Record sizes for the Turkish house gecko, Hemidactylus turcicus, from Aegean islands, Greece
The Turkish house gecko, Hemidactylus turcicus, is a nocturnal and insectivorous gecko (Durrell, 1956; Baha El Din, 2006; Bar Haimovitch, 2012; authors' personal observations) It is a common edificarian house gecko that frequents rocks, boulders and house walls (the Hebrew origin of Proverbs 30:28 is more specific than common English translation in stating that unlike "a lizard" a gecko "is caught by hand, yet inhabits the king's palaces" It is naturally distributed in Southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East (Sindaco Jeremcenko, 2008) Pakistan and India (Sharma, 2005; Khan, 2006) It is widely introduced in the New World, from Panama to the USA (Uetz, 2016) H. turcicus is a relatively small member of its genus (Feldman et al. 2016) The vast literature pertaining to its body size suggests it grows to no more than 61mm in SVL (maximum recorded for males: 60.2 mm, for females: 59.7 mm, Delaugerre, 1984) Our own measurements of 563 live individuals and museum specimens (Table 1; adults and juveniles of both sexes) suggest an overall size range of 1760.1 mm SVL. Mass data are less common for H. turcicus, as they are for lizards in general (Meiri, 2010) Literature data (Huey et al. 1989; Garland, 1994; Irschick et al. 1996; Van Damme Vanhooydonck, 2001) suggest a maximum of 3.6 g. Our measurements (Table 1) suggest an overall mass range of 0.16.5 g) METHODS