Sandeep Das, Saunak Pal, Surya Narayanan, K. Subin, Muhamed Jafer Palot, K. P. Rajkumar, V. Deepak

Vertebrate Zoology | January 30, 2024

A new species of Kangaroo Lizard has been discovered from Kerala part of Southern Western Ghats. The species is named Agasthyagama Edge after the prestigious EDGE program (Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangere). The new species is distinguished from its sister species Agasthyagama beddomii by a combination of scale characters and are also genetically different from each other with 11% uncorrected pairwise difference in ND2 gene and 3% in 16S gene. The two species are also geographically separated, the closest distributional records are approximately 80 km apart.