Burra Railway Station

It may be small, but an endangered species of lizard found exclusively in South Australia’s Mid North is facing a giant battle for survival, with one expert saying it could be extinct within this century.

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Conservationists, community and landholders are stepping up their efforts to keep the special little species around for the future.

The pygmy bluetongue lizard was already thought to be extinct, before it was rediscovered near Burra in 1992. Growing to less than 20 centimetres long, the skink lives only in remnant patches of native grassland that has not been cropped.

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Nature Foundation science and knowledge project officer Dr Lucy Clive has committed almost a decade to learning and observing as much as she can about the “fascinating” little lizard that is endemic to the state’s Mid North. While it was once found as far south as Adelaide, the last documented sighting of a pygmy bluetongue in the south was at Marion in 1956.

“This little skink lives in spider burrows built by trapdoor spiders and wolf spiders – they don’t build their own habitat, they’re like squatters really,” Lucy said. “It has a very limited habitat and the range of species goes only from north of Jamestown, Peterborough area down to Kapunda in the south.

“The Mid North around Burra is the core habitat species range and they live in these tiny little patches of habitat on grazed properties – predominantly sheep-grazed properties, but we’ve found a couple also on cattle grazing properties.”