Hidden beneath the leaf litter of a northern Malagasy forest lives a chameleon so slight that it could tumble off the tip of your finger. Measuring just under 30 millimeters from snout to tail, the newly described species, Brookesia nana.
Just two adult specimens, a male and female, are known. The female measures 28.9 millimeters, considerably larger than the 21.6-millimeter-long male. The size difference may have driven the male’s genitalia to be quite large — nearly 20 percent of its body length — to be a better fit to his mate, herpetologist Frank Glaw of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich and colleagues suggest.
Dubbed B. nana for its nano size, the species belongs to a genus of at least 13 other small chameleons spread out across the mountainous forests of northern Madagascar. Why B. nana and its cousins shrank to such minuscule proportions remains a mystery, though smallness does have its benefits:
