Harpesaurus tricinctus
I believe that several ways exist to do Science in Herpetology. Proposing and experimentally verifying hypotheses, for example, that a species is new to science, is one of them. But sometimes, important discoveries come out of nowhere, at least in appearance. In fact, they come from unrelated data and observations which, in certain circumstances, come together in a mind and lead to a concrete result.
I had the chance to make several discoveries of this nature during my career. The first concerns a very abundant and widely distributed small Pacific skink that everyone thought was a single species, Emoia cyanura. By observing several thousand specimens in the laboratory, I noted certain morphological and coloring characters whose presence varied from one individual to another, but many were linked to each other. I left it at that, but once in the field in French Polynesia a few years later, very quickly I realized that all these characters made it possible to highlight two sympatric, but not quite syntopic, species that everyone was confusing until my thesis work in 1987. Immense pleasure!
The second discovery is that of an external supralabial gland whose excretion orifice is visible in all snakes of the genus Echis. Hundreds of herpetologists have counted the supralabial scales in these snakes without seeing this orifice, which is so obvious now.
The third discovery in my career as a herpetologist is that of Bocourt’s terrifying skink (Phoboscincus bocourti). It was on a small tiny island in New Caledonia that I found, in 2003, a very large lizard that had been considered extinct for almost 150 years. Never such a discovery was imaginable, even less in this small place yet already explored by herpetologists.
Harpesaurus tricinctus MNHN 0623 HOLOTYPE
Now let’s see my fourth and most recent discovery. Being responsible for the collections of squamate reptiles at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris from 1988 until 2014, I often took photographs of lizards to respond to requests from colleagues. This is how, at the beginning of my career, I was asked to photograph a very original little Asian draconine agamid due to the presence of a relatively long flexible rostrum at the front of its head. The origin of this unique specimen is obscure because only “Java” is indicated without a collector’s name. Auguste Duméril described this specimen in 1851 as a new species, Harpesaurus tricinctus. There is a vellum which represents this lizard still relatively fresh with some colors preserved. The lizard has never been found since and is considered extinct.
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In December 2016 I was looking at issue 4 of volume 47 of Herpetological Review. In this issue, an advertisement for the 11th Latin American Congress of Herpetology in Quito, Ecuador was illustrated with a photograph of a strange lizard that immediately caught my eye. I really thought I was dreaming when I saw this image. This lizard looked almost totally like H. tricinctus, yet it was a South American species! At first, I thought that Duméril was mistaken and that his Asian agamid was a South American dactyloid. Examination of complementary material in the collections quickly showed that these were indeed two distinct species from different families, one Asian (Agamidae) and the other South American, Anolis proboscis (Dactyloidae). The latter was long, mysterious and no data were published on its ecology until 2007. From that year, the species was rediscovered and its ecology described. I then thought that this extreme convergence reflected a quite comparable ecology between A. proboscis and H. tricinctus, the latter being considered extinct. The written article was submitted to the Raffles Bulletin of Zoology in 2019 but was not accepted even before its passage by the reviewers. I then contacted Wolfgang Böhme and Thore Koppetsch, who were enthusiastic to join me in completing this project. Both have completed my work and this association has allowed its publication in the famous journal Salamandra in May 2022 (available here). The well-known ecology of the first lizard should make it possible to rediscover the Asian agamid and make it a Lazarus species. Another species of the genus, Harpesaurus modiglianii, was rediscovered in Sumatra in 2020, after almost 130 years without observation. All hopes are therefore allowed to find H. tricinctus based on the ecological information obtained from its convergent dactyloid.
Anolis proboscis. Photo by Jonathan Losos
All the data resulting from this work is available in:
Ineich I, Koppetsch T, Böhme W. 2022 – Pinocchio lizards and other lizards bearing rostral appendages − the peculiar habitus of the draconine agamid Harpesaurus tricinctus with highlights on its ecological implications and convergence with its New World equivalent, the dactyloid Anolis proboscis. Salamandra 58(2):123-138.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ivan-Ineich/research
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