Madeiran wall lizard (Lacerta Dugesii)
Original title: Lagartixa (Lacerta Dugesii)
The Madeiran wall lizard, a common small reptile that damages grapes and tomatoes and already existed on the island before its discovery.
A small reptile, very common in Madeira, which does great damage to grapes, tomatoes, etc. It already existed on the island before the discovery, for Gaspar Frutuoso refers to it in the following terms: ‘on this fresh island no other kind of creature was found but some little lizards the size of a finger, which do no notable harm and are not venomous’. Frutuoso also recorded lizards on the island of Porto Santo (see Saudades, p. 50), and the naturalist Richard Thomas Lowe found among the calcareous formations of Piedade (‘pity’) the jaws of a small vertebrate which Professor Owen identified as a reptile. For lack of material for comparison, however, Owen could not state whether it was identical to the Madeiran lizard.
In this article
Place
Places mentioned · 02
- Piedade
Porto Santo. Site of calcareous deposits where Lowe found fossil reptile jaws.
Site of calcareous deposits where Lowe found fossil reptile jaws.
- Porto Santo
Frutuoso also recorded lizards there.
An island of the archipelago, settled alongside Madeira and forming one of the three captaincies. It has always constituted a single parish, dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Piedade, whose church was repeatedly sacked. The Elucidário records the Moorish pirate raid of 1617, its own Misericórdia and a rainwater channel built on this drought-prone island.
People
People mentioned · 03- Gaspar Frutuoso1522–1591
Azorean chronicler whose Saudades da Terra records small harmless lizards in Madeira and Porto Santo at discovery.
-
Professor who identified Lowe's fossil jaws as a reptile's.
-
Naturalist who found jaws of a small vertebrate among the Piedade calcareous deposits.