Not a Lizard

Sometimes, something looks like something else. It doesn’t always mean to, but it just does. It doesn’t necessarily benefit it to look like something else, even if Charles Darwin might have concluded otherwise. Humans use ‘shortcuts’ to process information — these are called ‘heuristics’.

In New Zealand, there is a creature called a ‘Tuatara’. That name comes from the Maori language, and it means ‘peaks on the back’. It is the only extant (ie. still living, not extinct) member of a previously diverse order, the Rhynchocephalia. To anyone who is unfamiliar with this creature, they would think that it is a lizard.

But it’s not. It is, however, a reptile. Frozen in time, it is more closely related to dinosaurs than it is to modern lizards. Even though many modern lizards look like dinosaurs, they are not dinosaurs. They are modern lizards. Tuataras are the cutest dinosaurs that one could imagine!

A Tuatara (not a lizard) (Photo by Amanda Swanepoel on Unsplash)