My Year of Darwin 5/16/2014: Lovely lazy lava lizards

  

"The day was overpoweringly hot, and the lake looked clear and blue: I hurried down the cindery slope, and, choked with dust, eagerly tasted the water-but, to my sorry, I found it salt as brine. 

The rocks on the coast abounded with great black lizards, between three and four feet long; and on the hills, an ugly yellowish-brown species was equally common. We see many of this latter kind, some clumsily running out of the way, and others shuffling into their burrows." Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle 

The first is the marine iguana, which I think nearly everyone familiar with the story of Darwin and the Galapagos knows. I had no idea what the second is so I looked it up. Darwin's description is too vague to determine the particular species but he's probably referring to one of the over-twenty species of lava lizards that occur on the Galapagos Islands.  Now I know!