Worm-lizards have pink or brown scaly skin, black beady eyes and sometimes a coy smile. But behind that grin are sharp teeth, a powerful jaw and one big middle tooth. New research unveils the skull bones of these tiny beasts and how their noggins may help them burrow through the ground.
Despite their ambiguous common name and wriggly nature, these lizards are not worms. And “worm-lizard” sounds less like a spelling bee word than “amphisbaenian” (Am-fis-BEE-nee-un). That’s the formal name for these generally limbless reptiles.
These unusual animals, which could fit in a person’s hand, live throughout much of the tropical world. Their habitat stretches across the Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa. It also includes South America, the Caribbean and up into Florida. But they’re hard to spot because they spend most of their time underground.
That cryptic — hard to see — lifestyle has meant researchers know little about these lizards. For worm-lizards of Zygaspis, the most common genus, scientists had only studied the animals’ outer appearance. But in two new papers, researchers describe and compare worm-lizard skulls, bone-by-bone.
Scientists have largely classified worm-lizards by head shape: round, shovel-like, keel-shaped and spade-like. Those shapes likely influence how each type moves through the ground. Juan Daza, a coauthor on one of the new papers, studies reptiles at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He suspects that the round-headed lizards slowly jackhammer their way through the soil. A shovel-headed species, on the other hand, might use its noggin to scoop soil out of the way as it burrows. The new research looks to the worm-lizards’ heads for clues about how different species function.
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