tuatara

noun

1. A reptile, Sphenodon punctatus, native to New Zealand, that resembles a lizard and is the only surviving specimen of the order Rhynchocephalia.

   “In New Zealand the dinosaurs had perished 65 million years before, as they had elsewhere on the globe; but the sphenodons or tuataras who had been their contemporaries from Jurassic times persisted, in New Zealand but nowhere else, for reasons that remain obscure.”