Adelaide Zoo: Pygmy Blue Tongue Lizard

Reports of this little fellas demise were certainly premature. But that was because no-one had seen the South Australian pygmy blue tongue lizard - for more than three decades. For many years this museum exhibit served as yet another reminder of yet another local animal which was thought to have been wiped out. But all that changed more than six years ago when a biological field survey team working near Burra - and a dead brown snake - made a meal of that extinction theory.

"They found a brown snake which had been run over and killed by a car and being the through blokes they were they decided to have a closer look and Graeme Armstrong who was the reptile person in that particular group decided to look at the snake's stomach to see what it had been eating - there was a bit of a bulge there and the bulge turned out to be a very recently eaten pygmy blue tongue lizard. The first indication that we had anywhere in South Australia that they might be existing".

That historic find prompted an all-out search which uncovered several small colonies of pygmy blue tongues in patches of native grassland between Peterbrough and Burra. Prior to their rediscovery, the last time a pygmy blue tongue lizard had been seen was in 1959 under an old shed in suburban Marion - and before that few had been seen since the reptile was first identified by the German naturalist Richard Schomberg in 1863.

This miniaturised version of the common blue tongue certainly has a leisurely approach to life. It can't be fussed digging its own protective haven. Instead it adapts its "home sweet home" from the labours of others. "Trapdoor spiders and wolf spiders will dig their own holes - like missile silos I guess - during the wintertime when the ground is soft. And the lizards are able to move into those holes when they've active during summer. And from those holes they are able to sit and wait, grab prey like grasshoppers when they move. And at the first sign of danger scurry back down into the hole". You can visit these little guys in the reptile enclosure at the Adelaide Zoo which is open every day of the week. They room just across the hall from the giant South American Anaconda. For more information email info@postcards.sa.com.au