Pink Iguana discovered on Galapagos Islands, say the headlines. What the stories only get to later, if at all, is that they were discovered over 20 years ago.

Park rangers first spotted the land-based rosada (pink in Spanish) iguana in 1986. Now, Gabriele Gentile, of Rome’s University Tor Vergata, and his colleagues report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that these reptiles represent a “unique” species of iguana.

On the basis of genetic analysis, the researchers show that the pink iguanas are genetically distinct from the two known species of land iguana found on the Galapagos — Conolophus pallidus and Conolophus subcristatus — and estimate that they diverged some 5.7 million years ago.

So while we knew about them before, now we know that they’re not the freaks of the iguana world that some thought they were.

While previous studies showed that land iguanas diverged from marine iguanas 10 million years ago, these new findings do add a new branch to the evolutionary tree. The split between C. pallidus and C. subcristatus is thought to have occurred the most recently.

“So far, this species is the only evidence of ancient diversification along the Galapagos land iguana lineage and documents one of the oldest events of divergence ever recorded in the Galapagos” Gentile told Reuters.

The future for the pink lizards, which will receive their own as yet undetermined scientific moniker soon, does not look rosy. “Our studies would indicate that the population size is very small,” Gentile told the BBC. He suspects that there may be fewer that 100 of these iguanas left, and that they could already be classified as a “critically endangered species”.

Top image: the pink iguana. Photo by Gabriele Gentile.