Some lizards lost their legs to look like snakes
Animals
Hidden in the leaf litter of Taiwan's mountains, these reptiles spent a century tricking biologists into believing they were snakes by completely abandoning their limbs.
In the dense forests of Taiwan, a creature called Dopasia formosensis spent over 100 years as a taxonomic ghost. While it looks identical to a snake, it is actually a lizard that evolved to lose its legs to better navigate tight underground burrows. This process, known as convergent evolution, has happened multiple times across different species, but this specific lizard remained a mystery because it is almost impossible to find in the wild.