This grumpy-faced lizard is under threat. Can its adorableness help save it?
As habitat loss and invasive predators decimate the Texas horned lizard population, researchers are banking on statewide fervor to bring them back.
Out-of-state visitors may not know what they’re looking at, but fans of Texas Christian University (TCU) get fired up when SuperFrog runs onto the football field. Human-size and gray, with pointy protrusions on its head and spiky, Popeye-like forearms, SuperFrog is the school’s mascot, meant to induce fear in the hearts of opposing teams. SuperFrog’s real-life inspiration, though, isn’t quite as intimidating.
TCU’s mascot is based on a creature that’s at most four inches long and almost comically sedate, with a pancake-shaped body and grumpy face under thorny crowns. It’s not even technically a frog—or, as many Texans refer to it, a horned toad. It’s a Texas horned lizard, and the rest of the state loves the real thing just as much as TCU loves SuperFrog.
While not a keystone species, horned lizards might be considered charismatic microfauna—so culturally significant that losing them would be like losing a crucial piece of what makes Texas Texas. These prehistoric-looking wildlife celebrities adorn airplane tails and license plates, murals and postcards. They’ve been the official state reptile since 1993. In the town of Eastland (population 3,613), you can even visit the tiny tomb of Texas’s most famous horned lizard, Ol’ Rip (as in Rip van Winkle), who inspired the Looney Tunes dancing frog character and supposedly survived 31 years in a time capsule.
Despite their cult status and cultural presence, horned lizards are increasingly rare to come by in the wild. As a kid in the 1970s, Texan Wade Smith grew up playing with horned lizards and says children could find the “baby dinosaurs,” as he thought of them, all over the land. During the past several decades, however, the lizards have largely vanished from their territory across most of the state. Their habitats have been devoured by urban expansion, inhospitable grasses, and invasive fire ants decimating their food supply. Smith is one of a number of nostalgic ranchers in Texas now volunteering their properties to be part of the lizards’ big return.
But before that can happen, researchers need to figure out how to help Texas’s reptilian icon survive in a rapidly changing environment.
On a bright fall day, Diane Barber drives a truck deep into the heart of the Texas Hill Country. In the bed: 227 baby lizards in massive coolers. She’s coming from Fort Worth Zoo’s reptile lab, a stone-walled greenhouse tucked into the zoo’s Texas Wild! attraction that showcases animals from different eco-regions across the state. There, rubber tubs filled with sand, cork bark, and prickly pear house curious horned lizards peeking out from under grass clumps.
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Twenty-five years ago, Fort Worth Zoo became the first in the country to determine the precise combination of temperature and humidity required to successfully breed Texas horned lizards, among the largest of 21 species of horned lizards native to the United States. Since 2017, the zoo has reintroduced around 1,650 hatchlings into the wild, with support from other Texas zoos and state funding.
Much of that effort has been overseen by Barber, Fort Worth Zoo’s senior curator of ectotherms, who moved from Nebraska in 2001 to supervise the institution’s collection. At first, she was caught off guard by the intense reverence from locals for a creature so small and unassuming. “It’s a rarity to see that kind of connection between a reptile and people,” Barber says. “But they’re definitely charismatic enough to where you start to almost feel like you have a little bond with them.”
By keeping the lizards indoors under ultraviolet light and matching individuals carefully based on genetics to avoid inbreeding, Barber can now reliably hatch hundreds in a year. She’s helped by the fact that females can lay 13 to 45 eggs at a time and sometimes produce multiple clutches, which take about two months to hatch, in a year. Baby horned lizards, she’s learned, are a bit particular. They require temperatures in the mid-80s, need to be fed four times a day, and are surprisingly prone to dehydration, so their tanks must be misted regularly.
The hatched horned lizards, about as big as a penny, stay at the zoo for several weeks until they’re mature enough to be released at the Mason Mountain Wildlife Management Area, a stretch of government-owned prairie land in central Texas. The 5,500-acre property, about a three-and-a-half-hour drive southwest from Fort Worth, is a postcard come to life, with ancient oak groves and giant pink granite outcrops.
The horned lizards are less interested in the view and more appreciative that the area is filled with their favorite food: red harvester ants. Also native to the region, harvester ants help aerate the soil with their extensive tunnels and send foraging caravans to collect (and in the process, disperse) the seeds of native grasses that become coveted horned lizard habitats. Over the years, the ants’ numbers have declined across the state due in large part to invasive fire ants, but Mason Mountain’s control program aims to grow the population—which means happier horned lizards.
Barber’s exactingly bred and painstakingly nurtured lizards don’t get sent out into the wild completely naked. Researchers from TCU’s biology program glue harmonic tags onto the backs of the lizards, making it easier to locate them in the wild and determine the most viable areas for reintroduction. “When you’re a small lizard, you need to be put in the right spot early on,” explains Kira Gangbin, a Ph.D. student studying horned lizard ecology. Gangbin and her fellow researchers will wander the grounds of Mason Mountain with radio receivers, playing a game of hot and cold with the little lizards until they finally find one.
Bearing witness to the release of 227 baby horned lizards, I can see why Texans have fallen head over heels for these frowny-faced brown blobs. Barber, Gangbin, and other researchers line up in a stretch of Mason Mountain with deli cups, gently placing hatchlings one by one on the ground among tufts of wildflowers and blooming cacti. Some sit frozen, while others take off immediately, waddling determinedly into the cover of the grass.
Despite the months of hard work leading up to this moment, the entire release takes only about 15 minutes. In the ensuing days and weeks, many of Barber’s lizards will be hard to track—some will be picked off by predators like coachwhip snakes, roadrunners, and skunks, and others will shed their tags or otherwise become untraceable. But the ones that survive will grow quickly. Gangbin plans to return daily over the next couple of months to track how many remain before their first winter torpor.
So far, the results have been encouraging. At least 25 new hatchlings have been documented since releases began at Mason Mountain in 2017, suggesting that reintroduced horned lizards are beginning to breed naturally. “It’s just amazing to be able to be part of that,” says Barber, her voice breaking.
Rancher Smith understands the affectionate attachment. “They’re sentimental,” he says, speaking up for Texans across the state who remember the lizards from real life, not just college games or souvenir mugs. Eventually, Barber hopes to expand releases beyond Mason Mountain and onto private land, which makes up the majority of the Texas horned lizards’ original habitat. Plenty of ranchers like Smith want them reintroduced on their properties—so many, Barber says, that there’s a waiting list. But there is still a lot to learn about habitat requirements and management techniques before the Fort Worth Zoo can take them up on the offer.
Until then, Smith has added his name to the list, joining everyone else in the hope that Texas’s living mascot makes its big comeback.
