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Episode 450: Geckos and the Snow Leopard

Episode 450: Geckos and the Snow Leopard

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 Thanks for Preston and Pranav for suggesting this week's topics! Further reading: DNA has revealed the origin of this giant ‘mystery’ gecko Snow Leopards Dispersed Out of Tibetan Plateau Multiple Times, Researchers Say Conquest of Asia and Europe by snow leopards during the last Ice Ages uncovered The crested gecko AKA the eyelash gecko: The fluffy snow leopard: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a couple of suggestions from Preston and one from Pranav! This is the first episode I’ve recorded in my new apartment, so let’s make it a good one. First, Preston wanted to learn more about the crested gecko, mainly because he has a pet crested gecko named George Washington. That is one of the best gecko names ever! The crested gecko is also called the eyelash gecko. We’ve talked about it a few times, but not recently at all. It’s native to a collection of remote Pacific islands called New Caledonia, where it spends most of its time in trees, eating insects and other small animals, but also fruit, nectar, and lots of other food. It’s an omnivore and nocturnal, and can grow more than 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It gets its names from the tiny spines above its eyes that look like eyelashes, and more spines in two rows down its back, like a tiny dragon. It can be brown, reddish, orange, yellow, or gray, with various colored spots, which has made it a popular pet. These days all pet crested geckos were bred in captivity, since it’s now protected in the wild. The crested gecko has tiny claws on its toes, which is unusual since most geckos don’t have claws. It can drop its tail like other geckos if a predator is after it, but the tail doesn’t grow back. Since its tail is prehensile and helps it climb around in trees, you’d think the gecko would have trouble climbing after it loses its tail, but it doesn’t. Maybe that’s because in addition to claws, like other geckos it has basically microscopic hairlike structures on its toes that allow it to climb smooth surfaces like windows and walls and the trunks of smooth trees. It can also jump long distances to get to a new branch. The crested gecko was discovered by science in 1866, but wasn’t seen after that in so long that people thought it was extinct. Then in 1994, a German herpetologist out looking for specimens after a tropical storm found a single crested gecko. It turns out that the geckos had been fine all along, but because they’re nocturnal and mostly live in trees, scientists just hadn’t spotted any. While we’re talking about geckos, Pranav requested that we revisit Delcourt’s giant gecko with some updated information. We did mention the new findings back in episode 389, but it’s really interesting so let’s go over it again. Way back in episode 20 we talked about Delcourt’s giant gecko, which is only known from a single museum specimen donated in the 19th century. In 1979 a herpetologist named Alain Delcourt, working in the Marseilles Natural History Museum in France, noticed a big taxidermied lizard in storage and wondered what it was. It wasn’t labeled and he didn’t recognize it, surprising since it was the biggest gecko he’d ever seen—two feet long, or about 60 cm. He sent photos to several reptile experts and they didn’t know what it was either. Finally the specimen was examined and in 1986 it was described as a new species. No one knew anything about the stuffed specimen, including where it was caught. At first researchers thought it might be from New Caledonia since a lot of the museum’s other specimens were collected from the Pacific Islands. None of the specimens donated between 1833 and 1869 had any documentation, so it seemed probable the giant gecko was donated during that time and probably collected not long before. More recently there was speculation that it was actually from New Zealand, since it matched Maori lore about a big lizard called the kawekaweau. In June of 2023,
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