Expedition finds ‘lost world’ in Australia

An expedition to a remote part of northern Australia has uncovered three new vertebrate species isolated for millions of years, with scientists calling the area a “lost world”.

Conrad Hoskin from James Cook University and a National Geographic film crew were dropped by helicopter onto the rugged Cape Melville mountain range on Cape York Peninsula and were amazed at what they found. It included a bizarre looking leaf-tail gecko, a gold-coloured skink (a type of lizard), and a brown-spotted, yellow boulder-dwelling frog, none of them ever seen before.

“The top of Cape Melville is a lost world. Finding these new species up there is the discovery of a lifetime — I’m still amazed and buzzing from it,” said Hoskin, a tropical biologist from the Queensland-based university. “Finding three new, obviously distinct vertebrates would be surprising enough in somewhere poorly explored like New Guinea, let alone in Australia, a country we think we’ve explored pretty well.”

The virtually impassable mountain range is home to millions of black granite boulders piled hundreds of metres high, eroded in places after being thrust up through the earth millions of years ago.

While surveys had previously been conducted in the boulder-fields around the base of Cape Melville, a plateau of rainforest on top, identified by satellite imagery, had remained largely unexplored, fortressed by massive boulder walls.

Within days of arriving, the team found the three new species as well as a host of other finds Hoskins said may also be new to science.

The highlight was the leaf-tailed gecko, a “primitive-looking” 20cm creature that is an ancient relic from a time when rainforest was more widespread.

The Cape Melville Leaf-tailed Gecko, which has huge eyes and a long, slender body, is highly distinct from its relatives and has been named Saltuarius eximius, Hoskin said, with the findings detailed in the latest edition of the international journal Zootaxa.

Tim Laman, a National Geographic photographer and Harvard University researcher who joined Hoskin on the expedition, said he was stunned that such undiscovered places remained.