Peg–Legged Lizards Lead A Pirate’s Life On Caribbean Islands

Peg–Legged Lizards Lead A Pirate’s Life On Caribbean Islands

Peg–Legged Lizards Lead A Pirate’s Life On Caribbean Islands An amputee American green anole – credit, Tony Gamble supplied to Washington University The Bahamas were once crawling with pirates, but have always been crawling with lizards. Do the two have anything in common? Well, much like the old trope of pirates missing legs and hands, many of the lizards of the Bahamas are too. The reason we know this is because there happened to be the right person in the right place with the right interests at the right time: Jonathan Losos—who began to notice that peg-legged lizards were pretty nimble. In fact, after decades of study and a worldwide academic collaboration, Losos’ paper on the subject reveals that agility and capability was a trait possessed by over a hundred amputee lizards. Losos first formed this ad-hoc study project when he was catching and measuring anole lizards (pronounced a-nole-ee) in the Bahamas over 20 years ago, and noticed a female who was missing part of her hindleg. She wa…