Wildlife Wednesday: Big ol' lizard

I got a pleasant surprised this weekend past. While taking the family for a relaxing morning barbecue brunch at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station (an historic reserve at the site of the original overland telegraph station of Alice Springs) I chanced upon this big old perentie (Varanus giganteus) mooching along the dry riverbed of the Todd River. I followed it up into the rocky river bank and into an overhang. Finally my daughter arrived with a camera and I was able to snap some okay pictures.Perenties are not uncommon animals but it is only the second time I've seen a wild one so close to town.

Melanie with the perentie just visible in the background, the only shot that I could get that gave the lizard some scale. Note also the resurrection fern (Cheilanthes sp.) growing nice and green in the rock crack above and to the left of Melanie's hat. It rained here a few weeks ago.

Wildlife Wednesday: A cute furry mammal

Matthew and a Black-Footed Rock Wallaby share a moment.

The mammals of central Australia have suffered a severe paroxysm of extinctions. Fortunately the cute little black-footed rock wallaby (Petrogale lateralis) is still with us. These photos were taken at Heavitree Gap, at the south end of the town of Alice Springs. Here the wallabies are habituated to people and if you are there at dawn or sunset you can hand feed wild wallabies.

Wildlife Wednesday: It came from the Tanami

This monstrous beetle was brought in to me from Yuendumu, an aboriginal community out in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory, about 350 km NW of Alice Springs.

Dorsal view of the specimen. Those scale divisions are centimetres. Photo by Steve Jackson.

It is a female Haploscapanes barbarossa, a large rhinoceros beetle of the subfamily Dynastinae of the family Scarabaeidae.This one measured 52 mm long and weighed 62 grams. Males bear a horn on their head (hence the common name rhinoceros beetle) which they use for fighting each other, presumably over mates and territory.

Photo by Adam Yates

Normally one would expect such a giant insect to be an inhabitant of moist tropical habitats, if not tropical rainforest and jungles. An indeed H. barbarossa is an inhabitant of the wet tropics of Australia, however in an unusual biogeographic twist the range extends not only across the drier parts of the top end but southwards in the Northern Territory, penetrating the arid country of the Tanami.
H. barbarossa has two other claims to fame: it is, according to some sources, the heaviest Australian beetle (I do wonder about this, there are some pretty enormous cerambycids) and it was the first Australian insect to receive a scientific name (by Fabricius in 1775).