Head to head
Flap-footed Lizard vs Legless Lizard
A flap-footed lizard and a legless lizard both look almost exactly like snakes at first glance, but they come from different lizard families entirely, and neither one is actually closely related to the other despite sharing the same basic limbless body plan.
| Flap-footed Lizard | Legless Lizard | |
|---|---|---|
| Family | Pygopodidae (gecko relatives) | Several unrelated families |
| Range | Australia and New Guinea only | Worldwide, species-dependent |
| Front legs | Completely absent | Completely absent |
| Hind legs | Tiny non-functional flaps | Absent or tiny vestiges, varies by species |
| Movable eyelids | Yes, can blink | Yes, can blink |
| External ear openings | Present | Present |
| Can vocalise | Yes, some species squeak | Rare among most species |
| Closest relatives | Geckos | Varies, e.g. skinks in some species |
Flap-footed Lizard vs Legless Lizard: common questions
Are flap-footed lizards a type of legless lizard?
In the broadest everyday sense, yes, since a flap-footed lizard has lost its legs and looks snake-like, which is exactly what the general term legless lizard describes. More precisely, though, flap-footed lizard refers to one specific family, Pygopodidae, found only in Australia and New Guinea and closely related to geckos, while legless lizard is a broader descriptive term that also applies to several other, unrelated limb-loss lineages found in other lizard families around the world, so not every legless lizard is a flap-footed lizard specifically.
How can you tell any legless lizard apart from a real snake?
The two most reliable physical differences, which apply to flap-footed lizards and other legless lizards alike, are movable eyelids and external ear openings. A legless lizard of any kind can blink using eyelids just like a typical four-legged lizard, while a true snake has a fixed, transparent scale permanently covering each eye and cannot blink at all. Legless lizards also retain small visible ear openings on the sides of the head, a feature entirely absent in true snakes, which have no external ear structure whatsoever.
Why have so many different, unrelated lizards independently lost their legs?
Losing limbs and adopting an elongated, snake-like body appears to offer real advantages for moving efficiently through dense grass, leaf litter, or loose soil, and for burrowing, advantages significant enough that this same basic body plan has evolved independently many separate times across the lizard family tree rather than just once. This repeated, independent evolution of limblessness in unrelated lizard lineages, including flap-footed lizards and various other legless lizard groups, is considered one of the clearest and most striking examples of convergent evolution among reptiles.