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Italian three-toed skink

Chalcides chalcides · A lizard halfway to being a snake, with four tiny three-toed legs it barely uses.

A slender, almost snake-like Italian three-toed skink with tiny legs in grass
Italian three-toed skink (Chalcides chalcides).Photo: Bouke ten Cate · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

At first glance, a grass-snake-ish thing slips away through a meadow. Look closely and there are four minute legs, each with three toes, almost useless for walking. Three-toed skinks move by body undulation through dense grass, with the legs folded back.

It is a good animal to remember when people say legless lizards must be snakes. Within skinks, limbs have been reduced or lost many separate times, and Chalcides shows several steps along that road.

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