Harmless · Native to California

Northern legless lizard

Anniella pulchra (Gray, 1852)

Also called California legless lizard, silvery legless lizard
Data updated October 2026

Northern legless lizard on loose sand, showing a shiny silvery body with a thin dark line down the back — Fig. 1 — Adult on loose sand. It looks like a small snake but has eyelids and can blink.

Close view of a northern legless lizard's shovel-shaped snout and small eye with eyelid — Fig. 2 — The shovel-shaped snout helps it push through sand and loose soil.

At a glance

A small, shiny lizard with no legs that lives buried in loose, moist sand and soil in central California. It is often mistaken for a snake, but it blinks with eyelids. Since 2013 it has been treated as one of five California legless lizard species, and the state lists it as a Species of Special Concern.

Identification

The northern legless lizard is slender and limbless, with smooth, shiny scales, a shovel-shaped snout and a blunt tail. The back ranges from metallic silver or beige to dark brown or black, and the belly from whitish to bright yellow. Most have a dark line down the middle of the back and thin dark stripes along the sides. Coastal populations from Morro Bay to the Santa Maria River are dusky to nearly black.

01Eyelids. It blinks, which no snake can do. It also has tiny ear openings.
02Shovel snout, blunt tail. A wedge-shaped snout for burrowing and a short, blunt-tipped tail.
03Silver back, yellow belly. Usually silvery to brown above with a thin dark line down the spine, pale to yellow below.

Four other California legless lizards were named in 2013. Some can be told apart by belly color: yellow in the Southern California and Southern Sierra species, silver in the Temblor species and purple in the Bakersfield species. Others look nearly identical to the northern legless lizard and can be told apart only by genetics or location.

Size

California Herps gives an adult snout-to-vent length of about 4⅜ to 7 inches (11–18 cm), and UC Berkeley researchers describe California’s legless lizards as growing to about 8 inches. The body is pencil-thin, so even large adults are easy to overlook.

Range & habitat

Northern legless lizard partly buried in loose sand beneath low dune plants — Fig. 3 — Loose, moist sand under plant cover, as in coastal dunes, is ideal habitat.

Since the 2013 split, the northern legless lizard is the species of central California. It ranges from the south side of the San Joaquin River in northern Contra Costa County south to Ventura County, with scattered sites in the San Joaquin Valley, along the southern Sierra Nevada, on the desert side of the Tehachapi Mountains and in part of the San Gabriel Mountains. Old, unconfirmed records exist from Marin County, San Francisco and Palo Alto.

It needs warm, moist, loose soil with plant cover. Habitats include sparsely vegetated beach dunes, chaparral, pine-oak woodland, desert scrub, sandy washes and stream terraces with sycamores, cottonwoods or oaks, from sea level to about 5,900 feet. People usually find it under rocks, boards, driftwood and logs, and sometimes in suburban gardens.

Diet & predators

Legless lizards are ambush hunters that wait just beneath leaf litter or sand and grab prey that passes. They eat mainly insect larvae, beetles, termites and spiders. Their own predators include snakes, small mammals and several birds.

Feeds on

Insect larvae
Beetles
Termites
Spiders

Preyed on by

Ring-necked snakes
Kingsnakes
Deer mice, long-tailed weasels and house cats
Thrashers, robins and loggerhead shrikes

Beetle larva in loose soil — Prey — insect larvae.

Loggerhead shrike perched on a branch — Predator — loggerhead shrike.

Behavior & seasons

Northern legless lizards live mostly underground in loose sand and soil. They do not bask in direct sun and tolerate cool temperatures, and they are most active in the morning and evening, sometimes coming to the surface at dusk or at night. An individual may spend its life in an area about the size of a dining table.

If grabbed, a legless lizard can drop its tail, which writhes for several minutes while the lizard escapes. At Moss Landing on Monterey Bay, researchers tagged about 600 legless lizards with small electronic tags to follow their movements, and about 3,500 were moved to restored dunes nearby during a construction project.

Reproduction

Northern legless lizards give birth to live young rather than laying eggs. Breeding probably takes place from early spring into July, and litters of 1 to 4 young, usually 2, are born from September to November. Much of what is known comes from studies made before the 2013 split, when all of California’s legless lizards were treated as one species.

Conservation

In 2013, Theodore Papenfuss and James Parham split the single California legless lizard into five species based on genetic lineages, naming four new ones: the Temblor (A. alexanderae), Southern Sierra (A. campi), Bakersfield (A. grinnelli) and Southern California (A. stebbinsi) legless lizards. The split shrank the known range of A. pulchra. It is a California Species of Special Concern and a USDA Forest Service Sensitive species, but is not listed under the federal or California Endangered Species Acts. All California Anniella have been protected from take since 2013. Threats include farming, housing, sand mining, off-road driving in coastal dunes and invasive ice plant.

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Sources

Data updated October 2026 · How we build these pages