You may be wondering, "If there's a reptile without any legs it must be a snake," right?
But actually this is in fact a legless lizard.
So why is this a lizard and not a snake you ask?
Well, they have eyelids which is a characteristic of lizards -- snakes have eye caps which prevent them from blinking.
They also have ears -- see the little hole in the back of his head? That's another characteristic of lizards, as snakes
do not have any ears. And you can't see it here, but his teeth are cone-shaped much like a lizard's,
and snakes have more, like, fang-shaped teeth.
This legless lizard is the sheltopusik
which is the largest of the legless lizards,
and it's also called the giant glass lizard because people once believed that if you touched one of these it would shatter like glass,
which as you can see is not true.
They are native to Eastern Europe and Western Asia, and they live in both dry and humid environments depending on
where exactly they're located in the wild.
The way they shed is pretty unique as well. Here is just a normal snake shed,
this is from one of my hognose snakes, and
here is a shed or pieces of a shed from a lizard -- this is from a tegu -- they shed their skin
in just sections off at a time, and
legless lizards are kind of a combination of the two: they do shed some pieces off separately,
but they shed large pieces off all at once, and I have sometimes seen him shed almost his entire
body's worth of skin in one piece, and they compress it together like this.
Like this is actually a piece about that big that he's squished together as he peeled it off,
so it's a really unique way of shedding.
Here you can see that legless lizards do not have overlapping scales like snakes do, but rather individual scales much like lizards.
Another cool fact about the legless lizard is that in the movie Indiana Jones: The Raiders of the Lost Ark,
in the snake pit scene, they actually used legless lizards instead of snakes.
This is Legolas, the legless lizard.
I figured the name was fitting, and they're very much a burrowing species.
They love to go into half logs and dig in their substrate,
so it's good to give them at least a couple inches of substrate,
so they can burrow properly in it,
as well as a lot of these half logs to hide underneath, and just normal caves, too, are always good for them.
They're very curious little guys with a good appetite.
In the wild, they eat mostly snails and slugs, and in captivity you can give them a high quality dog food,
boiled eggs, and various insects. Today we have mealworms,
but you can also give them dubia roaches or other feeder roaches, crickets, super worms, wax worms.
And you might have noticed I do have the egg shell in there, too,
and that's because their cone-shaped teeth allow them to crunch the shells of snails very easily in the wild,
and so they have no problem crunching egg shells too, and it's a good source of calcium.
Hey, buddy.
As you can see they do flick their tongue to smell much like a snake,
but their tongue is not nearly as forked as a snake's tongue is.
So if you're looking for that next uncommon reptile to add to your collection,
a legless lizard is a good choice.
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