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ST. GEORGE — It seemed like a lizard’s eyes were bigger than its stomach after trying to chomp down on another lizard.
In what a local biologist called a “fairly rare” picture, a dead long-nosed leopard lizard is seen with a common chuckwalla inside its mouth. Kevin Anderson found the reptilian crime scene while hiking near the Bear Claw Poppy Trail (also referred to as Bearclaw Poppy trail) in St. George Saturday.
“I was kind of scrambling up along the rocks a little higher on the side of the trail when I found them,” Anderson said. “I caught a few pictures of them because I thought it was really cool.”
The lizards looked like they had recently died when Anderson found them at about 7:30 a.m. over the weekend, he said. They were originally on their backs when he found them.
Kevin Wheeler, a wildlife biologist for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, said the long-nosed leopard lizard probably got a little too ambitious when it tried to swallow the chuckwalla. The chuckwalla is a species that is able to inflate itself with air to escape predators, he said.
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