When Natalie Claunch, a scientist at the University of Florida first discovered a Northern Curly-Tailed Lizard near a Cocoa Beach pizza joint, she assumed the lizard was pregnant and about to give birth.
But when they went to check for eggs, “it just felt like it was full of Silly Putty,” said researcher Natalie Claunch in a statement.
The lizard weighed about 1 ounce (28 grams), and the mass alone weighed 0.8 ounces (22 grams), or about 78.5% of the lizard’s total weight.
Turns out it was just a big ball of poop.
The fecal mass was so large that it made up nearly 80% of the animal’s body weight
This represents “the largest feces-to-body mass ratio recorded in a living animal,”
“I was blown away by how little room there was left for all the other organs,” Florida Museum researcher Edward Stanely says in the statement. “It has only a tiny space left over in its rib cage for the heart, lungs and liver.”
To better understand her condition, the researchers had to humanely euthanize her.
But she’ll live on in history books.
Original Article
https://www.livescience.com/constipated-lizard-record-breaking-poo.html
