Last week U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake reinstated a 1993 proposal to list the flat-tailed horned lizard as a threatened species in the latest move to keep the reptile safe from urban encroachment in its Southern California and Arizona environments.
The ruling follows a recent U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals order that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reconsider its earlier decision to deny the lizard protection under the Endangered Species Act. That decision rejected a Bush administration policy that environmentalists said favored development at the expense of the lizard and many plants and animals across the nation.
Since 1993, the agency has withdrawn three proposals to list the lizard on the grounds that it was hard to find and, therefore, difficult to classify as threatened. In the meantime, the lizard's population has continued to decline in Arizona, California and Baja California largely because its habitats of gravel pans and dunes have been taken over by developments like farming and housing.
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