La Palma Giant Lizard - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

Working on fossil and subfossil evidence, this giant lizard was originally described as a subspecies of the El Hierro giant lizard (Mateo et al. 2001). Later, it was elevated to full species rank (Afonso & Mateo 2003). Specimen remains from La Palma assigned to G. goliath seem to belong to this taxon instead; if this is correct, they indicate that the average size of this species had been decreasing over the last millennia, possibly due to humans preferring to hunt larger lizards (Barahona et al. 2000). The recently sighted La Palma giant lizard individual was slightly more than 30 cm (~1 ft) long and had an estimated age of four years. New expeditions to the area of the rediscovery are planned in the hope of finding more individuals and possibly a breeding population.

However, scientist have not had the chance of studying any living specimen and the present fossil and subfossil material of G. auaritae does not allow for sufficiently detailed analyses of its phylogenetic status. Probably it belongs to the simonyi clade like the other giant Gallotia species from the western islands, but whether it actually was as close to G. simonyi as presumed remains unverified. The reason for this is also that it was only discovered after the present species' description that G. goliath was not another local representative of G. simonyi, as was previously assumed, but a more distantly related species (Maca-Meyer 2003).