Leiocephalus eremitus
| Leiocephalus eremitus | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Leiocephalus eremitus | ||||||||||||
| ( Cope , 1868) |
Leiocephalus eremitus is an extinct species of lizard from the family of the smooth-headed iguanas (Leiocephalidae). It was endemic to the uninhabited Caribbean island of Navassa and is only known from a single female described in 1868. A second individual, which wascollectedby Rollo Beck in 1917, turned out to bea specimen of the species Leiocephalus melanochlorus during a later examination by the herpetologist Richard Thomas .
The length of the holotype is given as 64 mm. The head scales and the ventral scales are smooth. The back scales are larger than the flank scales or the belly scales. The back is dark gray with 9 dark diagonal bands. The front half of the tail is light with diagonal bands and uniformly dark gray to black in the rear half. Throat, chest, abdomen and extremities are brown with light-edged scales.
Nothing is known about the way of life and the causes of extinction.
literature
- Albert Schwartz , Robert W. Henderson: Amphibians and Reptiles of the West Indies. Descriptions, Distributions, and Natural History. University of Florida Press, Gainesville FL 1991, ISBN 0-8130-1049-7 .
- Robert Powell: Herpetology of Navassa Island, West Indies. In: Caribbean Journal of Science. Vol. 35, No. 1/2, 1999, ISSN 0008-6452 , pp. 1–13, digitized version (PDF; 2.27 MB) ( Memento from July 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ).
Web links
- Photo of the holotype
- Leiocephalus eremitus in The Reptile Database
- Leiocephalus eremitus inthe IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2013.2. Listed by: World Conservation Monitoring Center, 1996. Retrieved January 5, 2014.