Scientists think a newly discovered gecko gives off a “Starry Night” vibe.
When scientists spotted a strikingly colored gecko scampering around the forests of southern India, a world-famous painting came to mind: “The Starry Night.” So, appropriately, they gave the lizard a name that honors the artwork’s creator, Vincent Van Gogh.
Say hello to a new species of gecko, Cnemaspis vangoghi. With its yellow-gold forebody, and the light blue spots and lines that bedeck its back and head, the male Van Gogh starry gecko has coloring reminiscent of the vivid multicolored swirls in the Dutch painter’s 1889 oil on canvas.
The gecko-naming scientists, from the Thackeray Wildlife Foundation, a conservation nonprofit in India, describe the newly discovered lizard in a new study published in the journal ZooKeys. They also detail a second species of gecko, Cnemaspis sathuragiriensis, named for its home in the Sathuragiri Hills.
Due to its famed namesake, it is, not surprisingly, the Van Gogh gecko that will likely grab more attention of the two reptiles. Mumbai artist and marine biologist Gaurav Patil couldn’t resist drawing a gecko that serves as a canvas for “The Starry Night” and posting it on Instagram, and the Thackeray Wildlife Foundation shared a whimsical illustration of Van Gogh himself drawing a gecko.
A lizard Vincent Van Gogh could have painted.
A top contender for the title “world’s artsiest gecko.”
“The Starry Night,” now housed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, captures the view from the east-facing window of Van Gogh’s asylum room in the French town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provenc just before sunrise. The artist, who struggled with mental illness, painted the artwork during a highly productive period the year before he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 37.
The little Van Gogh gecko the painting evokes can grow to be about 1.5 inches long. Both newly described gecko species are active during the day, mainly on rocks during the cool hours of the early morning and evening. So far, they have only been found in restricted localities, in this case in low-elevation, deciduous forests in the state of Tamil Nadu.
The state is “exceptionally biodiverse,” Ishan Agarwal, one of the scientists, noted in a statement. By the time the team has finished its expeditions, “we expect to name well over 50 new species of lizards,” he added.
Van Gogh, who marked a birthday on Saturday, March 30, has been having even more of a cultural moment than usual.
The traveling multimedia exhibit Immersive van Gogh continues to steep visitors in 65 million pixels of the artist’s works through digital projection, animation, light and music. And an interactive AI-powered Van Gogh at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris recently answered questions posed by visitors. They asked him about life, death and art, but not how he’d feel about sharing his name with a gecko.
Artists are having fun with the idea that a gecko looks like a Vincent Van Gogh painting.
