Not everything in Queensland is lethally poisonous – there are loads of lovely big lizards for instance. And amazingly, we’ve even managed to see and photograph a few.

Here’s the first, captured just after crossing the path in front of us at Cooktown, cunningly disguised. First of all he looks exactly like a dead eucalyptus stick about a foot long, then he moves and you think he’s a snake:

 

 

But he’s a harmless (to us) lizard. If you look closely at the photo above you can see his blunt tail – it has been broken off and is regenerating. Snakes can’t do that. Then if you look at his head:

 

 

You can see he has a very unsnakelike shape, with eyes that can blink (snakes can’t), and a solid tongue (snakes’ are forked). He is actually Burton’s snakelizard Lialis burtonis. Australia has loads and loads of legless or near legless lizards, almost certainly because of the combination of dense vegetation and sandy soil which makes legs an encumbrance. This species is still in the process of losing its legs – the hind limbs are still present as small flaps.

Then there are the monitors, about which I’ve written previously. Here is a lace monitor, Varanus varius:

 

 

This one is about 1500mm long, but they can grow up to 3m. It is actually the same genus as the Komodo dragon of Indonesia – which I learned only yesterday actually evolved in Australia and emigrated to Indonesia by island hopping. It was then eliminated here when humans arrived, along with a much larger relative some 9m long – a really big lizard.

 

On Keppel Island we found this lovely common blue-tongued skink Tiliqua scincoides. He’s also about a foot long:

 

 

Blue tongues occur all over Australia. They use the tail as a fat store, and in some species it has evolved to look just like the head in order to confuse predators.

 

Another very common group of Australian lizards are the dragons (there are 78 species here). This one is a water dragon Intellagama lesueurii which have adapted very well to urban living. We found this one living quite happily with a number of others in the leisure area of South Bank, right in the centre of Brisbane, about as crowded-with-humans place as it is possible to find in Australia. He’s basking on the warm tarmac (it’s Spring here, but unusually cool):

 

 

 

They like to be near water, into which they dash if frightened.

 

And finally, a little brown job:

 

 

There are literally hundreds of species of lizard in Australia. All I can say about this one is that it’s a small skink of some sort, living in the Botanical Gardens at Cooktown in the far north of Queensland. Quite often it is necessary to do things like counting the rows of belly scales to identify lizards and snakes with certainty; we left well alone.