Philippines dragon-sized lizard is a new species

[moz_k2]

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source: Philippines dragon-sized lizard is a new species - Yahoo! News

A dragon-sized, fruit-eating lizard that lives in the trees on the northern Philippines island of Luzon has been confirmed as a new species, scientists reported on Tuesday. Hunted for its tasty flesh, the brightly colored forest monitor lizard can grow to more than six feet in length but weighs only about 22 pounds (10 kg), said Rafe Brown of the University of Kansas, whose team confirmed the find.
"It lives up in trees, so it can't get as massive as the Komodo dragon, a huge thing that eats large amounts of fresh meat," Brown said by telephone. "This thing is a fruit-eater and it's only the third fruit-eating lizard in the world."
Discovering such a large vertebrate species is extremely rare, Brown said. The lizard, a new species of the genus Varanus, is skittish and able to hide from humans, its primary predators, which could explain why it has gone undetected by scientists for so long.
Biologists first saw photographs of the big, skinny lizard in 2001, when those surveying the area passed hunters carrying the lizards' colorful carcasses, but the species at that point had never been given a scientific identification.
In the next few years, Brown said, ethnobiologists kept hearing stories "about these two kinds of lizard that everyone liked to eat because their flesh tasted better than the ones that lived on the ground; this thing was described as bigger and more brightly colored."
The two kinds of lizard described by the local people were two names for the same animal, Brown said.
CLAW SCRATCHES ON TREES
In 2009, graduate students at the end of a two-month expedition kept seeing signs of the big lizard. There were claw-scratches on trees and clumps of pandanus trees, whose fruit the lizard prefers.
The clumps indicated that the lizards had eaten pandanus fruit and then excreted the seeds in clusters.
"It was literally in the last couple days of the expedition, we were running out of money and food and this was the payoff: they finally got this gigantic animal," Brown said.
Hunters who had heard of the team's interest brought a barely-alive adult male lizard to their camp. The team euthanized the animal and did genetic tests that confirmed it as a unique species, Brown said.
DNA analysis showed there was a deep genetic divergence between the new lizard and its closest relative, Gray's monitor lizard, which is also a fruit-eater but lives on the southern end of Luzon, rather than the northern end where the forest monitor lizard lives.
"They are extremely secretive," Brown said of the new species. "I think that centuries of humans hunting them have made the existing populations ... very skittish and wary and we never see them. They see and hear us before we have a chance to see them, they scamper up trees before we have a chance to come around."
These findings were published in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters, with additional work by scientists in the Philippines and the Netherlands.

images taken from discovermagazine

Sus pila na katuig gipang hunting karon pa nadiscover.

[moy1moy1]

actually, dili ni sya new species hehe ug dili ni newly discovered, but recently "rediscovered" since it has been declared extinct na before sa ia rediscovery..

it is the butaan or the Gray's monitor lizard, the only monitor lizard, if not in the world, that eats fruit and almost exclusively in pandanus fruits~

https://www.istorya.net/forums/scienc...ml#post6267648

click here hehe for added info~ maybe the pic is a bit different , it is because ang pic na aku gesample kay meju adult na nga specimen so dull na ngunit eto ay olive green with yellow reticulated spekles sa body same sa imu pic

[radiostar]

mura man og haw tan.awon

[lomotel]

hawo gyud tuod..murag manok ang karne ani

[moy1moy1]

mura man og haw tan.awon

haw bitaw na hehe k2 lng rare kind

[ground_crashed]

sus malipay ta kai na news ni ug inani samtang wala pa nahurot. lami baya daw ning haw, nya kibaw nakas mga taw uban. kung nadugayan aw ma extinct jud ni na species.

[Hat Trick]

ayusa karon ra ko kahibaw naa diay tay ingon ani dah

[radiostar]

daghan haw nad2 sa amo probinsya, e himo og pulutan... hehehe pero wala pako ka ka.on kay ana ako lola na.a man daw la

[moy1moy1]

ka OT b ninyo oi hehe kanang inyung gehsgutan nga haw water monitor na kanang prrme e chibog kani sa taas gepost sa TS nga haw nihit nah hehehe

[Eisen Japhet Larnx]

actually, dili ni sya new species hehe ug dili ni newly discovered, but recently "rediscovered" since it has been declared extinct na before sa ia rediscovery..

it is the butaan or the Gray's monitor lizard, the only monitor lizard, if not in the world, that eats fruit and almost exclusively in pandanus fruits~

https://www.istorya.net/forums/scienc...ml#post6267648

click here hehe for added info~ maybe the pic is a bit different , it is because ang pic na aku gesample kay meju adult na nga specimen so dull na ngunit eto ay olive green with yellow reticulated spekles sa body same sa imu pic

mura lahi gur0 ni cya bai....

ky naa mn ni sa southern part sa luz0n...
sa northern part mn dw ni cya mkit.an...

DNA analysis showed there was a deep genetic divergence between the new lizard and its closest relative, Gray's monitor lizard, which is also a fruit-eater but lives on the southern end of Luzon, rather than the northern end where the forest monitor lizard lives.