Descripción
Watercolour and gouache on Arches paper, 230 x 720mm, framed, signed and dated by artist. Original artwork from Flannery, Tim and Peter Schouten. A gap in nature: discovering the world's extinct animals. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2001. Last Record: 1914. Distribution: Branco and Razo, Cape Verde Islands. The Cape Verde Islands form an arid, rocky archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of northwestern Africa. Rain falls on the islands between August and December, but for the rest of the year vegetation withers, making the area hostile for most forms of life. Despite their forbidding climate the Cape Verdes were once home to one of the world's most unusual lizards, the Lagarto. When first noticed by Europeans it was restricted to two islands, Branco and Razo, both essentially bare rocks rising from the sea, though in earlier times it may have been more widespread. If a stuffed specimen in the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris was not unduly stretched by the taxidermist who filled it with cotton wool, the Lagarto was the largest skink ever to have lived, for the length of the head and body together is thirty-eight centimetres. It was covered in scales that seem to be too small for such a huge skink, and its tail was prehensile, which seems superfluous given that no trees grew on its island home. Its strangest feature, however, were its teeth, which resemble those of an iguana, indicating that lagartos consumed much plant matter. They almost certainly supplemented their diet with the eggs and young of seabirds, for they were a major resource for part of the year. Indeed, given the barrenness of its island home, the lagarto ate almost anything else it could get its jaws around. It may have been nocturnal and, unlike some other skinks that give birth to well-developed young, it laid eggs. Tradition among the Cape Verde Islands has it that the Lagarto was once found on other islands in the group, but that it was hunted to extinction there during famines, surviving only on largely inaccessible Branco. A group of convicts banished to the rock in 1833 ate a large number of the lizard, but somehow it survived their depredations, turning up again in the 1870s after forty years of obscurity. It was, according to collectors, an easy species to catch. When it was rediscovered some individuals were taken to Europe and kept in zoos. There one was photographed, giving us a clear idea of what it looked like. The last Lagarto captured by a collector was taken by a German in 1914. The species may have survived a little longer, however, for the Cape Verde Islanders reported occasionally seeing them until the 1940s. N° de ref. del artículo 25470
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