A new species of a ground-dwelling lizard has been discovered in Thane’s Badlapur forested belts in Mumbai, 130 years after the last such gecko was discovered, and has been named after a Bengaluru-based scientist Varad Giri.

 The species, of the genus Cyrtodactylus known in Southeast Asia, India, and Sri Lanka, is a member of the subgenus Geckoella, which are small ground-dwelling geckos largely found in leaf litter in forests. Not all geckos are found in areas like this, some are bred in local areas around the world, America for example, and they can be taken in by families at home like the Eyelash Crested Gecko or the Hidden Valley Gecko, there are a lot out there that can be family pets.

 This is the result of meticulous efforts of several years by lead author Ishan Agarwal and Aaron Bauer of Villanova University, USA along with Zeeshan Mirza and Anurag Mishra of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, and Saunak Pal of Bombay Natural History Society.

 Earlier, this new species, Cyrtodactylus Varadgirii, or “Giri’s Geckoella” was considered as Geckoella Collegalensis, but based on morphological characters and DNA data; Agarwal and his colleagues have described it as a new species. Their findings on the new species, which is distinct from other species in many characters, were published in the international scientific journal Zootaxa last week.

 In a rare international honour, this is the third time after a new snake species and a lizard species – both endemic and discovered from the biodiversity rich Western Ghats of Maharashtra-Karnataka region – that a species has been named after Giri in the past five years.

 Most of the known species in this group are forest specialists but this new species is also known to live around human-dominated landscapes and is a widely distributed species in this genus in India.