The Lazarus Lizards

 When I visited Tom in Cincinnati on Saturday (10/6/18) we took a number of walks and visited a mutual friend. It seems everywhere we went we saw what I thought were skinks. They were climbing on rock walls and out of concrete crevices. Here at Pinehaven I am most familiar with the young skinks that have red tails. I have understood that as they become adults the red tails fade and they become uniformly one color.

 It turns out that the Cincinnati creatures aren't skinks at all. They're called Lazarus Lizards.

There are various stories of how they came to inhabit Cincinnati because they are not native. The Cincinnati Enquirer printed an interesting story last summer about them and gave a number of stories explaining their origin. Most likely is this:

 A ten year old boy named George Rau collected "about ten" of them while on vacation in Northern, Italy, in either 1951 or 1952. The location was said to be near Lake Garda, about 80 miles east of Milan. They were released in the backyard of his family home on Torrence Court in East Walnut Hills.

 Cincinnati and that part of Italy have similar climates. In any case, the lizards took to their new home quite happily and have now multiplied into "estimated millions" according to the Enquirer.

  While several other origin stories exist, a University of Cincinnati biology master's student took genetic samples from both the lizards of northern Italy and those in Cincinnati and deemed them "family".

 Rau is the stepson of Fred Lazarus III who said he collected some of the lizards on a family trip to the Alps. Lazarus said he released them in his Cincinnati backyard in 1953 to eat mosquitoes.That's where the name came from.

Scientifically they are named Podarcis muralis maculiventris. Since 2005 the Cincinnati lizards have been "officially a subspecies of its ancestral Podarcis muralis".

 Close-up they look like tiny dinosaurs. They are not particularly skittish and will stay in one spot long enough to be  examined. Eventually they tire of the scrutiny and slither on. It seems Tom and I saw samples everywhere we went. They are also called "wall lizards" for their favorite habitat.

 The original article on the Lazarus lizard may be found by clicking here.