A chance encounter by Jonathan Losos inspired a team of biologists to study lizards with missing or reduced limbs.
More than 20 years ago, Jonathan Losos was in the Bahamas pursuing one of his favorite pastimes — catching and measuring anole lizards — when he spotted a familiar reptilian flash on a branch. But this wasn’t a typical lizard.
“The lizard was nimble,” said Losos, the William H. Danforth Distinguished University Professor. “Until I had her in my hand, I didn’t realize she was missing an entire hind leg.”
That surprising find reminded Losos of a passage from Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” in which Darwin wrote, “natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing … every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving what is good.” But missing an entire leg is more than a slight variation, Losos thought, and natural selection clearly hadn’t scrutinized it.
Over the years, Losos kept wondering if the Bahamian lizard was a fluke. “I started talking to colleagues and collecting anecdotes of other encounters with lizards that were missing all or part of a limb,” Losos said.