When we arrived at the almost embarrassingly luxurious Anjajavy resort, we were treated to a delicious icy fruity drink on a gorgeous patio overlooking a well-maintained swimming pool which in turn overlooked a beautiful rocky beach. My eyes just darted from rock to tree, looking for lizard shapes. It took about thirty seconds to find my first Oplurus cuvieri on a palm tree trunk about fifty feet away. That particular lizard did not pose for my camera, but no matter — the grounds of Anjajavy were crawling with these robust iguanids.

Here is a list of all the reptiles and frogs I saw on this 2007 trip to Madagascar.

These lizards remind me of a cross between America's spiny lizards and collared lizards, except that these guys get much larger than their western hemisphere lookalikes. My sister Mary took the third photograph above.

A couple more of these handsome lizards. The second one looks particularly like a U.S. collared lizard.

We took a canoe up the Pangalanes canal to the Palmarium resort. This lizard greeted us from a support beam of the dock. A number of species at Palmarium have been introduced by its former owner, and it's possible that this is one of them, since this seems to be outside of its normal range.

Here is a list of all the reptiles and frogs I saw on this 2023 trip to Madagascar.

This is as menacing as Oplurus cuvieri gets. It's not very menacing, unless you are grasshopper-sized.