When I went to the Austin Zoo last weekend, I came upon this little guy scuttling across my path. As a little kid I always loved to catch lizards and see them up close; I’d grab them quickly but carefully so they didn’t detach their tails and release them right after. I’m from Dallas and we mostly have geckos, so I had never seen a lizard with such pretty spikes in the wild. When I picked up this little guy he bit me pretty good, so one of the things I learned about Texas Spiny Lizards very quickly was that they are not poisonous. A user on INaturalist told me that this was a young one, and I learned later they can grow up to 11 inches. The one I found was probably about 6 inches.