Just take a guess where scientists have found a whole array of new animal species. You’d be thinking somewhere isolated, somewhere big, somewhere uncharted… Yup, it’s Australia. The continent down under is home to some of the world’s most fascinating animals, and just a few days ago a few more were were added to the list. Chief among which is the Leaf-Tailed Gecko – a “primitive-looking” lizard which researchers consider to be a relic from the days when the rainforest was more widespread in Australia.

A joint expedition between James Cook University and National Geographic in March led JCU’s Conrad Hoskin and Harvard University researcher Tim Laman to a rugged mountain range of black granite boulders the size of houses, stacked hundreds of metres high. Researchers considerd this place to be something of a hotspot for finding new animals because it’s so isolated an unexplored.

A helicopter took Hoskin, Laman and a National Geographic film crew to the forest canopy – where they made their startling discoveries. Along with the leaf-tailed gecko, they found a frog that only makes love in the rain, and a golden skink that can leap between rocks.

Hoskin said in a statement from the university:

Finding three new, obviously distinct vertebrates would be surprising enough in somewhere poorly explored like New Guinea, let alone in Australia, a country we think we’ve explored pretty well.

I bet many of you are re-considering your career choices now – who doesn’t want to don some explorer pants,  fly into an Australian forest, and get to name three new animals that you’ve just found?

[Source : CNN]