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- The weird and wonderful world of the reptile kingdom
is on full display at Taronga.
They range from the very familiar to the very alien
in their appearance.
And sometimes they're just downright confusing,
like in this species' case.
- Most people would see this little guy here
and think straightaway, well, that's a snake.
In fact, this is the world's largest legless
lizard, known as a sheltopusik.
This is our male sheltopusik.
This lizard is a subterranean species.
Being underground, they can avoid predation
and they can have a good supply of food.
They have a ferocious appetite.
The two we have here, they are hungry all the time,
especially the big girl.
If you have a look at his body structure, actually,
you may see a line that runs all the way along his body.
This is an expansion line.
It gives them the ability to expand their body when
they're having a deep breath or swallowing
a large item of food.
And it really is just skin which is folded or concertinaed
on itself, to allow it to stretch out
when it swallows something large or needs to take a deep breath.
- Not surprisingly, people often confuse
legless lizards with snakes, but there are
a couple of subtle differences.
- When he sticks out his tongue, he
has a big, broad, fleshy tongue, not
a forked tongue like a snake.
So that's one of the big differences, right there.
The other difference is he's got earholes.
So he has external ear openings.
No snake in the world has external ear openings.
OK, this is our big female sheltopusik.
One of the first things you'll notice
is they're different in color.
And she's also a fair bit bigger.
She's probably 100 to 200 grams heavier
than our male sheltopusik.
- With a male and female in their collection,
Taronga's reptile team naturally tried to breed them.
But nothing about this lizard has been a textbook experience.
- This species here was a very tricky
one to keep and to breed.
- The clues to breeding them successfully
lay in this strange lizard's origins.
- There's your girlfriend back, mate.
These guys, being from Eastern Europe, it gets cold in winter.
It gets so cold it snows.
We don't get snow here in Sydney.
We're a temperate zone.
So even though we were cooling this animal down in Sydney,
it only got to about 8 or 10 degrees Celsius.
That just wasn't cold enough.
After doing more research, we decided
to get them really cold.
So we put them in a couple of enclosures
and we literally put them in a fridge on site,
and set that to 4 degrees Celsius.
Started to warm them up after 2 and 1/2
weeks, put them together.
Bang, we got mating.
Now, this is the result of our successful mating,
breeding, and hatching, our young sheltopusiks.
Now, our female laid six eggs.
We got 100% hatching rate.
So we got six baby sheltopusiks out of those.
We kept several of them here at the zoo,
and the others were distributed through zoos
around the country.
So this little guy will be fully grown in approximately
three to four years.
They have a longevity of over 30 years.
So they're quite a long-lived reptile.
And we hope that she goes on to breed and have many babies
as well, just like her mom did.
This really was the result of a lot of hard work
with a lot of our reptile keepers.
And the day that that first little head sort of hatched out
of the egg was one of the most exciting times
I've ever been as a reptile keeper.
Being a little guy like this, I don't want to keep him out
and exposed for very long, so I'll
put him back into his shelter--
pusik.
- And not too far away, another reptile keeper
is also getting things ready for some new additions.
But every birth in this room comes with the added pressure
of saving an entire species.
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