Lizard

The lizard's power to shed and regrow its tail made it, across many cultures, an emblem of regeneration and renewal, and its habit of vanishing into cracks and reappearing, and of basking motionless in the sun, gave it associations with both the hidden and the solar. In the Greco-Roman world the lizard was linked to sleep and to death and waking: because it seemed to sleep through the winter and revive with the spring, early Christian art could read it as a figure of resurrection, and the young Apollo was shown as Sauroktonos, the lizard-slayer, in a famous statue by Praxiteles.

The tail a lizard sheds to escape a predator, a process called autotomy, is a genuine act of self-amputation at a special fracture plane built into the vertebrae for the purpose, and the regrown tail is not identical to the original: it is supported by a rod of cartilage rather than a full new set of vertebrae, and the replacement is permanent, since a lizard cannot regenerate the same tail twice. The mechanism has drawn real interest from regenerative medicine researchers hoping to understand why reptiles can regrow complex tissue that mammals generally cannot. Autotomy is not universal among reptiles: most geckos and many skinks can shed and regrow a tail, but monitor lizards and true chameleons largely cannot, and snakes, despite folk belief lumping them with lizards, cannot regenerate a lost tail at all, so the regenerative reputation described above belongs to specific lizard families rather than to reptiles as a class.

The lizard carried varied meanings across the ancient world: in Egypt the lizard hieroglyph could signify plenty or numerousness, and lizards were associated with the sun and with divine wisdom. Roman writers such as Pliny record a body of lore about lizards, their supposed enmity with snakes and their revival in warmth. In several living traditions, including those of Aboriginal Australia, lizards and goannas are ancestral and creator figures within specific cultural stories, which belong to those communities and are noted here only from the outside. Regeneration, resurrection, the sun and silent watchfulness are the recurring meanings of a small reptile that renews its own body and disappears and returns with the warmth.

An unrelated Central American lizard, the common basilisk, earns the popular nickname Jesus Christ lizard for a genuine physical feat rather than any religious teaching: it can run bipedally across the surface of water for short distances, supported by rapidly slapping fringed toes against the surface before it breaks, a real biomechanical trick studied by researchers interested in surface tension and locomotion, unconnected to the mythological basilisk of European legend, which is a different creature entirely, a serpent-king whose gaze or breath killed.