Lately, people have been accidentally submitting animals to me. This post comes as a result of an e-conversation in which a minor dispute over dinosaurs being truly extinct occurred. VERY minor. A quick google search on living dinosaurs eventually brought me to the tuatara.
The tuatara, the modern dinosaur, is native to New Zealand (aka Neighbor to The Deadliest Place on Earth, further aka'd as "Australia Jr."). They are...get this...in between a lizard and a snake, even though they look 100% lizard.
Tuataras also have a parietal eye, or a third eye (only in hatchlings, it gets covered by scales after a few months) and are able to hear despite not having ears. According to always trustworthy Wikipedia, tuataras retain some unique skeletal features of fish through the magic of evolution (WHAT?!). That paragraph right there is what Animals Are Weird is all about.
Additional Fun Fact: Tuataras were on the back of the New Zealand 5 cent coin until October 2006.
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