fancy lizards

These are some seriously cool lizards:

Researchers have suspected for decades that some desert lizards can harvest rainwater through their skin. The Australian thorny devil (Moloch horridus), for example, rubs its belly into the wet sand after a rain. In the 1920s, inquisitive researchers put this lizard in a shallow bowl of water and noticed that its entire body soon looked wet. “The initial thought was that they just took the water in directly through their skin,” says Wade Sherbrooke, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History’s Southwestern Research Station in Portal, Arizona. But that turned out to be wrong. Unlike amphibian skin, which lets water through, reptile skin keeps precious water inside the body, Sherbrooke says. So how were the lizards transporting water?

Later research suggested that water somehow traveled along the “scale hinges” in between the lizards’ scales. In the new study, Sherbrooke and colleagues at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, used light and electron microscopes to examine the scale hinges in detail. They discovered that the hinges contain tubelike channels about the width of one or two human hairs, a good size for harnessing capillary forces to draw in water. In thorny devils, the network of hinges covers the entire body and appears to funnel water to an area near the corner of the lizards’ mouth, the researchers report in this month’s issue of Zoomorphology. They found a similar plumbing system in another rain-harvesting lizard, the Texas horned lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum), but not in seven related lizard species that don’t transport water (from ScienceNOW Daily News, August 17, 2007).

They’re also really cute. See here.