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.”