In northern Mexico, a strange reptile was found, similar to a worm and a lizard at the same time. The body of the animal found is pink and ringed. Moreover, the lizard has only front legs.
Do you know who this is?
These lizards predominantly live underground; they are quite difficult to meet on the surface and study.
Sarah Ruan, professor of evolutionary biology and herpetology at Rutgers University in Newark, discovered a lizard in the Mexican state of Baja California.
It turned out that the lizard belongs to the order of scaly reptiles - two-walkers (Amphisbaenia), and has nothing to do with the suborders of snakes and lizards. The Mexican mole lizard is 24 cm long, and scientists speculate that snakes that navigate the tunnels dug by the lizard are its natural enemy.
Like the suborder of lizards, two-walkers or amphisbens are able to throw off their tail, which, however, after this trick does not grow back.
It is also called ailot, or the Mexican mole lizard.
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This reptile lives in the sandy desert soils of the California Peninsula, clearing passages with its paws in combination with ramming head movements.
Locals call the animal ailot and believe that it can crawl inside a person. However, there is no documentary evidence of such an invasion; moreover, it is extremely rare to even see the ailot. He spends most of his life underground, where he feeds on insects and termites.
Recently, biologists from the University of California managed to film a mole lizard, moreover, it happened by accident. Young scientists simply set up several cameras in different places; the task was to fix the representatives of the fauna of the Mexican state of Baja California Sur.
In the 1980s, herpetologists gathered to specifically study these reptiles, but out of more than 2,000 collected individuals, only three were found on the surface: all the rest led their usual underground lifestyle.