Original subtitles

Picture in your mind the creatures we study to reveal how life works.

What do you see?

Fruit flies, which revolutionize genetics?

Chimpanzees, which teach us about the origins of intelligence?

What about mice, which help us understand human diseases?

Whatever you're imagining, it probably isn't a lizard in a suburban backyard.

But researchers studying one special group of lizards are

discovering answers to big questions about life on Earth.

How do animals adapt to different environments?

How can so many species coexist in one place?

And how fast can evolution happen?

When scientists have had big questions about the world around us, time and time

again over the last century, they've turned to anoles to answer those questions.

My name is Neil Lozen.

And my name is Nate Dappen.

Neil and I are biologists and wildlife filmmakers.

We're on a year-long journey, traveling from remote forests and tiny islands to

high-tech labs in big cities, all in pursuit

of these lizards that defy our expectations.

As they battle their rivals, evade predators, and survive in hostile

environments, these little lizards seem to meet

every challenge with an ingenious adaptation.

In the process, they reveal how simply you and us, what Neil and I call the laws of

the lizard, can explain the complexity of nature.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

You got him.

Ha, ha, ha, ha.

One of the rarest anoles in the world.

Come with us and discover how these unassuming lizards

are changing the way we think about life on Earth.

Every lizard biologist remembers their first.

That is, the first lizard they ever studied.

The lizard that took Nate's innocence was a

strange Costa Rican species called the river anole.

Nate and I both got our PhDs studying lizards.

And over the last 10 years, we've become collaborators, business partners,

and best friends.

Through all of that, Nate has not shut up about that river anole.

So we're starting our journey in Nate's old

stomping grounds in the mountains of Costa Rica.

To find the lizard that was so interesting, it convinced Nate to become a biologist.

If you get a chance to see a river anole, the first thing that it'll do is sort of

move to the other side of the rock or the branch that it's on.

If it thinks that you're a real threat, it'll do something amazing.

Sometimes, river anoles reappear downstream after just a few seconds.

It's hard to predict exactly where they'll pop up.

Other times, they just seem to vanish.

What are they doing when they disappear?

Almost as soon as we got our camera under the water, we were

documenting a behavior that's essentially unknown to science.

One female clung to a rock underwater for almost 10 minutes.

We figured she must be holding her breath.

But when we watched our footage, we saw something that blew us away.

Look carefully, and you can see a little air

bubble growing and shrinking on her head.

It looks like she's rebreathing her air, like

a deep-sea diver recycling her oxygen supply.

Researchers at the University of Toronto are now

trying to understand this rebreathing behavior.

The first law of the lizard?

Expect surprises.

It's an exciting start to a quest we've been thinking about ever since we met.

I met Nate Dappen in 2008 in Costa Rica when we were

both students on the same tropical biology course.

We were so similar, it was kind of spooky.

And so we're the same height, same size, we can

fit into each other's clothes if we need to.

And we were both studying evolution, and we were both really into photography.

And so we either had the decision to destroy each other or join forces.

Luckily for Nate, we decided not to destroy each other.

Instead, we started working together on experiments, photography projects,

and eventually on films.

We sort of had this decision to make.

Did we want to continue on and be researchers

or did we want to go into film full time?

And we sort of decided together that we were going to take

the plunge and start making science films professionally.

Ever since, Nate and I have traveled around the

world making films about wildlife and science.

One film we've always wanted to make is the story of these little creatures that

have had a huge impact on our understanding of life.

We wanted to tell the story of anoles.

We've all seen documentaries with lions and sharks and elephants, but none of

those species have had remotely the same kind of

impact on our understanding of biology as anoles have.

From evolution to ecology, genetics, physiology, even conservation biology.

So what are anoles?

They're a group of closely related lizard

species that live all over the American tropics.

There are more than 400 species of anoles, with a wide range of colors, sizes,

and behaviors.

But despite all this variation, anoles share two

traits that set them apart from other lizards.

And that's the dewlap, which is a colorful flap of skin that extends from the throat,

and sticky adhesive toe pads on their feet, which

allow them to climb on smooth surfaces like leaves.

Some other lizards have dewlaps or toe pads, but only anoles have both.

The dewlap is used to communicate with members of the same species.

Males use it to tell other males, hey, this is my territory, don't mess with me.

Or they use it to show females, hey, come over here,

I've got this great territory and I'm really attractive.

To ward off a potential rival, a male anole

will perform a sort of ritualized display.

He'll do push-ups.

And he'll flash his dewlap.

If that doesn't intimidate his rival, their

encounter can escalate into a violent battle.

If the male can defend his territory, he'll have opportunities to court females.

And, if he's lucky, a chance to mate.

Anoles are fierce hunters.

They chase down and eat almost anything that fits in their mouths.

From insects and spiders to other lizards.

Even members of their own species.

One of the most surprising things about anoles is that generations of scientists

have dedicated their lives to studying these critters.

To understand why, we need to introduce you to

the man at the center of the anole universe.

If you mention anoles to anybody, they're gonna think of Jonathan Lassoes.

The first person that jumps to mind is Jonathan Lassoes.

Jonathan Lassoes.

Jonathan Lassoes.

Yeah, I would say Jonathan Lassoes is the Bob Dylan of anole lizard biology.

The Leonardo da Vinci.

The Godfather.

The John Lennon.

The Barack Obama.

The Albus Dumbledore of lizard biology.

And Jonathan has literally written the book on anole biology.

The two most common ways of pronouncing it are anole and anole.

And there's no right or wrong.

And I actually go back and forth either one for no particular reason.

He just really loves anoleless lizards.

He just also happens to be a brilliant scientist.

We caught up with Jonathan in Costa Rica to find

out how his name became synonymous with anoles.

There's a picture of me when I was about eight in Miami.

And I just caught a little green anole.

It's a picture of me looking very goofy with a green anole.

So I go way back with him.

It sounded like destiny that Jonathan would become an anole researcher.

And so I've been studying anoles ever since.

And do you know any good anole puns?

Well, only one.

It's anole-y but a goody.

I first met Jonathan when I was a graduate student.

And he tried to convince me to study anoles.

I remember that.

I said, the guy's living in Miami and he wants to go to

Spain to do his PhD when there are anoles in his backyard.

Crazy, man.

I know, but what I did instead is I convinced this guy.

He paid it forward.

Yeah, well, alright.

Excellent.

So, failure, success.

That's how I looked at it.

I spent three years studying anoles in Miami where they're just part of life.

You'd run into people, joggers, dog walkers,

and most people have some awareness of anoles.

But people are usually surprised to learn that I'm not just this one random weirdo

out there in the park, but there are actually hundreds of biologists,

including some of the top scientists in the

world, who are studying these particular lizards.

It's hard to know for sure how many papers

on anoles have been published over the years.

I would guess 5,000, maybe 10,000?

So, a lot of people study anoles.

But where does the anole story begin?

A good place to start is the world's largest collection of reptiles and

amphibians at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

We have almost 600,000 specimens of amphibians and reptiles.

Of those 600,000, about 18,000 of them are anolis lizards.

These scientific collections are like a combination

dictionary and encyclopedia of life on Earth.

They show scientists what species look like today and how they've changed over time.

Unfortunately, anole fossils are incredibly rare.

So, until recently, the fossil record didn't

shed much light on the ancient history of anoles.

But all that changed with recent discoveries on the island of Hispaniola.

There's a famous amber industry that's been going on there for a long time.

They're used for jewelry.

But occasionally, you find baby lizards in there too.

One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen

was a 20 million year old anole trapped in amber.

There are bubbles in the stone that truly contain the air that that lizard breathed.

These lizards trapped in amber show us that anoles have been living and evolving

on the islands of the Caribbean for tens of millions of years.

That history is preserved in the jars that line the walls of these collections.

Look closely and you'll start to appreciate that

these little lizards are the key to a big story.

The story of life and how it evolves.

To discover the secrets that only anoles can reveal, we need

to follow in the footsteps of generations of scientists.

We need to go to the Caribbean.

Here in Puerto Rico, a world of surprises is waiting.

In the Caribbean, land comes in all shapes and sizes.

If you visit the biggest islands in the Caribbean, the first

thing you'll notice is that they're crawling with anoles.

Look closely and you'll see that these anoles come in all shapes and sizes, too.

And just like bodybuilders and ballerinas, an anole's

anatomy can tell us a lot about how it makes a living.

Step into a Puerto Rican forest and you can see what I mean.

You won't have to wait long to see your first anole.

Maybe it'll be a brown anole with long legs on the trunk of a tree.

Higher in the tree, you might find a green anole with

shorter legs, climbing in the leaves and branches.

And down by your feet, an anole with a long tail and

stripes that disappears into the grass if you get too close.

High in the canopy, if you're lucky, you might see a

massive green anole with strong jaws and huge toe pads.

And if you sit really still, you could spot a tiny anole with a short tail and

stubby legs clinging to the smallest twigs in the forest.

All of these anoles live side by side here in Puerto Rico.

But they aren't just randomly scattered all over.

They specialize.

So you tend to find each type in a different part of the forest.

Some low.

Some high.

Some on the tree trunks.

And others out in the forest.

Some on the smallest twigs.

Hop over to a second island and the pattern becomes clearer.

Here in the Dominican Republic, the anole species

are different than the ones in Puerto Rico.

But look around and it'll feel like deja vu.

You'll find anoles in all the same places you saw them in Puerto Rico.

Long-legged breakfast and brown anoles on the tree trunks.

Anoles with long tails and stripes in the grasses.

Giant green anoles in the canopy and so on.

The species playing these roles are different,

but they look strikingly similar between islands.

It's almost as if different, look-alike actors were performing the same show.

Across the Caribbean, anoles that live in the same part of the forest share similar

anatomical features no matter which island they inhabit.

It's such an unusual pattern that anole researchers invented a word to describe it.

They called these anole types that repeat from island to island ecomorphs.

The ecomorphs are named for where in the environment you usually find them.

Trunk ground, trunk, trunk crown, the crown giant, the twig, and grass bush.

Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico each have

different species, but they all have the same ecomorphs.

The question is, why do lizards living in the same habitat, on different islands,

look so similar?

Why do the ones near the ground have long legs,

and the ones up in the trees have short legs?

Why up in the tree do they have big toe pads and they're often green, and the ones

down in the ground have smaller toe pads and are brown in color?

Jonathan suspected that each ecomorph's anatomical features

helped it survive in a particular part of the forest.

He hatched an ingenious plan to put this idea to the test.

The way we test that is basically by having the lizard Olympics.

Jonathan captured 15 different anole species in Puerto Rico and Jamaica.

And he brought them into the lab to measure their sprinting speed,

jumping ability, and toe pad cleaning power.

The species that live high in the trees, the trunk crowns and crown giants,

have the biggest toe pads.

These toe pads help them stick to smooth surfaces

like leaves so they don't fall out of the trees.

Trunk grounder anoles have long legs, which help

them jump far and run fast on flat surfaces.

Trunk grounder anoles are critical skills for a lizard that

has to capture prey and escape predators on the ground.

Jonathan's lizard Olympics confirmed what he suspected.

But each ecomorph has adaptations that help it

move through a different part of the forest.

We did find one interesting twist we didn't expect.

We thought that lizards with short legs would be faster on narrow surfaces.

Turns out they're not faster at all.

They may not be fast, but the short-legged anoles of

the twig ecomorph do have an advantage on thin branches.

They hardly ever fall.

In contrast, long-legged anoles have real trouble maneuvering on twigs.

They reach around to get the twig, and sometimes

they just miss and they just fall off the twig.

For an anole, being able to move quickly and confidently

through the forest turns between a full belly and an empty one.

Or even between life and death.

Imagine an anole species living down near the ground.

Just by chance, some have genes that give them longer legs than others.

These long-legged lizards can run fast.

So they're great at catching prey and escaping predators on the ground.

On average, long-legged anoles will produce more offspring than short-legged

anoles, passing more of their genes onto the next generation.

So over many generations, the whole species will evolve longer legs.

That's exactly how Charles Darwin

envisioned the process of natural selection.

So to Jonathan, natural selection in different parts of the forest could

explain why each ecomorph evolved its distinctive traits.

The problem was, no one was there to see evolution happen.

I always compare studying evolution to being like a detective story.

We've got a whodunit.

What happened in the past?

Why did it happen?

We can't go back in time, so we have to use whatever clues we have to piece it all

together to figure out what happened in the past.

Since each island has different species but the same ecomorphs, the big question

is whether these ecomorphs evolved once and then spread to

the different islands or evolved separately on each island.

To distinguish between these possibilities, we need to reconstruct the

evolutionary history of anoles in the Caribbean.

An evolutionary tree is a diagram that illustrates

the evolutionary relationships of species.

Like a real tree, an evolutionary tree begins with a single ancestor species.

When that one species splits into two, the stem branches.

As the tree grows, some branches die back as species go extinct.

But others keep growing and branching.

For a group like anoles, with hundreds of living species,

figuring out the evolutionary tree is a daunting task.

One type of evidence that helps scientists build evolutionary trees is something you

can find inside every plant and animal on earth.

DNA.

DNA changes over time, it evolves.

The longer two species have been diverging separately,

the greater the difference will be in their DNA.

So by sequencing the DNA of many species, you can build an evolutionary tree.

The shape of that tree, its pattern of branching, can help

us understand how anoles evolved and spread across islands.

At one extreme, all the ecomorphs could have evolved

just once, then spread from island to island.

At the other extreme, anoles could have spread to different islands first,

then to the ecomorphs separately on each of the four islands.

Jonathan and his colleagues collected DNA samples from 55 species of anoles to build

an evolutionary tree that encompassed every ecomorph on all four islands.

Had the ecomorphs truly evolved independently on different islands,

well the DNA should tell us.

The tree gave them an astonishing answer.

Despite all the variation among them, anoles living on the same island were more

closely related to each other than to species on other

islands, even the ones that looked strikingly similar.

This meant that anoles had colonized the different islands first, and then evolved

on each island into a virtually identical community of ecomorphs.

No one could ever tell the difference They evolved independently on each island.

These scientists had revealed another law of the lizard.

When they live in the same type of environment, different species evolve

similar traits to survive again and again and again.

Well people were very excited when this result came out because it showed that

evolution does repeat itself, that there are rules to evolution.

Many scientists thought that nature was so complex and evolution unfolded over such

long timescales that you rarely see the same outcome twice.

They suggested if you could somehow replay the tape

of life, you would get a different outcome every time.

But here you got the same outcome four times in a row on different islands.

Jonathan decided to dig deeper into this

intriguing idea that evolution was predictable.

It would be great to actually do an experiment to test the hypothesis that

natural selection drives the evolution of these features.

Jonathan was about to venture into new scientific territory and discover

something that Darwin never would have imagined.

It's a little known fact that Charles Darwin was a great experimenter,

but he never did an experiment about his most important

idea, the theory of evolution by natural selection.

And the reason he didn't do an experiment is obvious.

He thought that evolution moved incredibly slowly, glacially slowly.

He thought it would take thousands of years to lead to changes that we could detect.

Well, Darwin was right about

which he was wrong.

It turns out that anoles can show us something

that Darwin never could have imagined.

What evolution looks like as it's happening.

To see it for ourselves, we're heading to the Bahamas.

On the four biggest islands of the Caribbean, anoles

have evolved to thrive in different parts of the forest.

And their DNA reveals that they did so independently on each island.

These events took millions of years.

But what if you could watch evolution happen?

Charles Darwin thought that the Earth changed gradually over eons.

And since plants and animals adapt to their environments,

he thought the process of evolution had to be slow as well.

But some environments are much more dynamic than Darwin imagined.

The Bahamas have hundreds of tiny islands that often get hit by hurricanes.

Here, species colonize and go extinct from year to year.

That makes them the perfect laboratory to study survival and adaptation.

And that's what brought ecologist Rob Pringle here.

If you do your best male lizard impersonation,

you might get the females to come check you out.

Oh yeah, should I get down and do some pushups?

I was helping Rob catch a knolls for a massive experiment on a knoll evolution.

Easiest and best way to catch a knoll is to noose it.

Which is basically, it's land fishing for lizards.

So you take a fishing pole and you tie a little slip knot at the end of it.

And you try to loop that around the head of a lizard.

And then you pull.

And hopefully you have a lizard on the end of your stick.

Oh, look at this guy.

Bring him to your face.

Oh, right?

But I gotta say, that was the worst lizard catch in history.

So I got the lizard and I also fell thigh deep into a hole in the limestone.

But me and the lizard are okay.

Oh, there we go.

I'll leave it to the professionals from now on.

Well, you know.

Rob and his colleagues bring the knolls back to their portable lab to sample their

DNA and take x-rays to measure the lizard's bones with precision.

They're looking for signs of evolution taking place not over

millennia but during an experiment lasting just a few years.

After you x-ray her and take her measurements,

then she's going to come right back to this.

That's exactly right.

She'll probably just think it was a really weird dream.

It'll just be a weird dream, something she'll tell her friends about,

like you guys wouldn't believe what happened

to me and that none of them will believe her.

Knoll researchers have been coming to the Bahamas for decades

because it's a perfect place to study lizard evolution.

If you get a small enough island that you can study the whole population and yet big

enough that they can survive and adapt, it's

almost the equivalent of a laboratory test tube.

In the 1970s, ecologist Tom Shainer found small islands without a knolls and he

added a knolls to study how populations grow, shrink, and eventually go extinct.

Some populations defied the odds and continued to thrive year after year.

These survivors gave Jonathan an intriguing idea.

Would the lizards adapt to their new island homes?

They had inadvertently set up an evolution experiment because these islands differed

in their characteristics.

Tom Shainer had moved brown and knolls from a larger island, Staniel Key,

where the lizards lived on large trees, to these

tiny little islands that didn't have trees.

They had narrow bushes and narrow stem vegetation.

Just like twig and knolls having short legs on narrow vegetation, we predicted

that the brown and knolls would move from a broad

surface to a narrow surface, would evolve shorter legs.

Did the same rules that made evolution predictable

on the large islands operate in the Bahamas too?

And if so, could we witness evolution happen in just 14 years?

Few biologists would have asked this question because most of them still

thought that animals evolved too slowly to observe in a human lifetime.

But Jonathan saw an opportunity to put this conventional wisdom to the test.

A big part of biology is about creativity and

about understanding what is the right question.

There's an artistry there and if that's an art, then Jonathan's a Picasso.

Jonathan returned to Tom Shainer's islands in the 1990s with a new plan to compare

the anatomy of the new island populations and the original source population.

If the knolls were different, that would show that

these populations had evolved in just 14 years.

And the results flashed on the screen.

The populations were different.

They had evolved.

Well, needless to say, this is incredibly exciting.

The knolls differed in just the way Jonathan expected.

On the islands with slender branches, the knolls had evolved shorter legs.

And they did so in just 14 years.

Even for knolls, which can reproduce at one year old, 14 years is incredibly fast.

Of course, we should have been very surprised.

He thought that evolution occurred so slowly that you

couldn't possibly see it until a thousand years had elapsed.

Once we realized that knolls would adapt rapidly to new

conditions, that opened our eyes to other experiments we could do.

Knoll researchers could now ask new questions,

like how do predators affect evolution?

And they could answer those questions not just by doing detective work about the

ancient past, but by doing experiments and watching evolution unfold in the present.

That's what Rob Pringle and Jason Colby are doing in the Bahamas right now.

So, it's a good place to be if you're a brown or knoll.

Let's go paint some lizards.

Let's go paint some lizards.

Rob showed me how to mark knolls with non-toxic,

water-soluble paint for his experiment.

Yeah, there's a ton of lizards on this island.

It's also fun.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

It's like shooting lizards in a barrel.

Shooting lizards in a tree.

Yeah, it's kind of exactly like that.

The lizards will lose these paint marks the next time they shed their skins.

But the paint doesn't need to last long.

By marking all the knolls we can find one day and returning to count the marked and

unmarked knolls the next day, we can estimate

the total number of knolls on an island.

Last year we had upwards of 400 lizards on this island.

This population census helps the researchers monitor

how the knolls are doing on different islands.

And on some islands, the knolls are in real danger because

Rob and Jason have added another lizard into the mix.

One of the brown knoll's enemies.

The curly-tailed lizard.

It turns out that curly-tailed lizards don't

just impact the numbers of knolls on islands.

They actually cause natural selection.

Within the first six months of the curly-tails being

there, knolls with longer hind limbs have better survival.

And presumably that's because they're faster at running on

the ground to escape predation from the curly-tailed lizard.

Gradually, the knolls begin to move up.

They spend less time on the ground and more time in the slender branches.

Once they're out of danger from the predator,

natural selection has a different effect.

During that period, selection reverses and favors brown knolls with shorter hind

limbs because they're occupying these narrower branches and

knolls with shorter limbs can move better in that environment.

These experiments reveal another law of the lizard.

Natural selection is happening all the time.

And it's driven not only by the environment, but also by other species.

One species more than any other is shaping the next era of lizard evolution.

How are knolls adapting to the age of humans?

To find out, Nate and I are heading to my backyard, Miami, to discover the

astonishing adaptations of these little lizards in the big city.

Our journey has already shown us that knolls

are evolving to survive in a changing world.

But never in their history have knolls faced a more

perilous or uncertain environment than the world of humans.

Living in Miami, I see knolls around me every day.

But a lot of the knolls I see in Miami didn't actually originate there.

They come from islands all over the Caribbean.

Southern Florida is a melting pot of knoll immigrants.

Florida has only one native species of knoll, but

eight other species have established populations here.

They got to Miami either through the pet trade or accidentally in shipments of

produce and other goods coming from the Caribbean.

Humans don't just bring them to the city.

As we convert wild forests into concrete jungles, we also bring the city to knolls.

When knolls arrive in a new area, they encounter novel types of environments.

And so there are new predators, there are new competitors.

Most knolls live on the trunks of trees, branches of trees, higher up in the canopy.

But in the urban environment, much of this vegetation

has been replaced by buildings and walls, lamp posts.

Those surfaces can be smoother and harder to climb than trees and rocks.

And that's not the only challenge of city life.

By replacing natural vegetation with concrete,

asphalt, they change the thermal environment.

They're much hotter than a comparable natural area.

Since lizards can't regulate their body temperatures internally,

the heat of the city could also threaten their survival.

In some cases, the challenges are too overwhelming.

They just can't do it.

But sometimes they're able to survive and perhaps even adapt to these new conditions.

One of these survivors is the Puerto Rican Crested

Anole, which thrives in cities throughout Puerto Rico.

Researchers Kristen Winchell and Shane Campbell-Staten want to understand how

this species is coping with life in the city.

The overarching question my research is trying to

tackle is can humans influence the course of evolution?

How fast can these animals change?

And can they keep pace with human-mediated changes in the environment?

I think a lot of people do get confused when I'm walking around in urban areas.

I am walking around with a fishing pole which is very strange.

I'm sticking my fishing pole up trees and on their walls which is even stranger.

So we get a lot of questions.

To understand whether lizards are adapting to city life, Kristen and Shane collect

anoles from urban and natural sites and take them back to their field lab to

compare their anatomy and physical performance.

Kristen found that compared to forest lizards,

urban lizards had longer legs and larger toe pads.

The question is do these traits make a difference?

To find out, Kristen planned a new Lizard Olympics to

test the anoles performance in the urban environment.

The first event in this competition, urban and forest

lizards sprinted on racetracks with three different surfaces.

We're running them on painted concrete, on bark, and on unpainted metal.

We're very interested to see if the forest lizards can run

as fast as the urban lizards on these other substrates.

While Kristen's lizards sprinted on miniature racetracks, Shane set up a less

traditional Olympic event to test how urban anoles cope with the heat of the city.

Reptiles are cold-blooded animals and a lot of

aspects of their biology are linked to temperature.

To figure out how hot a lizard can get before it stops working, we gradually warm

that lizard and we periodically flip it onto its back.

Shane isn't hurting the lizards.

As he slowly heats them up, they eventually get too hot to respond.

The riding reflex is such a good test because

a lizard always wants to be on its feet.

Shane records the temperature at which they can no longer turn themselves back over.

And then he quickly helps the lizards cool back down.

After capturing and testing hundreds of anoles, it was time for Shane and Kristen

to compare the lizards from the forest and the city.

On average, urban lizards were able to tolerate temperatures

that were one degree Celsius hotter compared to forest lizards.

A difference of one degree Celsius might not seem like a lot, but for a lizard,

this is a difference of being able to be active all day long and have access to all

of those mates and all of that food that you otherwise would have to give up

because you're hiding in the shade trying to cool down.

The urban lizards also have an advantage running on

the slick surfaces found in the city environment.

The urban lizards run faster on all substrates, and these differences are most

pronounced on the very smooth vertical substrates

on the metal and on the painted concrete.

The ability to perform well on these substrates has

real implications for their survival in this habitat.

These little lizards continue to surprise scientists with their powers of

adaptation, even in fast-changing environments.

Kristen and Shane and Shane's discoveries show that the anole's ancient evolutionary

playbook still helps them survive and adapt, even in the modern world.

Just when we thought our journey was over, we heard

about a new discovery in the Dominican Republic.

A new anole species.

A truly bizarre lizard that had caught scientists completely off guard.

We had to see it.

One of the few people who knew where to find

it was a scientist who first described it.

It's an unexpected discovery.

This is a giant anole that lives high in the trees, but it's strikingly similar to

a group of lizards previously only known from Cuba.

So this anole potentially represents a new ecomorph.

So we're here to look for it.

Luke took us to the place where he first saw this mysterious anole.

You get this sort of neat spot where the trees are dry

forest trees but then you start getting this Spanish moss.

Lots of lichen.

I've never seen any place like this.

This is a totally bizarre, unique, cool place.

I'm liking this environment.

Oh, that's good.

I'm liking this environment.

Luke told us that our best chance of finding these lizards

was to search for them at night while they were sleeping.

Is that a guarantee?

Is that a promise?

Promise.

Awesome.

I can't wait.

This new species was one of the most mysterious lizards in the world.

And we wanted to be the first film crew to find it.

Easier said than done.

Gotta be in the right spot.

Get lucky and be looking for the right thing.

From Luke's description we knew what to look for.

A grayish, mossy looking lizard sleeping on a gray mossy branch.

I've never seen so many tarantulas.

Welcome to my world.

After spending five hours looking at twigs in the

dark he starts seeing things that aren't there.

I'm pretty sleepy.

It's been a long, unsuccessful night.

Other than a few hundred tarantulas and a ton of bug bites we had nothing.

I think we're going to find it.

Just... not tonight.

We still had one more night in the Dominican Republic.

One last chance to be the first film crew to capture footage of this new species.

But it was starting to feel like a long shot.

It was our last night in this remote corner of the Dominican Republic.

Our last chance to find and film a lizard that was brand new to science.

We were all a little nervous.

So the goal here is if you see a lizard and it doesn't see you look away from it.

Don't scare it with your lights.

Flag it.

Radio over.

Let everybody know.

A few hours go by and Luke gets a call over the radio.

So we got Ananol up here.

Alright, I'll be right over.

Which tree?

Yep, that's Ananolus landistoiae.

Hello guys.

Okay, we got one.

Baby?

We got one.

Where is it?

I'll show you.

So we're going to be careful not to spook it.

You see there's that white spot.

Oh yeah.

That's it.

It's a little juvie hanging head down.

How did you see that?

Totally different looking from everything else we've seen.

First Ananolus landistoiae, man.

Yeah.

Alright.

Seeing this lizard for the first time was amazing.

But then reality hit.

It was dangling from a branch 30 feet off the ground.

Way too high for us to film.

Our only chance was to wait until sunrise and hope

that it moved low enough that we could catch it.

I got an idea.

I got a great idea.

Let's pull the car over here and noose him from on top of the car.

We both get on the roof.

Nate's looking through the camera so that he

can guide me because I can't see what I'm doing.

No.

He's lost it.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Oh!

You got him!

F♪♪♪!

You got him!

Got him!

Yes!

Neil!

Hands down, the best lizard catch that I've ever seen.

One of the rarest anoles in the world.

Oh, he's like a little dinosaur.

What?

He's trying to bite me.

Oh my god.

I'm pretty stoked.

This is like the whole trip we've been looking for this guy.

Very, very few people who are interested in anoles have seen this lizard.

It's super special to get to home.

As we held this new species and filmed it climb back into the tree, we couldn't help

but remember the first law of the lizard we learned on this journey.

Expect surprises.

Even on Hispaniola, an island where biologists have worked for decades,

here was a strange anole totally unlike anything else

that no one had even noticed until a few years ago.

It really drove home how little we still know in many ways about anoles.

But even some of the most common species, the ones that scientists have studied for

decades, there are still things about their lives that we just don't know.

When I graduated from college, I said to myself, I'm

never going to study anoles again because we know it all.

Of course that was naive.

Far from knowing it all, we barely scratched the surface.

Neil and I had followed the anole story for more than a year.

From Caribbean rainforests to university laboratories.

From tiny Bahamian islands to the city of Miami.

We started this quest thinking we understood why anoles were special.

But our journey left us with something more profound.

Going and seeing the diversity of anoles in an island like Puerto Rico,

it's like going to the Louvre in Paris and appreciating the dirt in there.

It's something that's beautiful and complex

and fascinating completely of its own accord.

When I was a scientist studying lizards, people

would always ask me, why are you studying lizards?

And I think that it's normal to be skeptical.

It's hard to understand why it could possibly be important to dedicate all this

effort into understanding how these lizards live their lives.

But life on Earth is incredibly complicated.

And understanding the rules that generated that diversity is fundamental to

understanding where we fit into the bigger picture.

And very few other organisms have taught us as much about those rules as anoles.