La Palma Giant Lizard

About La Palma Giant Lizard

The La Palma Giant Lizard (Gallotia auaritae) is a giant lacertid (wall lizard) that, as its name indicates, live in the littoral zone of La Palma in the Canary Islands; its habitat ranged from sea level up to altitudes of 800 m. It probably lives in xerophytic vegetation and is presumably an egg-laying species. Long believed extinct (and likely will remain classified as such until the Red List is updated), it was rediscovered in 2007.

Its decline started 2000 years ago with the arrival of humans on La Palma. Until its recent rediscovery, it was believed to have become extinct in the last 500 years. The main causes of this presumed extinction were believed to have been introduced cats, consumption by people, and habitat destruction for agriculture. It is not the only lizard from the Canary Islands to have been considered extinct only to be rediscovered later: This happened with other giant lizards of the Canary Islands, like the El Hierro and La Gomera Giant Lizards (rediscovered 1974 and 1999, respectively); the somewhat smaller Tenerife Speckled Lizard was only discovered for the first time in 1996.

This giant lizard was originally described as a subspecies of the El Hierro Giant Lizard (Mateo et al 2001). Later, it was elevated to full species rank (Afonso & Mateo 2003). Specimens from La Palma assigned to G. goliath seem to belong to this taxon instead; if this is correct, they indicate that the average size of this species had been decreasing over the last millennia, possibly due to humans preferring to hunt larger lizards (Barahona et al. 2000). The recently discovered individual of the La Palma Giant Lizard was slight more than 30 cm (~1 ft) long and had an estimated age of four years. New expeditions to the area of the rediscovery are planned in the hope of finding more individuals and possibly a breeding population.