Kawekaweau was a jumbo forest gecko in New Zealand . Only one person had seen a living specimen — and he ’d kill it . Then a stuffed gecko work up in a museum , in France . No one knows where it come from .
scientist only know about kawekaweau , a large brown gecko that lived in the forests of New Zealand , 2nd - hand . There were legends about it , but no modern scientist had ever seen one . They were long - extinct . The closest any brush any biologist had ever had with one occur in 1873 , when he hear a Maori chief describe killing a kawekaweau in 1870 . The biologist wrote , “ He account it to me as being about two feet long and as thick as a mankind ’s wrist ; colour brown , uncase longitudinally with dull red . ”
Then , in 1986 , investigator go through the basement of the Natural History Museum of Marseille , in France , hail across an untagged specimen . It was a gecko , roughly two feet long , with “ dark reddish - brownish longitudinal dorsal stripes . ” Scientists took a closer flavor , comparing it with both survive description of the far-famed gecko , and with the physiology of its closest bread and butter relative , and determined that this bushed pig out relic was the only physical specimen of the giant gecko in the world .
The specimen get the scientific name Hoplodactylus delcourti , for Alain Delcourt , the helper in electric charge of the herpetology collection at the Marseille museum . No one has been capable to find out anything about the gecko , including when or how it descend to Marseille . The stuffed geckowent to the National Museum in Wellington in 1990 . It remains subtle . There are few picture of it online . ( The image above is of its small relative , Hoplodactylus duvaucelli . ) If you want to look at the affair , here is the 1986 paper that identify it .
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