Seek and Hide
(Open Section)

We have been studying frillneck lizards (Chlamydosaurus kingii) along a 10km long dirt track in the Top End since 2001. Frillies (as we call them) are highly arboreal spending most of their time playing seek and hide with each other and also with us Therefore it takes some skills to find them, but once you know the trick they are easy to spot. By studying their population genetics, they revealed an astonishing phenomenon, so far not documented in any other terrestrial vertebrate. Traditionally mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has been claimed to exhibit only maternal inheritance. By sequencing the entire mitochondrial genome, we found that the leakage of paternal mitochondria resulted in mitochondrial recombination in one of our lizards.