At least four new species of legless lizards have been discovered living in different throughout California.
State biologist recently found legless lizards living at the end of a runway at Los Angeles International Airport, in the Mojave Desert, in oil derricks located in San Joaquin Valley, and in downtown Bakersfield, according to a press statement made by the University of California Berkeley.
"You don't have to go to remote places to find biodiversity," Ted Papenfuss of UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology said in a statement. "California has so much biodiversity we're not even aware of."
The species looks like a snake and initially experts believed they belong to one species, but a recent discovery proved otherwise, according to a paper published in Breviora.
Click here to read the paper.
During the last 15 years, Papenfuss and his colleague James F. Parham of California State University, gathered samples of the legless lizards from all-over the state and began studying their DNA.
What the duo realized is that they had discovered four new species, each with unique belly color, DNA, arrangement of scales, and number of vertebrae, according to the paper.
The legless lizard is currently listed by the state as a "species of special concern" though this could change quickly.
"These species definitely warrant attention, but we need to do a lot more surveys in California before we can know whether they need higher listing," Parham said.
The legless lizards can be up to 8 inches long, but are rarely seen because they live underground. The lizards live by eating insects and larvae, and spend most of their lives in an area that's approximately the size of a dining table.
The snakes can be discovered by people who overturn large rocks or logs according to the paper.
Despite the discoveries, California biologist promise that they're not done searching for legless lizards.
"This is only the beginning of the story," Parham said. "We need to further study each species' distribution. At this point, each species has quite small ranges, and if that's truly the case, more monitoring of their habitat needs to be done. If we lose those small spaces, we'll lose those species."
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