can be of various ranks. For example, humans, as a biological species, are a taxon. Hominids, which, in addition to us, include the living gorillas and chimpanzees, as well as a huge number of extinct Homo, are also a taxon, only of a higher rank. Next come the taxa of primates, mammals, vertebrates, chordates, and so on.

One of the largest families of lizards – skinks – has 130 genera and more than one and a half thousand species. Among them is the genus Ophiomorus. They are also called snake lizards because they have short, even reduced limbs with 2-4 fingers and an elongated serpentine body. Two species generally parted with their limbs. Distributed in Southern Europe, Southwest and Central Asia up to Pakistan and India. Serpent lizards lead a burrowing lifestyle, many “swim” in loose sand. Therefore, it is difficult to study them, scientists usually work with single specimens, and to compare species with each other, they count the number of fingers on the reduced paws and compare the shields on the head.

And so Russian scientists, together with their Iranian colleagues, studied an unusually large sample of these serpent lizards – 54 specimens of 7 species common in Iran – four of them are endemic, that is, they are found only in Iran and nowhere else. In the study, the method of geometric morphometry was applied. With its help, scientists studied the shields on the heads of these lizards, investigated the variability of their shape and size.

The results showed that in representatives of two species – the Persian and Maranjab snake lizards (O. persicus and O. Maranjabensis), head shielding is very peculiar and differs from other species.

Another surprise came from a population of the species O. Nuchalis from the Iranian Highlands, whose head shielding was significantly different from that of other populations of the same species living in the valley south of the Caspian. This suggests that an independent taxon inhabits the highlands.

Interestingly, all species in which these features have been identified are endemic to Iran.

To test the hypothesis, scientists will study these species using the method of molecular taxonomic diagnostics.

Yana MAYEVSKAYA.