These ‘Pirate Lizards’ Thrive With Three Legs

A new study finds that many lizards with missing limbs fare surprisingly well despite their impairment

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

October 21, 2025

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Jonathan Losos, a lizard biologist at Washington University, was catching anole lizards in the Bahamas decades ago when he came across an unusual specimen.

“The lizard was nimble,” Losos recalls in a statement. “Until I had her in my hand, I didn’t realize she was missing an entire hind leg.”

Over the years, he heard similar stories of three-legged lizards from other researchers and colleagues. But it wasn’t until 2018, when James Stroud, now at the Georgia Institute of Technology, joined his lab, that an investigation began in earnest.

Now, the results of their work suggest that limb loss is common among lizards—and that these “three-legged pirates” can run fast, live long lives, and reproduce. The findings were published in the American Naturalist last week.

To conduct their study, the researchers reached out to an international team of lizard biologists to see if they had ever encountered a lizard with three legs.

“Most have never thought about it and just had a random picture on their phone, just like: ‘Huh, this is odd’,” Stroud tells Gennaro Tomma at the New York Times.

Overall, the researchers documented 122 cases of limb loss across 58 lizard species spanning six continents.

Previous research has demonstrated that even small differences in leg length can affect a lizard’s ability to escape predators, catch prey and reproduce, Losos and Stroud explain in an article for the Conversation. “Since subtle variations matter so much, biologists have long assumed that losing an entire limb should be catastrophic,” they write.

Their findings, however, tell a different story. While most lizards probably don’t survive their limb injury, many of them find ways to compensate for the loss. Though these “pirate” lizards represent less than one percent of the animals’ population, they conclude, they do surprisingly well without the offending limb.

To test the lizards’ ability to function without their missing limbs, the researchers used high-speed cameras and computer software to track their running movements. They called the event the “Lizard Olympics,” they write in the Conversation.

While some lizards were clearly impacted by their limb loss, others were speedy sprinters. One brown anole could actually run faster than four-legged members of its species, they write; it did so by increasing its body undulation to extend the length of its strides.

“It’s impressive,” Mark Scherz, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, tells the New York Times. “Not only are they overcoming the injury, but they’re going on to modify their behavior to compensate for it.”

The findings might even challenge Darwin’s idea of natural selection, the researchers suggest. Scientists have long thought that limb length in lizards is an adaptation to the lizards’ natural environment. Under the theory, animals with major deformities would usually be expected not to survive long, meaning that over time their genetic material would fade from the natural population.

In the present research, however, some of the three-limbed lizards thrived. Perhaps, the researchers write, natural selection is not as omnipresent as Darwin believed.

They propose four possibilities. Natural selection could be probabilistic, meaning different factors like the presence of predators can influence the process. It might be multifarious, meaning some limb-damaged lizards may have other important traits that offset the impact of their impairment. Perhaps it’s episodic, meaning that some traits matter more than others over time, possibly in response to pressures like food availability or low predator populations. Or an organism may choose to simply change its behaviors to avoid scenarios that might be affected by their impairment, they write.

Whatever it may be, they conclude, it’s worth studying lizards with leg injuries.

“You can’t help but be impressed by lizards that do well even when they lose a good chunk of a limb,” Losos adds in the statement. “They’re remarkably resilient.”

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.