The researchers behind the discovery hope that the identification of this animal will help conservationists better achieve their goals of keeping local flora and fauna safe from industrial development.

At a certain point in life, you think you pretty much know what animals look like. You've seen lizards and bears and snakes and birds and octopuses and dogs and all that. You know, animals.

But then sometimes, you come across an animal that reminds you that no, in fact, you do not know what "animals" look like. Like a blobfish. Or a binturong. Or an axolotl.

Or a worm lizard. Which, despite looking like an earthworm crossed with a snake, is neither a worm nor a snake. As the back half of its name implies, it is actually a type of legless lizard (and it moves around like someone made a very weird sock puppet and is trying to convince you it's a real creature). And scientists just found a new species of the squirmy guy, which the team behind the discovery described in a study published in the journal ZooKeys.

There's actually quite a few species of these absolutely bizarre-looking critters -- around 170, in fact. But despite their prevalence, we actually don't know very much about them. Worm lizards, or amphisbaenians, spend a vast majority of their time underground. As you can probably guess, that makes them very hard to study.

There is a bit of standard information out there, though. For instance, they're mostly around a foot long, and they have really weird skulls. They have teeth, which might be in and of itself a surprise for an animal that looks like an earthworm, but those teeth are centered around one big middle tooth that makes a snout! Awful! There's also a mystery bone at the base of each of their skulls that scientists don't know the purpose of. And those skulls have strange seams with jagged connections that seem to be related to how they move their heads as they dig through the earth.

But when most of what you know about an animal is merely the basic arrangement of its bones, it leaves a lot of room for further investigation. So, discovering a new species is an exciting prospect. In order to confirm its newness, the researchers had to not only analyze all the morphological characteristics they could get their hands on (scales, body segments, shape of head, etc...), but dig into the DNA to see if it differed enough from other species to warrant its own designation.

And it turns out that yes, indeed, it's a brand-new, never-before-seen worm lizard. It was given the name Amphisbaena amethystaafter the region in which it lives, which is known in part for amethyst mining.

Mining is one of the reasons that the team was so excited to find this animal. "Mining activities cause several irreversible changes to the environment," they wrote in the paper, "including the loss of habitat due to the removal of vegetation and the relocation and excavation of soil during the opening and operation of new mines. In such circumstances, the development and execution of environmental programs are critical for effective impact mitigation."

Now, we have just a little bit more information about what could be at stake, and what needs protecting. "Finally, the identification of a new species indicates that the fossorial fauna, as well as that of other groups, in the Espinhaço Mountain Range region is far from being completely known and that it may harbor a much greater diversity of endemic taxa than has been realized so far."