This amazing looking lizard is known as a CRESTED GECKO, a species with the scientific name Correlophus ciliatus (formerly Rhacodactylus ciliatus). Crested geckos live only on a tiny group of islands called New Caledonia, off the eastern coast of Australia, and nowhere else in the world. 

The individual in the images above is an adult male named Pongo, hatched on June 27th 2015, who is definitely one of the most popular animals in my entire collection! Children and adults alike love him because he is beautiful, has skin that feels like marshmallows and is a real personality! Pongo is known as a dalmatian crested gecko due to the random black spotting all over his body. I have two female dalmatians as well, known as Dottie and Pepper, who are pictured in that order below:

I have owned many crested geckos over the last 20 years and as you can see from the pictures below they are hugely variable in terms of colouration, pattern and spottiness!

In July 2013 two of my crested geckos & I appeared on live TV when we were invited to join Naomi Wilkinson, Tim Warwood and Radzi Chinyanganya for the final live show of CBBC’s fantastic series WILD in Leeds! It was a great experience and here is the video sequence as it appeared on the live TV show as well as some photographs taken during the live filming:

In my opinion crested geckos have some of the most beautiful eyes, not only of the world’s lizards but of any living creature!

Crested geckos get their common name from the ‘crests’ of modified scales which start above their eyes and run down their necks and most of the way down their backs. These crests look quite sharp but actually they feel as much like marshmallows as the rest of their skin! 

The individual above and below was one of my very first crested geckos and was named Stumpy. He got his name from the fact that he did not have a tail, and just had a little stump where the tail would usually have been (see below). Unfortunately he lost his tail as a tiny baby, long before I owned him. Unlike most geckos and other lizards, which can re-grow their tails if they lose them, crested geckos cannot regrow anything at all if they lose their tail. 

One of the many amazing things about crested geckos, which is demonstrated quite brilliantly by the individual named Flame below, is that they can change colour. Despite being incredibly beautiful in the first picture, Flame does not always look like this. During the daytime crested geckos tend to be much less colourful than they do at night, although colour change can also be triggered by changes in mood, humidity levels and temperature. The second picture below is of Flame in her ‘fired down’ or ‘unfired’ colours rather than her ‘fired-up’ colours, as we gecko breeders tend to refer to them. You can see that the colour difference really is quite remarkable!

Over the years I have bred many crested geckos and as babies they are absolutely adorable, as well as being incredibly variable in terms of colouration, pattern and personality!

This is what makes crested geckos so exciting to keep and especially to breed, as you can never tell what the new babies will look like OR how they will end up looking when they are fully grown because they change so much during their development!

Here are some more pictures of just a few of the many (many!) babies I have hatched since I started breeding this wonderful species back in 2007:

Baby crested geckos (like most species) demonstrate an innate defensive behaviour towards larger creatures (i.e. me)! Due to their small size, newly-hatched baby geckos in the wild are at risk of predation by lots of different creatures so they make themselves look as big and scary as possible when faced with any kind of threat, including opening their mouth REALLY wide as the one below is demonstrating! It’s a bit too cute to be threatening but it is trying hard!!

With regular handling (assuming it is done correctly and represents no perceived threat to the gecko) they become calm very quickly and in all my years of keeping and breeding crested geckos I have never once been bitten by one!!

Like all lizards, crested geckos have to shed their skin regularly during their lifetime. Prior to shedding their skin a gecko’s colours appear very different to usual as you can see here:

The gecko is looking very drab because the old outer skin has separated from the new skin and is ready to come off – it actually looks a bit like he is wearing a thin plastic bag over his entire body!! If you look on his head you will see that there are a couple of small tears in the old skin, showing that it is fully loose and ready to be shed (and in the case of these geckos, completely eaten)!

The picture below shows how the skin looks when it starts to be torn (usually bitten) and you can see clearly how the new skin underneath is much more brightly coloured than the old skin which is being removed during the shedding process!

Here is the same gecko’s skin after the shedding process is finished, showing its usual vibrant colouration and deep black spotting! 

Crested geckos have many amazing and interesting features but my favourite by far is the fact that they have no eyelids and have to lick their eyes to keep them clean and clear. The picture below shows one doing this perfectly!