Blue Tongue Skink

🌍 Overview

Blue-tongued skinks are large, slow-moving lizards native to Australia and parts of Indonesia and New Guinea. Their shocking blue tongue, flashed at predators, serves as a startling warning display. They are ground-dwelling omnivores that consume a diverse wild diet of fruits, plants, snails, and carrion. Thick-bodied and docile by nature, their manageable temperament has made them highly popular as pets.

📋 Quick Facts

📜 History

John White, surgeon general to the First Fleet, published the first description of a blue-tongued skink in 1790 in his Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, illustrated with a color plate. Australia's 1982 ban on commercial wildlife export means the animals sold abroad today are largely Indonesian and New Guinean species taken from the wild, while Australian keepers work from separate domestic stock. The genus also produced one of herpetology's better rediscovery stories: Tiliqua adelaidensis, the pygmy bluetongue, was written off as extinct until 1992, when a researcher near Burra in South Australia opened a dead brown snake and found one in its stomach.

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