Pygmy blue-tongue

For decades the pygmy blue-tongue was known only from museum specimens and presumed extinct; none had been recorded since 1959. In 1992, the herpetologist Graham Armstrong examined a road-killed brown snake between Burra and Morgan and found a pygmy blue-tongue in its stomach. Surveys soon located living populations.

It lives almost its entire life in a single vertical burrow dug by a spider, sitting at the entrance to ambush passing insects and to bask. Its tongue is pink, not blue. Its survival depends on the last fragments of native grassland in an area dominated by farming.