14 DAY TRIAL // A lizard's tail helps it keep its balance when getting about its daily routine, so it's no wonder these creatures have evolved to quickly regenerate this appendage of theirs should they ever come to lose it.
Just minutes after a lizard loses its tail, bleeding stops and the body gets to work engineering a new one, which grows from the remaining stub.
Except nature sometimes makes mistakes
Recently, wildlife researchers at the Institute of Animal Diversity and Ecology in Córdoba, Argentina, got to study a most bizarre lizard that, having lost its tail, grew back not one but six in its place.
The creature, a black and white tegu still quite young, was brought to them by environmental officers, who admit that the only reason they captured it so that scientists could have a better look at it was because they were quite taken aback by its peculiar anatomy.
Researcher Nicolás Pelegrin and his colleagues at Argentina's Institute of Animal Diversity and Ecology suspect the lizard grew back six Tails instead of just one because it sustained multiple injuries throughout the entire length of its original appendage.
These wounds likely weren't deep enough for the creature to lose its tail completely, but they did trick its body into growing new tails at the site of each of the injuries, the specialists explain in a report.
Apart from looking positively bizarre, the black and white tegu appears to be doing just fine. Even so, researchers suspect that, if released into the wild, it would probably have some trouble getting about.
The first six-tailed lizard on record
This black and white tegu isn't the first lizard carrying one too many tails that specialists have so far had the chance to study. It is, however, the first documented to grow as many as six new tails at once.
“It is not difficult to find scientific reports on lizards with two and even three tails, but there is no information available on cases like this,” said researcher Nicolás Pelegrin in an interview, as cited by New Scientist. Otherwise put, it would appear that this six-tailed fellow is a record holder.
