Marine iguana

Now snakes, including sea snakes, are pretty much lizards in an evolutionary sense, just lizards that have been radically reshaped by evolution.

But amongst the animals the general public would look at and say, yes, obviously that's a lizard, there's only one marine species in the whole world, one marine lizard, the marine iguana of the Galapagos Islands.

an animal that is the living embodiment of evolution as a process played out amidst a host of competing forces.

Darwin's Menagerie Part 3 The Imps of Darkness Charles Darwin arrived in the Galapagos Islands, an archipelago of over a hundred islands around 600 miles out into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, in September 1835.

Those biggest examples would be males.

There are a lot bigger than females, something like twice the body mass, a fact that's kind of central to the particular story we're working towards here.

the legs are quite short but strong the head blunt and rounded both sexes have rows of little spines running all the way along their backs from the neck to the tip of their tail bigger spines in males The sort of baseline colour for a marine iguana is something close to black, very, very dark at least.

But this and the size too depends what island you're on.

As Iggy ate a delicious fruit salad for breakfast, he got going.

You see, Iggy was a marine iguana.

Marine iguanas, you might be thinking of an iguana that's green, right? Yeah, those are green iguanas, which are really cool.

But Iggy...

He's a marine iguana, which is a different kind of iguana.

They're black with white stripes and usually like brown or tan speckles all over their body, and they have some white crests on the top of their head.

They're a really cool creature, and I guess pretty good at surfing.

Water again, and...