Uromastyx Lizard Characteristics

"On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Nicole and I'm here to tell you about Uromastyx. This here is my female Molly Uromastyx. I'm going to get it out of the cage here; she's getting a little excited. She wants to see what's going on. They do enjoy being held, they are little skittish, they don't like being grabbed very hard but they will stay in your hand if you just kind of relax a little bit. She's a little upset because of all the excitement that is going on so she'll probably be a little extra skittish. But this is a female Molly Uromastyx. They are characterized by their dull colors. The males are much more colorful now in a lot of breeds of Uromastyx, she's a little patchy here because she is in the process of shedding which is completely normal. In most breeds of Uromastyx, the pores down here are smaller in the female than they are in the males. On the male, this would be much more pronounced. Some Uromastyx also exude a brown waxy substance that is used for scent marking and if you ever see a Uromastyx with something kind of poking out of these pores, it kind of looks like a comb of a tooth or a tooth of a comb. Then you can be pretty sure that you have a male. Now as far as breeding goes they are egg layers. If you like to breed Uromastyx, you would need to do a cooling period somewhere between somewhere in the fall just cool your lizard down. Actually what you need to do is you need to lower the temperatures in the cage down to 65 degrees and keep your lizard at that temperature without feeding for 3-6 months, 8-12 weeks it seems like a very long time. This is natural for them, they need to hibernate and then when it starts warming up again in the early spring that is when they come out and that is when they breed. After breeding about a month later, the eggs will be laid and at that point with captive breeding you need to remove the eggs from the habitat for fear of crushing them. You can make your own incubator for these eggs basically out of a small bathroom trash can, a small plastic trash can often works well for an incubator filled with moist of vermiculite. You can purchase vermiculite usually in hardware stores or such as Home Depot or Ace. You can get vermiculite at any of those places and you need to keep the eggs about 85-90 degrees and within 3 months they should hatch. Most Uromastyx eggs will not hatch. They are very difficult breeders; successful breeding does not mean successful hatching. But if you are lucky, you may get a few hatching eggs and this is going to be a little bit simpler in the Molly Uromastyx they are a little bit easier to breed."