Did you know that there are lizards that don’t have legs? Yep, there are, and there is one species, known as the western slender glass lizard, here in Nebraska. Worldwide there are over 200 different kinds of legless lizards. You might ask, how do you tell a legless lizard from a snake? They are both long and relatively thin, obviously neither has legs, but lizards, ones with legs as well as those without them, have eyelids.

Snakes don’t.

Lizards, both those with legs and those without legs, have external ears, except the earless lizards that have a thin flap of skin over the ear to keep dirt out, so it appears they don’t have ears. No snakes have ears. They “hear” through vibrations in the ground.

I like to point out that in the Bible, in Genesis 3:14, God curses the serpent after it fooled Eve into eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. He tells the serpent, “You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.” I translate that as the serpent originally had legs. People curse snakes, blaming them for the downfall of Eve…but I would contend that a lizard was the culprit.

Here in Nebraska, we have nine species of lizards.

We have four species of skinks: one earless lizard, a short-horned lizard more commonly called a “horned toad”, a prairie fence lizard, a racerunner, and our legless lizard.

What got me to thinking about lizards and specifically legless lizards was St. Patrick’s Day. Most people associate St. Patrick’s Day with drinking and partying.

They like to be “Irish for a Day”. However, originally the Day was celebrated with a feast but “NO DRINKING”. By law, all pubs in Ireland were closed on that day. That changed when the Irish moved to the U.S.

The new immigrants wanted to celebrate their heritage and, given there were no laws requiring the pubs and bars here in the U.S. to be closed, they enjoyed the day with alcohol.

The second thing everyone associates with St. Patrick is his driving all the snakes out of Ireland. Actually that “trick” was easily accomplished given there are no snakes in Ireland and there never have been. During the last Ice Age Ireland was completely covered in a mile thick layer of ice and snow and it stayed that way for over 16,000 years. Snakes don’t do well in ice and snow.

Again, why snakes, lizards and St. Patrick’s Day?

Because, around 1970 a type of legless lizard was discovered in Ireland. The scientific name for this lizard is Anguis fragilis, or the fragile snake. This lizard is harmless, and it looks like Nebraska’s legless lizard because, well, they are both lizards with eyelids, ears, and no legs. Someone, no one knows who, brought the legless lizards to Ireland from Europe and then released them. So, why the story of St. Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland in the first place if Ireland had no snakes? Snakes were (are) considered to be evil thanks to Genesis and St. Patrick is given credit for converting the “evil” pagans of Ireland to Christianity, thus driving the evil (snakes) out of Ireland.

Me, I think once again the snakes are being maligned. I still contend that it was a lizard that was the culprit in the Genesis story, and it is a, now legless, lizard that is the purveyor of evil, and they ARE in Ireland…where is St. Patrick when you need him?