A team of wildlife researchers including Tejas Thackeray—son of former chief minister of Maharashtra Uddhav Thackeray—has discovered three new species of bent-toed geckos (Cyrtodactylus) from Nepal. The research paper regarding the same was recently published in the international scientific journal Zootaxa. The paper has been authored by Santosh Bhattarai, Bivek Gautam, Bishal Prasad Neupane, Akshay Khandekar, Tejas Thackeray, Ishan Agarwal, Frank Tillack, Ashley R Olson, Fiona Hogan and Wendy Weight.

Ishan Agarwal, a scientist with Thackeray Wildlife Foundation (TWF), said, “These discoveries are a result of fieldwork in Nepal by our Nepali colleagues. Cyrtodactylus (bent-toed geckos) are the most diverse gecko genus and the second-most diverse vertebrate genus. The group is distributed from the Himalayas through Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea (PNG) and northern Australia. Only three species were known from Nepal and so we expected that this was due to poor sampling and that the region would harbour numerous bent-toed geckos.”