Endangered
Marlborough Spotted Skink
Oligosoma elium
Marlborough Spotted Skink is a skink in the family Scincidae — Oligosoma elium, recorded as Endangered and tied to New Zealand.
The skink
Skinks are smooth-scaled lizards, often with reduced limbs in burrowing forms. Most eat insects and other small invertebrates.
Range and habitat
Marlborough Spotted Skink, the Marlborough spotted skink, is a skink that is native to New Zealand.
The type locality — the place tied to the name-bearing specimen — is “Motunau Island, Canterbury (43° 04’S, 173° 04’E)”, New Zealand.
GBIF currently lists 6 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Most skinks forage in leaf litter or under cover. Burrowing species slip through sand or soil more than they climb.
In crisis
Marlborough Spotted Skink is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Marlborough Spotted Skink — often a short stub, Wikidata item Q46999314 and GBIF occurrence geography. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
