On our morning walk through the dunes we met a herpetologist from Texas Tech, who was checking traps she had set for dunes sagebrush lizards. The lizards have a very tiny range encompassing a small portion of New Mexico and only four counties in Texas. For her Masters thesis she was attempting to capture the lizards’ DNA from the sand through a chemical process. If a lizard entered her trap, she would collect sand from the trap to analyze in the lab and extract dna to prove the lizard had been there.
We talked about snakes and lizards for a while, then packed up and headed on to San Angelo.