This cat potentially made a scientific discovery while looking for a snack

Amanda Harris, the owner of the ‘explorer’ cat from Taranaki, New Zealand didn't expect anything extraordinary to happen when her pet came back home with his ‘particular meow’ of a hunter. But to her surprise, the prey was no less than a rare native type of skink known as a kakerakau.

It may be the first specimen of its species to have been found.

Something slithered across the carpet

According to Harris, her cat always sounded different if he was back home with a ‘gift’.

She said:

This cat's got a particular meow when he's got something, so when he brought it in I saw it and it slithered across the carpet and that's what caught my eye.

Harris immediately picked up the creature, put it in a box and contacted the Taranaki Regional Council to identify it.

Skinks are a type of lizard, characterized by their distinctively shorter legs than other species of lizards. Around 1,500 species of skink have been discovered so far.

‘It could be something completely new’

Biodiversity officers got super excited about the cat’s discovery because it looked like something they’d never seen before.

A DNA sample confirmed that the skink was indeed a kakerakau or even a new species.

Taranaki Regional Council senior ecologist Halema Jamieson said this was significant, as kakerakaus had only been seen previously in tiny populations dotted across the northern portions of New Zealand's North Island.

She added:

Even if it's not a brand new species and is the same as is found up at Bream Head that's still super exciting because that's over 500km between the two known populations and given that it hadn't been recognised before 2003 this is entirely exciting. It's essentially a new species that's turned up on our doorstep.

So few kakerakau skinks have been found that very little is known about them.

According to Jamieson, the lizard was feisty and wasn't scared of being examined by the scientists. It was ‘poised up’ and ‘very cheeky looking up at the camera’.

Scientific discovery, not a snack

It is extremely rare to find native lizards in the wild on mainland New Zealand due to the large degrees of predation from rodents and cats.

Luckily for this skink and the scientific community, the ‘explorer’ cat wasn’t much of a brute and spared his discovery for the world.

His owner said:

The cat that brought it in is not much of a hunter, he'll gather but he won't really eat anything so to speak so he chose the right cat.

Sources used:

- Newsweek: 'New 'Very Cheeky' Lizard Species Potentially Found by Cat'