One in 10 Reptile Species Can't Live Without Rocks — and We're Crushing Them

What's destroying these habitats?

Rocky ground exists on every continent, from cliff faces to outcrops to fields scattered with loose stones. It might look indestructible compared with a forest. It isn't. Once damaged or destroyed, rocky habitats can take centuries — or even millennia — to reform.

The pressures are concrete and growing:

• Mining, quarrying and urbanization destroy rocky areas outright, as with the Emirati gecko's shrinking habitat.
• Rock crushing uses specialized machinery to grind boulder fields into farmland. In Australia, new equipment can clear and crush surface rocks at up to one hectare (2.5 acres) per hour.
• These crushing methods are increasingly common in agricultural areas of Western Australia, South Australia and western Victoria, where they threaten the habitat of several threatened reptile species.

The backdrop makes this urgent: one in five reptile species worldwide is already at risk of extinction, and habitat loss is the most pressing threat to reptile populations globally.

Why aren't rocky habitats protected?

Here's the policy gap the study exposes: rocky habitats are often overlooked in conservation plans, including the IUCN's own habitat classification system — the framework used to categorize where species live and what needs protecting.

The researchers found more than twice as many reptiles live in rocky areas as current classifications capture. Without formal recognition, these habitats are far less likely to be prioritized for conservation funding and legal protection.

There's also a scientific blind spot. Because rocky areas are rarely monitored or managed, scientists don't actually know how quickly they're disappearing. And rock habitats matter beyond reptiles: as the world warms, the authors note, they'll serve as crucial climate refuges, shielding animals from drought and extreme temperatures.

Can damaged rocky habitat be restored?

Partly, yes — and faster than you might expect. The team's earlier research on Australian farms found that putting surface rocks back into cleared landscapes pays off quickly. Within a single year, restored rocky patches supported more reptiles and a greater diversity of species than areas left without added rock.

There's a final reason to act. New rock-dependent species are being discovered constantly, so protecting these landscapes guards not just the reptiles we know about, but the ones we haven't found yet.

The study, led by Jackie L. O'Sullivan and colleagues, appears in Conservation Letters (2026), DOI: 10.1111/con4.70096. It's an observational analysis rather than experimental work, so its extinction-risk figures describe associations rather than proven cause and effect — but the pattern it documents spans the entire reptile family tree, from worm-lizards to geckos to snakes that independently adapted to life on stone.