WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A dragon-sized, fruit-eating lizard that lives in the trees on the northern Philippines island of Luzon has been reliable as a new species, scientists reported on Tuesday.
Hunted for the juicy flesh, the brightly colored timberland guard lizard can grow to some-more than 6 feet in length but weighs usually about twenty-two pounds (10 kg), pronounced Rafe Brown of the University of Kansas, whose group reliable the find.
"It lives up in trees, so it can"t get as large as the Komodo dragon, a outrageous thing that cooking large amounts of uninformed meat," Brown pronounced by telephone. "This thing is a fruit-eater and it"s usually the third fruit-eating lizard in the world."
Discovering such a large vertebrate class is intensely rare, Brown said. The lizard, a new class of the classification Varanus, is changeable and means to censor from humans, the initial predators, that could insist since it has left undetected by scientists for so long.
Biologists initial saw photographs of the big, spare lizard in 2001, when those contemplating the area upheld hunters carrying the lizards" full of color carcasses, but the class at that point had never been since a systematic identification.
In the subsequent integrate of years, Brown said, ethnobiologists kept conference stories "about these dual kinds of lizard that everybody favourite to eat since their strength tasted improved than the ones that lived on the ground; this thing was described as bigger and some-more brightly colored."
The dual kinds of lizard described by the internal people were dual names for the same animal, Brown said.
CLAW SCRATCHES ON TREES
In 2009, connoisseur students at the finish of a two-month speed kept saying signs of the big lizard. There were claw-scratches on trees and clumps of pandanus trees, whose ripened offspring the lizard prefers.
The clumps indicated that the lizards had eaten pandanus ripened offspring and afterwards excreted the seeds in clusters.
"It was literally in the last integrate days of the expedition, we were using out of income and food and this was the payoff: they eventually got this enormous animal," Brown said.
Hunters who had listened of the team"s seductiveness brought a barely-alive adult masculine lizard to their camp. The group euthanized the animal and did genetic tests that reliable it as a singular species, Brown said.
DNA research showed there was a low genetic dissimilarity in between the new lizard and the closest relative, Gray"s guard lizard, that is additionally a fruit-eater but lives on the southern finish of Luzon, rather than the northern finish where the timberland guard lizard lives.
"They are intensely secretive," Brown pronounced of the new species. "I think that centuries of humans sport them have done the existent populations ... really changeable and heedful and we never see them. They see and listen to us prior to we have a possibility to see them, they scurry up trees prior to we have a possibility to come around."
These commentary were published in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters, with one more work by scientists in the Philippines and the Netherlands.
(Editing by Sandra Maler)
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