Species group · Reptiles
WAnimals has 3 species of skink, in the family Scincidae.
Ranges calculated from the profiles that record the figure, not from all 3.
Each one has its own full profile. This group does not replace them: it brings them together.
No species documented in this group is genuinely at risk according to the IUCN, with the data available today.
Recorded in 18 countries. The ones with the most species in the group:
Its smooth, overlapping scales reduce friction so effectively that it can move through loose sand almost as if swimming, an adaptation shared by several desert skinks.
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In some parts of the Near East it has traditionally been used in folk medicine, a practice that has led to animals being collected for sale in markets.
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It is notably long-lived for its size: there are captive individuals that have passed twenty years.
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Threatened, it opens its mouth and shows a deep blue tongue as a warning display to put an attacker off.
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Its blue tongue is a warning signal: it flashes it out while gaping its pink mouth, and experiments have shown that the blue also reflects ultraviolet light, most strongly at the back of the tongue, which is the part it shows in the last instant before an attack.
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It is live-bearing: it gives birth to as many as twenty fully formed, independent young, which disperse within a few hours with no parental care at all.
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Its ancestors crossed the Atlantic: genetic analyses indicate that the species descends from African skinks that reached the island on rafts of vegetation carried by the currents, a voyage of more than three thousand kilometres.
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It is extraordinarily tame and abundant on Fernando de Noronha, to the point of approaching visitors and restaurant tables, behaviour typical of island wildlife with no land predators.
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