While exploring a cave in Timor-Leste, a small island nation sandwiched between Indonesia and Australia, scientists saw a gecko dashing across the limestone. Because the cave was so remote, said Chan Kin Onn, a herpetologist at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum in Singapore, “the potential for this gecko to be a new species was high.” On a hunch, he sprang after the critter and found himself wedged in the rocks.
“I couldn’t get to the lizard because the crack was too narrow, but I saw the rear half of its body and could tell that it was a bent-toed gecko from the genus Cyrtodactylus,” Chan said.
Bent-toed geckos are most active at night, so the team returned in the evening with flashlights. Within an hour, Chan said, they found 10 individuals of this unfamiliar gecko. DNA analysis and further study of the gecko bodies they collected would later confirmed it was a species new to science. Descriptions of the new species are published in a paper in the journal ZooKeys.
The researchers chose to name it Cyrtodactylus santana, after Nino Konis Santana National Park, home to the cave where they encountered the gecko. The park itself is named in honor of Nino Konis Santana, a Timorese militia leader who fought against the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste between 1993 until his death in 1998.
Timor-Leste won its independence in 2002, making it today the fourth-youngest country in the world and the first new sovereign nation created in the 21st century.