Crossword-Solution: GECKOES 7 letters, 8 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 14

How is it, that though we have echidna in three different colours--black, grey and straw--there is no typical marsupial, large or small, no iguana (rather, monitor lizard), though a fair variety of other reptiles, from white, house-haunting geckoes to carpet snakes? Though the CYCAS MEDIA is plentiful on the seaward slopes of the adjacent mainland, no trace of that interesting old-world plant has been discovered here.

The peculiarity of the indigenous animals of New Zealand is seen not only in the absence of mammals and the abundance of remarkable birds, many of them flightless, but also in the fact that there are no snakes in this vast area--no crocodiles, no tortoises--only fourteen small kinds of lizard (seven Geckoes and seven Skinks), and only one species of frog (and that only ever seen by a very few persons)! There were fish in the rivers when settlers arrived there, but none very remarkable.

The geckoes are small, carnivorous, mostly nocturnal animals with large eyes and vertical, elliptical pupils.

Etym: [See Hemi-, and Dactyl.] (Zoöl.) Defn: Any species of Old World geckoes of the genus Hemidactylus.

The other is said to form a peculiar genus of geckoes, but both its locality and affinities appear to be somewhat doubtful.