The rare reptile species are known as "radiated tortoises" and found only in Madagascar, customs officials said. The one-of-a-kind pattern on their shell case makes them precious for collectors.

The baby reptiles, 15 of which had died, were discovered in a crate carrying sea cucumbers on December 14. The officials added that "particularly unsuitable conditions of transport," was the cause of their death.

Those that have survived have been transported to Tortoise Village in France's southeastern Var region.

If she and Cherkiss are correct, then the Lower Keys have joined the Everglades as home to breeding populations of alligators and crocodiles.

Unlike the Upper and Middle Keys, the Lower Keys have long been home to a small community of alligators. The famed Everglades denizen is one of the main draws at Blue Hole, an old railroad quarry in the Key Deer refuge that has evolved into a rainfall-fueled freshwater lake. Alligators also make homes on other parts of Big Pine, as well as surrounding Lower Keys islands, where the limestone bedrock is of a less porous variety than the keystone bedrock of the northern island chain. As a result, those islands retain enough freshwater during the dry season to provide acceptable, if not especially good, habitat for freshwater-dependent alligators.

Lower Keys promoters now can decide whether to follow the path of Everglades backers by promoting the fact the area harbors both alligators and crocodiles. After all, the area already focuses much of its marketing resources around its attributes as an ecotourist destination.

Lizards don’t get much bigger than the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), which can reach three meters in length and may weigh as much as 70 kilograms. But not every member of the Varanus genus is a giant. Scientists in Australia last month unveiled the newest Varanus species and it’s as small as the Komodo is large. The newly discovered Dampier Peninsula goanna (V. sparnus) is just 23 centimeters long and 16 grams in weight. That’s about the size of a human hand, which would barely count as a nibble for a hungry Komodo dragon.

"I thought my eyes were deceiving me," Lasca said. When she saw the flicker of the snake's tongue, she knew it was a snake.

She screamed and ran from the bathroom, slamming the door and calling the county Department of Animal Services.

The snake, identified as a Colombian rainbow boa, was curled up behind the toilet when an animal services employee arrived at the office in a building at 5th and G in downtown San Diego, which was once city hall.

“We are trying to develop a university-based nonprofit that’s a global leader for reptilian and amphibian conservation and herpetology,” said Chris Jenkins, chief executive officer of The Orianne Society and an adjunct faculty member at The Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. “If you look at different types of mammals and birds you’ll find that the entities working to provide conservation and manage those populations is numerous, but there’s nowhere near as many working for reptiles and amphibians.”

The Orianne Society approaches conservation in three ways — research, conservation and boots-on-the-ground work such as purchasing land, managing and restoring habitats, conducting inventories of animals and reintroducing rare reptiles and amphibians into habitats where they have become extinct.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 200 of the lizards died within a few weeks of being seized due to the "inhumane methods used to ship the animals and the conditions they were held in prior to their arrival in the United States..."

The Detroit Zoological society said in a statement that the lizards are representations of a global wildlife trafficking crisis.

"Many individual animals die in situations like this, and the impacts on wild populations can be catastrophic," Scott Carter, Detroit Zoological Society chief life sciences officer, said in a release. "We are happy to be able to provide great care and permanent sanctuary for these lizards, and to help bring attention to this important wildlife issue."

“It’s a surprising finding,” Dr. Vogel told mongabay.com, “as [the new species] is a large viper, very colorful and superficially different.” It inhabits forested areas between 1,500 and 2,000 meters (5,000 to 6,500 feet) in elevation. This is an important difference from T. sumatranus, which lives on lower, hilly areas rarely above 950 meters (3,000 feet).The difficulty in accessing these high mountain areas, as well as lack of economic interest in developing them, has preserved them from deforestation, according to a 2011 study in Global Change Biology.

“This is a highland species and in Sumatra there is little infrastructure in the higher mountain areas, so I feel it might be safe in the near future,” Vogel said. However, he cautioned its safety is far from secure, saying that its distribution should be more thoroughly studied to help further understanding of the species and its long-term prognosis. He added the region itself deserves more attention, with more endemics possibly awaiting scientific discovery. Vogel, who has discovered other reptile species, is a freelance herpetologist as well as a chemist whose research is self-funded and not tied to any particular institution. For their study, the researchers inspected 53 specimens of T. sumatranus and Trimeresurus hageni, with the primary objective of establishing the differences between them and amend the historical confusion of these two species.

With so much of the fresh water lost to evaporation, what's left is highly concentrated with minerals and very salty. And that has left the turtles in bad shape.

The USGS researchers called Shaffer when they noticed that not only were the turtles lethargic, but some of their heads, feet and shells were coated in a thick white crust of mineral deposits.

"Some of them looked like ceramic turtles," Shaffer said. "Between the biologists who were out there and me, we have a hundred years of turtle experience and we had never seen turtles look like this."

So they mobilized, collecting 60 turtles from the arid lakebed and transporting half to the Turtle Conservancy's captive breeding facility in Ojai, and the other half to UCLA, where Shaffer and his team set up a reptile refugee camp on the roof of the botany building.