Tiliqua rugosa—also known as the sleepy lizard—is a gorgeously chunky species, part lizard and part pinecone in appearance, which is found across the southern half of Australia. But it’s what’s on the inside that has captured the attention of researchers. Reptiles in general have immune systems that are unusual from a mammalian perspective; for example, they may rely more heavily on innate immunity and less on adaptive immunity, says University of New Mexico biologist Rob Miller. But the sleepy lizard (along with other scaled reptiles, a group known as squamates), may be even stranger.
Last month, Miller and an international team of scientists published a study in the Journal of Immunology comparing the sleepy lizard’s genome to that of the tuatara (a lizardlike animal that is the closest living relative of the squamates). The work revealed something strange: large deletions in the lizard’s genome resulted in the removal of genes ...
