Two new species of Proctoporus lizards from the Andes

In this lab collaboration, we describe two new species of semifossorial microteiid lizards of the genus Proctoporus from the montane forests of Cusco. We used a variety of approaches including  morphological and molecular data concatenating four mitochondrial and a nuclear gene to identify and characterize the new species.  We name the two new species Proctoporus katerynae and P. optimus ​(photo below), the first honoring Kateryn Pino Bolañoz in recognition of her work for mammal conservation in Peru, and the second in reference to Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots in the science fiction movie Transformers, in recognition of the seventh film that was filmed in Machu Picchu: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Machu Picchu is the type locality of P. optimus. With these two new species, the genus Proctoporus currently includes 18 species.