Lamington National Park

Recently I spent a day up at Lamington National Park with some friends of mine. We’d gone up there to look for a small, brown, nondescript species of skink called Harrisoniascincus zia. I’ve nicknamed it the Solo skink, because the people who came up with the name Harrisoniascincus were Star Wars fans. While they officially named the skink after “the late Dr Launcelot Harrison, of Sydney University, N.S.W.”, I reckon they had someone else on their minds. We managed to find the Solo skink, plus a bunch of other species.

The highlight of the trip was seeing Coeranoscincus reticulatus. This is a species of reduced-limbed, fossorial skink that I’ve wanted to see for a while. A friend of mine had told me of a walking track up at Lamington that was a good spot to find them of an evening. I’ve done a fair bit of walking around at Lamington at night (mainly looking for geckos), but had never seen a Coeranoscinus. On this last trip, we’d started walking down a track to try to find a basking red-bellied black snake some other visitors had told us about. We got to the spot where the snake had last been seen, but it was no longer there. It was now about 5 PM, and on the way back up the track we came across three Coeranoscincus reticulatus crossing the path. Top stuff!

Coastal carpet python (Morelia spilota mcdowelli)

Marsh snake (Hemiaspis signata)

Rainforest dragon or southern angle-headed dragon (Hypsilurus spinipes)

Solo skink (Harrisoniascincus zia)

Murray’s skink (Eulamprus murrayi )

Murray’s skink (Eulamprus murrayi)

Murray’s skink (Eulamprus murrayi)

Land mullet (Egernia major)

Coeranoscincus reticulatus