Rare find hidden beside outback road after decades-long hunt
Dr Jane Melville is an expert in Australia's dragons, but there's one species she's never seen in the wild — the hidden dragon. 'They're so hard to find,' Melville, the senior curator of terrestrial vertebrates at Museums Victoria, told Yahoo News.
Over a decade ago, Melville spent a week searching the last places where hidden dragons were collected — the hillsides north of the famous Wolfe Creek crater in 1979 and Wave Hill in the Top End in 1984.
'We walked around for a week looking for the dragons, but didn't locate them,' she said. 'We know very little about them. They're quite small, so they have quite small home ranges, and they live on this rocky, stony ground.'
It's unknown whether they have vanished from those places, and how rare they are elsewhere. In 2011, a botanist accidentally photographed one in the Kimberley, but that was the only sighting until a massive discovery in 2016.
In its isolation, Australia developed more lizard species than anywhere else on the planet, with goannas evolving to fill the role as a top-tier predator in some parts of the country, similar to how the now extinct 3.6-metre-high moa was once dominant in New Zealand.
For years, the hidden dragon was known by just six 'old' scientific specimens. Measurements taken of the animals late last century were enough to confirm they were a separate species, but it wasn't standard practice to take genetic samples at the time before preserving them in chemicals, so which genus they belonged to was unknown.
Excitingly, the dragons were found again at five new sites in the remote central Kimberly in 2016. One of the first to see them was Stephen Mahony, an expert field ecologist who specialises in tracking down reptiles.
He was volunteering with non-profit Australian Wildlife Conservancy at its Mornington-Marion Downs Wildlife Sanctuary in 2016. Thousands of years of evolutionary development has given the hidden dragon the ability to camouflage against the earth, but luckily for Mahony and his colleague, this one was easy to see.
'We were driving a car, and saw out the car window a tiny dragon perched on a rock next to the road. We were pretty amazed, because we as ecologists instantly recognised that this was a dragon that hadn't been seen in years,' he said.
'We went back for a search the next day and found several more. Some of them were on top of rocks, some were under rocks, and others were sitting out in the open, but curled up really cryptically, mimicking the rocks themselves.'
Because the hidden dragon appeared visually unique when studied last century, it was placed in its own solitary genus called Cryptagama. But new genetic material collected from 2016 onwards that Melville and her team examined, confirmed it was actually part of the Ctenophorus genus.
'Ctenophorus is the biggest genus of dragon lizards. We revised its taxonomy to take it out of the genus Cryptagama and into the genus Ctenophorus, which means it's now Ctenophorus aurita,' Melville said.
Her team says this new research into the hidden dragon, "completes the puzzle" of our understanding of the genetic lineages of known Australian dragon species. These findings were published in the Australian Journal of Taxonomy in June.
It's not the first time lizards from other genera have been reclassified as Ctenophorus, a genus with remarkable diversity. Researchers have discovered earless dragons that were once classified as Tympanocryptis are actually genetically Ctenophorus. It also includes fast-moving Central Australian sand-dwelling military dragons and robust netted dragons that live in the desert.
'It's really interesting that one related group of lizards has spread across these arid and semi-arid environments across all the different habitats available, from rocky deserts to sandy deserts, with this diversity of morphology,' she said.
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There's a key reason researchers need to describe these rare and cryptic species in such detail — it's often the only way to ensure they aren't wiped out.
It was Melville's 2019 paper that revealed what was believed to be one species of grassland earless dragons in the eastern states was actually four. Crucially, this meant at the time that two of them, the Victorian and Bathurst species, could have been extinct as they hadn't been observed in decades.
This would have been the first time a reptile had gone extinct in the wild on mainland Australia. The Victorian species was rediscovered at one site in 2023, and it's unlikely to exist anywhere else in the wild, and researchers are still searching for evidence that the Bathurst species survives.
The world is undergoing a human-driven mass extinction event, believed to be wiping out species 1,000 to 10,000 times what would naturally be occurring. In Australia, habitat destruction, climate change and the spread of invasive species all remain key threats to native wildlife.
There's no doubt that some small species with limited home ranges have vanished entirely without anyone ever knowing they existed, a phenomenon referred to as silent extinction.
Melville thinks it's entirely possible there could be more species of dragon lizard, camouflaged in remote parts of Australia still waiting to be described.
'It wouldn't completely surprise me if there were,' she said. 'I was up in the Kimberley some time, up on the Mitchell Plateau, and I saw a dragon that was completely different. We called it Diporiphora pallida and it's the only one that's ever been caught. They could be up there everywhere, but no one goes there.'
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