I'm a journalist with particular expertise in the arts, popular science, health, religion and spirituality. As the former culture editor at news and technology website CNET, I led a team that tracked movies, TV shows, online trends and science—from space and robotics to climate, AI and archaeology.
When scientists spotted a strikingly colored gecko scampering around the forests of southern India, a world-famous painting came to mind: “The Starry Night.” So, appropriately, they gave the lizard a name that honors the artwork’s creator, Vincent Van Gogh.. With its yellow-gold forebody, and the light blue spots and lines that bedeck its back and head, the male Van Gogh starry gecko has coloring reminiscent of the vivid multicolored swirls in the Dutch painter’s 1889 oil on canvas.
The gecko-naming scientists, from the Thackeray Wildlife Foundation, a conservation nonprofit in India, describe the newly discovered lizard in a new studyDue to its famed namesake, it is, not surprisingly, the Van Gogh gecko that will likely grab more attention of the two reptiles.
The little Van Gogh gecko the painting evokes can grow to be about 1.5 inches long. Both newly described gecko species are active during the day, mainly on rocks during the cool hours of the early morning and evening. So far, they have only been found in restricted localities, in this case in low-elevation, deciduous forests in the state of Tamil Nadu.
The state is “exceptionally biodiverse,” Ishan Agarwal, one of the scientists, noted in a statement. By the time the team has finished its expeditions, “we expect to name well over 50 new species of lizards,” he added. Van Gogh, who marked a birthday on Saturday, March 30, has been having even more of a cultural moment than usual.continues to steep visitors in 65 million pixels of the artist’s works through digital projection, animation, light and music. And anat the Musée D’Orsay in Paris recently answered questions posed by visitors. They asked him about life, death and art, but not how he’d feel about sharing his name with a gecko.
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