Daily drawing 27-12-2019: Tuatara. Fountain pen.

During the Jurassic, Rhynchocephalians ruled the world: the small-reptile niche of it, anyway. Now the tuatara is the last surviving member of that order. Babies hatch with a ‘third’ parietal eye on top of their heads. Tara means peaked, thorny, toothed. The poet Harry Ricketts once told me how he used the tuatara that live at the University as a means of foretelling the day, depending on how many were visible of a morning.

I saw this one at Zealandia, the wildlife sanctuary, chilling outside its burrow. (In the wild, tuatara will sometimes share burrows with seabirds.) It was quite young, and so motionless and well-camouflaged that it was difficult to spot against the leaf-litter.