You might also like...
Animal of the Day: Star-Nosed Mole
H.P. Lovecraft meets the Berenstein Bears.
Animal of the Day: Cuttlefish
It’s like an squid got rear-ended by a stingray!
Animal of the Day: Mexican Mole Lizard
Beasts are all around us. Many of them are familiar and many of them are so odd and mysterious that they challenge the laws of what we find nonfiction. Each weekday on GUY, we take a look at one of them.
A warning: Some will be adorable. Some will make your skin crawl. Some of them will make you never want to leave the house.
Yesterday’s Animal: Aye-Aye
Today’s Animal: Mexican Mole Lizard
"I mean no harm to your planet."
Poor guy. Imagine being the worst of all worlds. You’re like a snake except you have none of the skills of a snake. You’re like a lizard except slow and easy to catch. You’re like a mole except you’re not adept at moving fast through the underground. You’re like an armed thing except you have horrifying Tyrannosaur limbs, small and useful only for one thing. Digging.
It’s as if a vengeful god had their own April Fool’s joke, except it goes on forever.
Enter the Mexican Mole Lizard, a nearly sightless underground oddity who unironically creeps in the soils of Mexico looking for insects to devour and generally minding its own business. It’s slow, methodical, and excessively harmless. Unfortunately it’s a bad thing to be harmless while looking like something with a stigma for being dangerous. One would suspect a lot of folks demolish these beings first and then realize it’s nature’s nerd after.
It’s somewhere in the midst of its evolutionary journey with back legs that have been absorbed into its skeletal chassis. Perhaps one day they’ll evolve wings or turrets that fire cartilage darts but in the interim these fragile little members of the amphisbaenia group are best staying deep underground where a ball of cotton won’t gently blow into it and wreck its whole goddamn life.
It’s as if a vengeful god had their own April Fool’s joke, except it goes on forever.
Quick Hits:
- If it were horse sized, we’d… WAIT FOR IT TO LUMBER AWAY, GIGGLING.
- If it had wings, it’d… BE A FLYING FAILURE.
- If granted human intellect, it’d… WRITE A THESIS ON BEING PICKED ON IN P.E.
- If ‘Day of the Animals’ happened, we’d… CONTINUE EXACTLY AS WE ARE.
Have a peek:
He looks so… defeated in that first picture.
“Oh goddammit I wasn’t dreaming this reality.”
I really enjoy these.
OrSpell Check Your Text
Language: English (change)
This is so cool! You’re write up was very funny, Nick (I loved when you referred to him as moving about ‘unironically’), and the animal is even better. It definitely looks pretty defeated in that photo up top, Nexus 7, but when I watched the video I gained a deeper appreciation for what the mole lizard was going for. Clearly it’s in the process of developing adaptations that will aid it’s survival. It’s figured out that there is no money in being a regular mexican lizard these days, and it’s best bet for surviving predators and scorching sun burns is to hide out under ground like a snake. It clearly doesn’t want to be a snake though, since rather than shrinking, it’s hands have elongated into little scoops for digging through dirt. Essentially, it’s becoming a graboid and I salute it’s efforts. It might not look like many other animals, but if it’s look works for it, why change further? I think it’s probably perfectly evolved for the kind of life it wants to lead. IMHO, if anything, it should relocate the two hind legs it absorbed back up to the front, so it would have four legs all up by it’s head, for better digging, though obviously I am no expert on being a snake with legs
Anyway, this was a great AOTD, Nick! Keep ‘em comin’!
PS It has a little pink nose just like a mole!
sorry ’bout the spell check tags at the top of my post, that was a mistake but still I figure you’ll appreciate the lack of spelling mistakes!
That creature should never be around the nervous. What a dude! This guy should get an automatic pass to chill for life so his kind can evolve into awesomeness.