09/01/2025
Here's one for all the reptile parents out there.
It looks like a lizard at first glance —
scaled skin, clawed feet, golden eye burning in the dusk.
But the tuatara is not a lizard.
It is something far older.
A survivor of an age when reptiles ruled the world,
when dinosaurs thundered and pterosaurs darkened the skies.
All of its relatives vanished,
yet this one lineage endured in the islands of New Zealand.
And on its head lies the mark of its ancestry —
a third eye.
The pineal eye, small and pale, sits atop the skull.
Not for seeing shapes, but for sensing light,
measuring seasons, guiding rhythms of growth and behavior.
In young tuatara, it is visible as a tiny scale-covered window,
a ghost of vision inherited from deep evolutionary past.
The tuatara grows slowly,
living over a hundred years,
breathing so quietly it may pause for an hour between breaths.
It hunts by night, swallowing insects, birds, even hatchling reptiles whole.
By day, it rests in burrows shared with seabirds,
a partnership as ancient as the species itself.
It is the last of its order,
a relic that outlived empires of stone and fire.
Not a lizard. Not a dinosaur.
But a forgotten thread of life —
still watching, still breathing,
with three eyes open to the passage of time.
Learn more:
Te Papa Museum – The Tuatara: New Zealand’s Living Fossil
National Geographic – Tuatara: Survivor of the Dinosaur Age
BBC Earth – The Reptile with a Third Eye
