You know that special excitement when you discover a new food? A dish you've never tried before but suddenly can't contemplate living without? Well, Lee Grismer, a scientist from La Sierra University in Riverside, California, recently had such a moment, only his culinary discovery was not just of a new food, but of an entirely new species - a lizard being served up at a restaurant in Vietnam.

The National Geographic reports that the lizards, now called theLeiolepis Ngovantrii, are not only a previously unrecorded species, but are also among the one percent of lizards that use parthenogenesis to reproduce, which means the animals use cloning to reproduce, making for an all-female species of self-ovulating lizards.

It all started when Ngo Van Tri, from the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, noticed the lizards live, displayed like lobsters in a tank at a restaurant in the Ba Ria-Vung Tau province in southeastern Vietnam. Noticing an unusual similarity among all of the lizards, he sent pictures of the lizards to his colleague Grismer, who has been studying snakes and lizards in Southeast Asia. Given these similarities, Grismer conjectured that Ngo had spotted a cloning lizard.

With his son Jesse, a herpetology (the study of reptiles and amphibians) doctoral candidate, Grismer hopped a plane to Vietnam and took an eight-hour motorcycle trip to the restaurant. However, by the time the pair arrived at the restaurant, the lizards were sold out.

"When we finally got there, this crazy guy had gotten drunk and served them all to his customers," Grismer told National Geographic.

But Grismer was in luck - the lizards were featured on the menus at nearby restaurants. "The Vietnamese have been eating these for time on end," said Grismer. "In this part of the Mekong Delta, restaurants have been serving this undescribed species, and we just stumbled across it."

With the help of area schoolchildren, the Grismers gathered about 70 lizards and confirmed their suspicions. A new species of all-female lizards had been discovered.

"It's an entirely new lineage of life that was being eaten and sold in restaurants for food," Grismer told CNN. "But it's something that scientists have missed for hundreds of years." While the discovery is an exciting step for the science of herpetology, Grismer found it less so for the culinary arts.

"The lizards tasted horrible," he said in an email. "They were skinned and fried and served with a number of different vegetables. They tasted like stagnant water smells if you can get what I mean."

Curious about other wacky foods eaten abroad? Then you're gonna want to know about these 10 bizarre foods eaten around the globe.

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