Among sun-baked rocks on barren islands off the New Zealand coast basks a solitary survivor of the days before the dinosaurs. It is earth’s oldest back-boned inhabitant, a fugitive in time from nature’s harsh law of the survival of the fittest—the tuatera, or three-eyed lizard. Its big, dreamy hazel eyes have watched the procession of the ages for 300,000,000 years—the beginning and extinction of the dinosaurs to whom it stood in about the relationship of a great uncle, the coming of birds and mammals, milleniums of famine and milleniums of plenty, the shattering and crashing together of continents. It has survived while all its contemporaries of the earth’s ancient days have died, largely because it has been willing placidly to watch the parade pass without bothering to take any part in the tumult and shouting. The feature of great interest about the tuatera, both popularly and scientifically, is its third eye. This third, or pineal, eye is closer to its original form in the tuatera than in any other living creature. Just after the little reptile is hatched the organ appears as a dark spot under a film of thin, semi-transparent skin. In a baby tuatera it becomes a small knob on top of the head. Thick, opaque skin covers the eye in the adult reptile and it is difficult to distinguish. Anatomists doubt whether the animal actually sees with the pineal eye any more. The fact remains that this organ can be distinguished easily and that it retains, in degenerated form, the characteristics of a seeing eye which has nerve connections with the visual cortex at the back of the brain. Moreover, when the third eye of an infant tuatera is dissected there is clear evidence that it once was a double organ. The tuatera is about two feet long from its snout to the tip of a crocodile-like tail. It has a scaly skin with a row of spines along its back. Its large hazel eyes are its most conspicuous feature. They have a soft, dreamy expression, and they never appear to blink. There are no external ears, but the sense of hearing is highly developed. One way of drawing the creature from its burrow is to play a tune on almost any instrument.