Spectacular scientific discovery!
Two new species of lizard discovered in the Otway Ranges of Victoria!
Media release dated 16 May 2022
At a time when people think almost all species of animal have been discovered and named, scientists are still finding new species.
Sometimes these discoveries are not in wilderness areas, but in fact literally under our noses in the most populated places.
This week, Australia’s foremost reptile expert, the Snakeman Raymond Hoser, announced the discovery of dozens of species of lizard from across Australia.
His papers were published in the peer reviewed Australasian Journal of Herpetology.
Significant in this collection of newly named species in some 11 papers, which combined literally fill two books, were the two species from the Otway Ranges in southern Victoria, just a few hours drive down a freeway from Melbourne, a capital city with over 5 million people.
Some time ago, Hoser was working with the Victorian Dog Training Academy, training dogs to avoid snakes with his world leading Canine Snake Avoidance training, when he lifted a rock and found a tiny brown skink lizard he immediately knew was a species new to science.
That species, now known as Anepischetosia shireenhoserae Hoser, 2022 is a small burrowing skink most like Anepischetosia maccoyi (Lucas and Frost, 1894), which is a common species from the east of Melbourne in Victoria.
The first thing Hoser noticed was that the belly was yellow and not orange as it is in the other species.
Now of course, only a lizard expert like Hoser would notice such a difference and know that the Otways animal had never been named or named and forgotten by scientists since.
Because Raymond Hoser is the only globally recognized reptile expert in the state of Victoria with such knowledge and expertise, this is exactly why the new species had remained hidden from science for the last 200 years.
After taking comparative photos of both species and then blowing them up on the “big screen”, Hoser was able to check out scalation and other properties to see the various differences between the forms.
One species had red lines running down the tail, while in the other the lines were black.
On closer inspection, they were not exactly hard to tell apart, so did not qualify as so-called cryptic species.
Cryptic species are those that normal people would have trouble telling apart, even if DNA or other means shows them to be separate.
A sweep of Australian museums soon found a nice little gap of about 150 km in a straight line between the populations of the two species, with habitat wholly hostile to either species, meaning there was no way either species were in the intermediate area or in contact and breeding.
So then Hoser set about getting hold of molecular data that could help confirm that the new population was sufficiently divergent to be a new species.
Molecular evidence, combined with the geological evidence of a biogeographical barrier in the form of basalt plains, confirmed a divergence in the range of 3-5 MYA, which is well and truly species-level differentiation.
It was a series of volcanoes in Victoria’s past, that Hoser described as being of "biblical proportions" that cut the two lizard populations off and in effect formed the two species, including the one new to science.
Taking it all a bit further, Hoser re-assessed all the putative lizard species in southern Victoria that had not been subjected to this kind of scrutiny and he ended up finding another undiscovered species from Otways as well as some from the Grampians and other parts of south-east Australia.
Added to that was the culmination of a 40 year study into the Australian gecko genus Heteronotia, and Hoser this week published discoveries of about 30 new Australian species of lizards.
This week, he also named a new species of deadly snake, closely related to the Taipans, from South Australia, a spectacular reddish coloured Viper from Western Cape, South Africa and a large brown monitor lizard from the Sunda Islands, Indonesia.
Hoser is a scientific powerhouse, having discovered and named more species of Australian reptile and frog than anyone else in Australian history, being over 200 species; more species of reptile worldwide than anyone else alive (over 500 species); also discovered and named species of mammal and fish and made numerous world-first discoveries that have already saved dozens of endangered species.
For example Hoser was the first to artificially inseminate snakes and lizards using a method now copied worldwide to enable captive breeding of species on a scale never previously thought possible.
The Otway species of lizards discovered this week are Anepischetosia shireenhoserae Hoser, 2022 named in honour of Hoser’s wife, Shireen Hoser and Pseudemoia danielmannixi Hoser, 2022 named in honour of Daniel Mannix of the Victorian Dog Training Academy for his life saving work with dogs, teaching them to avoid snakes using world-first methods developed by Hoser and Mannix.
Another newly named Victorian species was named in honour of local snake catcher Benny McNamara (Snake Catcher Colac), the species being Pseudemoia mcnamarai Hoser, 2022. That species is a tree climbing lizard restricted to the Grampians.
For more details, photos, etc.
Contact the Snake Man Raymond Hoser via
http://www.snakeman.com.au
Download the relevant peer reviewed scientific paper naming the two Otways species, published in the Australasian Journal of Herpetology here:
Hoser, R. T. 2022. Hiding in plain sight. A previously unrecognized biogeographical barrier in Australia formed by an event of biblical proportions. Five new species of skink lizard from south-west Victoria, three more closely related species from New South Wales and another from South Australia. Australasian Journal of Herpetology 56:3-21.
