Peru: three new species of lizards discovered in the Andes

redorbit.com reported that three beautiful new lizards from the Andes of Peru have been delimited and discovered using different lines of evidences by Peruvian and American biologists from San Marcos and Brigham Young universities respectively. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys.

These lizards have been “hidden” and confused with other lizards of the same group because of their overall similar appearance. However this study, which includes molecular, ecological and more detailed morphological analyses, has identified them as new species. This research can be seen as an example of a midpoint between, on one extreme, species delimitation studies which rely on expensive molecular data and rarely include descriptions of new species, and at the other extreme, species descriptions that rely on morphology and rarely include more than elementary analyses. Read Article