This very beautiful animal is a lovely adult male LEOPARD GECKO called Blotch.  Leopard geckos live in the hot, dry deserts of south-west Asia, in countries including Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.  They are nocturnal or active at night, which is when they hunt for insects and other small animals to eat.  Blotch is very friendly indeed and is a big favourite with children and adults alike!

Blotch is named because of the large dark spot in the middle of his back!  He is an adult male and the largest leopard gecko in my collection, weighing in at over 80 grammes.  Leopard geckos are very variable in terms of colour and pattern and this makes them fascinating to keep, something I have been doing for a very long time as leopard geckos were the first geckos I ever kept as a young child!

Here is a piece of fantastic (and huge!) art work completed by the Year 2 children of Berkeley Primary School in Gloucestershire, following a visit Blotch paid to their school in the summer term of 2011.  Thanks very much to class teacher Laura Baker for sending me this photograph and for allowing me to display it here on my website, I absolutely love it!  Excellent work children!!

You can see clearly in this next picture of Blotch that they have quite sharp claws, unlike most other geckos which have sticky foot pads.  The reason for this is that life in the desert would not suit sticky feet as there is not much to climb around on, so claws are more suitable for crawling around on the dry and rocky ground.

Blotch was introduced to two new adult female leopard geckos in August 2011 and they are both very beautiful (but very different in appearance, both from Blotch and from each other) as you can see below! 

I haven't yet thought of good names for these two geckos and would welcome suggestions from anyone who can think of suitable names based on their appearances! 

Leopard geckos lay eggs like most, but not all, lizards.  Their eggs can take anything between seven to fourteen weeks to hatch depending on the temperature at which they are incubated.  Very unusually, the temperature at which the eggs are incubated will also determine whether the baby gecko will be male or female, with females generally being produced at cooler incubation temperatures and males at higher temperatures!

I have spent a great many years breeding leopard geckos so have seen a lot of babies in my time, but despite this it is still really exciting to watch each one hatch and you never get tired of seeing new ones!  When they are ready to hatch the babies slit the egg with a special tooth at the front of their mouth, and they often sit with their heads partly or fully out of the egg for a while before fully emerging.  Here is one which has just slit the egg and has its nose poking out of the egg! 

When they first hatch leopard gecko babies usually have a banded pattern of dark brown and yellow, with a black and white banded tail like this one:

Sometimes the yellow colour can be much brighter, and still other times there may not be a banded pattern at all, as they can be very variable in colour and pattern from the moment they hatch as you can see in just the few examples of other babies below!

I'm sure you'll agree with me that whatever their pattern or colour may be, the babies are always gorgeous!  As they develop the pattern changes a huge amount until eventually they are (usually) quite spotty as demonstrated by Blotch and the first female right back at the top of the page!