Slow Worm - Tumblr Posts

Day 10 of posting cute creatures we found on the field trip:

This is one of my favorite reptiles in the world. Behold:

slow worm (Anguis fragilis)! This is a legless lizard, not a snake and you can easily tell because she blinks (snakes don’t have eyelids and can’t blink) and look at her tongue: it’s not forked, more like spoon shaped.

She also has a tiny ear hole right behind her eye. It looks like white > sign. Can you spot it? Snakes don’t have external ears!

I know it’s a female because males have blue spots and an exaggerated dark stripe on their back. This girl is tiny which means that she’s not gravid this year. Or maybe she’s already laid her eggs!

Here she tried posing but got super bored. Slow worms feed on insects, other invertebrates and rarely eggs. They spend most of their lives digging through earth. There was a belief that they were made of glass and if you dropped them, they would shatter. This was because of their very hard, but also very smooth scales. They do kind of feel like rough glass and such scales help them move through earth and not get hurt. They rarely bite and even if they do, their teeth are tiny and can’t do any damage. They will however poop on you. She sure did.

While I'm slowly dying of heat-related stress, have some more journal pictures!

Lots of illustrations from dreams in this set. Also something I labelled as a snake but discovered, watching Springwatch later, was probably a slow-worm, which is a legless lizard.

Little garden critters for a craft market soon! If your in brighton on the 27th of july you can snag yourself one of these! After then im going to start an etsy shop and if there are left overs theyll be on there :)