AT A GLANCE
- Common Name: Common Flat Lizard
- Scientific Name: Platysaurus intermedius
- Category: Reptiles
- Subcategory: Lizards
- Range: Southern Africa, widely distributed across northern and eastern South Africa, eastern Botswana, southern Zimbabwe, and central Mozambique
- Habitat Type: Granite kopjes, sandstone outcrops, rocky gorges, and boulder-strewn savannah hillsides in open woodland and bushveld
- IUCN Red List Status: Least Concern
- Lifespan: 8 to 12 years
- Diet: Insectivorous (swarming winged termites, ants, beetles, grasshoppers, flies, caterpillars, and occasional wild figs)
- Average Size/Weight: Snout-to-vent length 9 to 12 cm; total length with tail 20 to 28 cm; weight 25 to 50 g
- Key Defining Feature: Heavily flattened pancake-like lizard adapted to narrow rock cracks, with spectacular rainbow-colored males featuring emerald-green backs, blue throats, and orange tails
Overview
The Common Flat Lizard (Platysaurus intermedius) is one of the most widespread and magnificent rock-specialist reptiles of southern Africa’s bushveld. Belonging to the family Cordylidae, this remarkable lizard has undergone extreme morphological flattening, possessing a wafer-thin skull and ribcage that allow it to slide into wafer-thin hairline cracks in granite kopjes. While females are camouflaged in subtle brown stripes, territorial adult males are a visual explosion of electric emerald, cobalt blue, and glowing orange.
Biology and Physical Characteristics
Platysaurus intermedius displays extreme dorsoventral compression: its body is pressed remarkably flat, with granular, smooth scales that minimize friction when wedging into tight rock crevices. The species exhibits striking sexual dichromatism. Adult males possess a brilliant dark green or turquoise-blue head and back speckled with fine yellow dots, an intense indigo-blue throat, a bright orange-red or yellow belly, and an orange-to-terracotta tail. Females and juveniles are cryptically adorned with a dark brown back marked with three sharp, creamy-white longitudinal stripes running from snout to tail tip.
Behavior and Ecology
Diurnal and heliothermic, Common Flat Lizards spend hours basking on horizontal granite slabs to absorb radiant heat. When competing for mates and defending territory, males perform dazzling displays: tilting their flattened bodies sideways, raising their heads high, and arching their backs to expose their luminous ultraviolet-reflective blue and orange throats to rivals. If a falcon, hornbill, or mongoose attacks, the lizard darts at lightning speed across the rock face and wedges itself deep into a horizontal fissure, exhaling air to squeeze in and then inflating its lungs slightly to lock itself firmly in place.
Conservation and Human Impact
The Common Flat Lizard is classified as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. It is abundant across its extensive range in southern Africa, thriving wherever suitable granite or sandstone outcrops occur. Because rocky kopjes are generally unsuitable for agriculture, its rock-face habitat remains largely undisturbed, and populations are well represented in numerous major reserves including Kruger National Park and Matobo National Park.
Interesting Factoid
When fleeing a predator, the Common Flat Lizard squeezes into a rock crack barely thicker than a coin, exhales all the air from its lungs to slip inside, and then puffs its body back up so tightly that no predator can pull it out.