They were great runners, those skinks. The only one that gave me even a sniff left me with a pawful of prickles as it went down a crack. All I can say is it had one dark stripe running down the central midline, with one, possibly two more running down each flank; I don’t recall much, if any, speckling or spotting. I know this describes pretty much every Ctenotus ever, and my memory goes fuzzier with each passing month, but I thought them rather interesting at the time.

I don’t know what your Mareeba Ctenotus would have been, but I’m intrigued.

Big Mitchell Creek, which the highway crosses just near Lake Mitchell, yielded a couple of Ctenotus for me, one of which I’m fairly sure was C. robustus, but another I’ve tentatively called C. spaldingi (didn’t have a hand-lens so the best I could do was squint until I thought I had a decent idea of the diagnostic scales; have you ever been licked on the nose by a Ctenotus?). It’s also a gun site for White-browed Robin, which was why I was there; look out for them if you want to get your bird on, it’s a pretty special tick. There were also a couple of very heavily horizontally-striped skinks in termite mound habitat around the Mareeba Wetlands, though I could never get tabs on them.