Cuban rock iguana for sale

The Cuban rock iguana for sale (Cyclura nubila), also known as the Cuban ground iguana or Cuban iguana, is a species of lizard of the iguana family. It is the second largest of the West Indian rock iguanas (genus Cyclura), one of the most endangered groups of lizards. A herbivorous species with a thick tail and spiked jowls, it is one of the largest lizards in the Caribbean.

The Cuban rock iguana for sale is distributed throughout the mainland of Cuba and its surrounding islets with a feral population thriving on Isla Magueyes, Puerto Rico. A subspecies is found on the Cayman Islands of Little Cayman and Cayman Brac. Females guard their nest sites and one population nests in sites excavated by Cuban crocodiles. As a defence measure, the Cuban iguana often makes its home within or near prickly-pear cacti.

The numbers of iguanas have been bolstered as a result of captive-breeding and other conservation programs. C. nubila has been used to study evolution and animal communication, and its captive-breeding program has been a model for other endangered lizards in the Caribbean.

This species was first introduced to scientific literature by British zoologist Edward Griffith in his rather rewritten translation of George Cuvier‘s Le Règne Animal, in 1831. In this work the lizard is illustrated with the title Lacerta nebulosa, the clouded lizard, and summarily and dismissively described under that name in the text as a smallish lizard.

 In an addendum to the 1831 volume titled Synopsis, John Edward Gray provides a Linnaean list of the species mentioned. Here Gray identifies the lizard as Iguana (Cyclura) nubila or “Clouded Guana” and includes a brief species description.

Cyclura was seen as a subgenus by Gray at the time. In Cuvier’s actual Le Règne Animal (from the second edition onwards) he describes an Iguana cychlura,^[5] but Griffith doesn’t mention this at all in his ‘translation’, and Gray dismisses the taxon as unclear in his Synopsis.^[4] The word nubila is Latin for “cloudy”.