Newly discovered gecko has a disgusting escape trick: it peels off its skin down to the flesh

Lizards are famous for their ability to detach their tails when a predator grabs it, but a newfound species of gecko from Madagascar takes this ability to the extreme.

When a predator goes to take a bite, Geckolepis megalepis peels off its own skin to give its pursuer a mouthful of scales and skin instead.

If you think this sounds gruesome, you don’t know the half of it. G. megalepis is thought to have the largest body scales of any gecko, which means that even a relatively minor scuffle can result in major armour losses. The paper describing the new species, published on Tuesday in the journal PeerJ, includes an image of one of these lizards with nearly every scale removed from its torso. The skin beneath is glistening and pink – like a wet, uncooked chicken breast.

Fortunately for the weird-looking little critters, known as “fish-scale geckos,” their bodies can replace lost scales in a matter of weeks, a remarkable example of rapid and good-as-new regeneration.

“This regeneration is, as far as we have been able to tell, scarless, and the resulting regenerated scales are indistinguishable from original ones,” said Mark Scherz, a herpetologist at the Bavarian State Collection for Zoology in Munich and lead author of the new paper. “That is not the case of many other geckos, in which the regenerated scales have a distinctly different appearance to the original ones.”

The exceptional size of the scales, which sort of make the lizard look as if it’s covered in pinkie fingernails, may contribute to the ease of their removal. Larger scales mean more surface area to get caught on claws and jaws, after all. But it’s also more than that.