Frillneck lizards (Chlamydosaurus kingii) photographed at our study site in Fogg Dam Conservation Reserve situated 60 km southeast of Darwin in the Northern Territory. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is the traditional workhorse for reconstructing evolutionary event. The power of its use derives from the apparent simplicity of its inheritance; maternal and lacking recombination. However, for the first time in a terrestrial vertebrate, in one of the lizards, we have documented a recombinant haplotype derived from the fusion of maternal and paternal mtDNAs.