Lizards: Tricks and Traits

Lizards keep solving the same handful of problems: how to stay warm, how to avoid becoming lunch, and how to find something to eat. What makes them fun is how differently they answer. One lizard changes the color of its skin. Another grips a glass wall with feet covered in microscopic hairs. A third lets its tail break off on purpose and grows a replacement.

Each article in this category starts with a single species and uses it to explain one trait: what the body is doing, why that design works, and what it costs the animal. You will meet lizards that glide between trees, run across the surface of a pond, live along a sea shore, or put up with a desert at midday. A few even make venom, which is rarer than most people expect.

Conservation categories change as scientists reassess populations, so every article states its category together with the date we checked it. Prefer to start with a game? Pick any empty slot in the Terrarium and play a round to unlock its full article.