Animal · New Zealand
Tuatara
Sphenodon punctatus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The tuatara looks like a lizard but is not one: it is the last survivor of an ancient group of reptiles, and it lives only in New Zealand. It hunts beetles and crickets on cold nights. Some tuatara live for more than a hundred years.
Picture credit: Nil NZ (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Judi Lapsley Miller (CC BY 4.0) · Panamitsu (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the tuatara live?
Home: Seabird burrows on cool New Zealand islands.
In the wild it lives in these countries: New Zealand.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: up to about 80 cm from nose to tail tip. It weighs about 0.7 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
Tuatara belong to an order of reptiles of their own, the Rhynchocephalia, whose other members died out around the time of the dinosaurs. That makes the tuatara a distant cousin of lizards and snakes rather than one of them, and its skeleton shows it: the bones behind the eye form a complete arch, and the teeth are fixed spikes of jawbone with a second row along the upper jaw. When it bites, the lower teeth slide between the two upper rows and saw a beetle in half. Tuatara stay busy at temperatures that would leave most reptiles too sluggish to move, around 16 to 21 degrees, and they hunt at night. They often share a burrow with a nesting seabird, using the tunnel by day while the bird is out at sea. Females lay eggs only every few years, and those eggs take more than a year to hatch. Rats brought by ships wiped the species from the New Zealand mainland, so nearly all tuatara now live on islands kept free of predators.
Find it on the globe
Tuatara is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why does the tuatara like the cold?
Its body works best at around 16 to 21 degrees, lower than for almost any other reptile. On a warm day it may stay underground, while in cool, damp weather it is out hunting.
What is the third eye on its head?
A hatchling has a light-sensitive spot under a clear scale on top of the skull. Scales and skin grow over it within a few months, and it probably helps the young animal keep track of day and night.
Why do tuatara live only on islands?
Rats that arrived on ships ate their eggs and young until the mainland populations were gone. Today the species survives on islands where the rats have been removed, and a few fenced sanctuaries on the mainland have taken animals back.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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