Chamaeleo africanus, Peloponnese, Greece

Until 1998 it was believed that there were only one species of chameleons in Europe - Chamaeleo chamaeleon. A new population of chameleons was found after seeing photographs of a big chameleon in the hands of a hotel owner in southwestern Peloponnese, Greece (Böhme et al., 1998). The German herpetologist Wolfgang Böhme went to Greece in 1997 to study the habitat of the chameleons, only to discover that these chameleons could belong to a new species for the Greek herpetofauna (Böhme et al., 1998). In 1999 Böhme's et al. thesis was confirmed by Kosuch et al. (1999) by testing sequences of mitochondrial DNA and once again by Dimaki et al. (2008) who concluded the population to be closest related to specimen from the Nile Delta. The chameleons found on the Greek mainland was not C. chameleon as earlier thought but Chamaeleo africanus.