Pink Lizards

It took two centuries for people to "notice" giant pink lizards on Galapagos; which goes to prove that scientists are only human after all. What it says about the park rangers who were stepping on and tripping over these animals is another puzzle.

Darwin said nothing in his Galapagos journals of 1835 about big pink lizards. Park Rangers noticed them in 1986, or at least admitted seeing them at that time, but didn't consider the lizards might really be pink. They went with the simple idea that the lizards were black and white and had gotten stained somehow.

Having lived in red dirt country I can see where they might have entertained such an idea for awhile, but after a year or so of only seeing them in pink they probably should have begun at least wondering if the big lizards really were black and white.

When you consider the blue-footed booby, giant tortoises and more different finches than can be kept up with, it sounds a little silly that no one considered that the lizards, which are 3 to 5 feet long, might really be pink; especially when the animals were right there in front of them.

In 2001 some scientists from the University of Rome began to investigate the possibility that the pink and black lizards might really exist. They conducted blood and genetic tests on 36 of the lizards which seems to mostly live near Isabela Island's Wolf Volcano. This explains why Darwin made no notes about them. He didn't explore that particular area of the Galapagos. We can let him off the hook for not reporting pink and black striped lizards.

Once the existence of the lizards was acknowledged the supposition was that they were a later variation of one of the other two land iguanas that lived on the island; Conolophus pallidus and Conolophus subcristatus. After Cruz Marquez, a biologist looked at the results of the blood and genetic tests he found that the pink and black lizards may well be some of the oldest lizard group on the islands, going back some five million years. They are more likely to be the ancestors of the other giant lizards on the island.

Now that they've been noticed there is some concern because there don't seem to be any young ones, as in baby or adolescent lizards, running about the place. Since they don't actually know the number of lizards that exist and also should consider that just maybe the young are very different in coloration than the adults a lot more study needs to be done on the new discovery.

Since Isabela Island is one of the more studied islands in the Galapagos this willful blindness once again raises the question of just how much humans miss every day by not believing their own eyes.