Obviously, this green reptile is a chameleon. But this specimen, discovered in Ethiopia, belongs to a previously unknown species, which is noticeable, among other things, by its prickly scalloped crest on its back and tail.
The Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia are home to unique plant and animal species that almost exclusively live there in small populations. These include, for example, the rare Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis), a few individuals of the giant climbing mouse (Megadendromus nikolausi) or the giant mole rat (Tachyoryctes macrocephalus).
Several species of the chameleon genus Trioceros also occur only in the Ethiopian Bale region. For example the species Trioceros affinis, which lives there in isolated small forest populations. Some of these chameleon habitats are separated from each other by extensions of the Great Rift Valley, a widening plate boundary in East Africa. A research team led by Thore Koppetsch from the Alexander Koenig Research Museum in Bonn is investigating whether this isolation of the populations has already led to the emergence of new chameleon species.
They found what they were looking for on an expedition to the mountainous area in southern Ethiopia: On the northern slopes of the Bale Mountains at an altitude of around 2,500 meters, the researchers discovered specimens of a still unknown small chameleon species on the edge of a forest. As you can see in our photo, the reptile stood out for its characteristic appearance: this chameleon has large, spiky scales on its back and tail that form a distinctive crest. And the high number of white flank scales on the sides of the body and the irregularly scattered, plate-shaped scales are unusual.
Koppetsch and his colleagues compared these chameleon specimens with other individuals of the species complex of Trioceros affinis and then identified them as a new species. It was named Trioceros wolfgangboehmei – after Wolfgang Böhme, who researched chameleons and other reptiles at the Alexander Koenig Zoological Research Museum.
“In view of the variations in the color patterns and the morphology between different populations of these chameleons in Ethiopia, it is likely that these groups have a higher hidden biodiversity than expected,” Koppetsch suspects. The researchers want to check this in the future.