Andy Anderson, age ll, of Murray, Utah, for his question:

What exactly is a skink?

The words skink and lizard seem to have no connection, but a language expert sees that skink is borrowed from an older word for lizard. so are the words saurian and dinosaur. All the lizards of the world are classified in the suborder sauria, and almost one quarter of them are skinks. Snakes and lizards, of course, are reptiles, and biologists tell us that snakes are descended from ancient lizards that lost their legs. The large family of skink lizards have features that suggest how this could have happened. Though the skinks are true lizards, some of them are legless, and the legs of the rest of them seem to be wasting away. Many of them have very weak and tiny legs and fewer toes than other lizards.

Nevertheless, the skinks are quite successful lizards. The smallish, snaky fellows live on the ground, and even those without legs can dig themselves burrows. They tend to avoid bright light and dry heat, and most of them enjoy life among moist rocks and shady woods. Their slender bodies are covered with smooth and rounded overlapping scales, and all skinks have shiny, glassy coats.

Their smooth, snaky bodies scuttle    and scamper quickly and quietly through rocks and leafy debris. Their lower eyelids lift up to cIOse their eyes. At Least one skink has windows of transparent skin in his movable eyelids so that he can see even when his eyes are closed. All skinks have forked tongues that dart in and out to sample the flavors in the air, for its tongue is a smelling organ. It also is sticky, and a skink uses it to grab his favorite insect food and stuff it into his mouth.

The skinks are the most numerous lizards of Africa, Asia and Australia. But of their 600 species, only about 20 are native North Americans. The five lined skink lives in the eastern half of our country. His glossy brown coat is striped with five milky white lines that run from his nose to the tip of his pointed tail. The youngster has a bright blue tail that turns dark before he reaches his adult length of five or six inches.

In the West We find skinks with three to eight stripes and some with no stripes. Our largest is a foot long. His shiny coat is plain olive green, and his cone shaped nose is freckled with red spots. All our skinks are insect eaters, though a few of their cousins of the tropics feed on fruit, mushrooms and other vegetables.

All of our native slinks are egg layers, and the mothers guard their nests until the babies hatch. But about half of the world's 600 skinks give birth to live babies. A litter of live skinklets is no larger than l0, while the egg laying mothers often produce broods of 20 or more. Most of the youngsters reach maturity in less than two years and have a life expectancy of three to five years.