On May 30, 2008, a research team armed with GPS units, notebooks, and binoculars set out into a dense patch of jungle in Indonesian Borneo. An oil palm company had commissioned them to survey the area for important environmental and cultural assets that might be impacted should the forest be converted into a plantation. They had no idea, however, that an “exceptional herpetofaunal discovery” awaited them that morning, they later wrote.

As midday approached, the sweating group decided to take a break from their uphill trek to have lunch next to a shallow, rocky stream bed. Glancing at the creek between bites, one of the local team members spotted something of note: a brownish-yellow reptile, about a foot long, that he referred to simply as kadal—the generic Indonesian word for “lizard.” The partially submerged creature had the elongated, snakelike body of a Chinese dragon, the facial features of a cartoon dinosaur, and the pronounced scales of a mini-alligator.

For a few minutes, the strange visitor became the focus of attention as the group photographed it and gently passed it around. To their amazement, it hardly struggled and did not try to bite them. Lunch soon resumed priority, though, and they put the creature back into the stream, where it sat, unmoving, for the next hour. As the group prepared to leave, one of the team members glanced back for a final look and noted that it had disappeared.

Excerpted from POACHED: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking by Rachel Love Nuwer. Scribe Publications

It wasn’t until the researchers returned to their computers and reptile identification books that they realized the importance of what they had found: the mystery creature was, in fact, the elusive earless monitor lizard, Lanthanotus borneensis (literally, “hidden ear from Borneo,” named for its lack of external ear openings). Until recently, scientists and collectors had captured fewer than a hundred specimens since the species’ 1877 discovery. Among reptile enthusiasts, its rarity and mystique have earned it a grandiose nickname: “the Holy Grail of herpetology.”

In 2012, a few members of the Indonesian survey team published a paper about their finding in the Journal of Threatened Taxa. They were careful to limit the amount of detail they included about the lizard’s location, noting that, “due to the species’ rareness and its high conservation value, it cannot be ruled out that pet reptile collectors and traders may misuse this … information.” Although they omitted GPS coordinates, they did print a rough map and a description of the habitat.

Unfortunately, the authors had underestimated the tenacity and resourcefulness of the world’s unscrupulous reptile collectors. The map and scant description provided ample detail for them to go on—as evidenced by the snowballing number of earless monitor lizards that quickly began turning up in collections and online ads.

In June 2014, Vincent Nijman, a conservation ecologist at Oxford Brookes University, spotted a blog post offering pairs of earless monitor lizards for sale in the Czech Republic. By July, specimens had made their way to Europe’s largest reptile fair, held in Germany, while photos posted on Facebook, online reptile forums, and dealers’ websites began surfacing in countries from Japan to the UK.

Nijman was torn about what to do. On the one hand, he didn’t want to bring even more attention to the lizard. On the other, raising awareness about its plight could alert customs agents to look out for it and help it gain important protection. Like so many other obscure species, it was not yet included in the CITES international trade appendixes. In the end, Nijman decided to sound the alarm.

A quick walker with a firm handshake, Nijman stands out for his endearing eccentricities: He styles his shoulder-length curly hair like Kenny G’s, continues to use a Nokia brick phone from the mid-2000s, and loves singing Dutch-accented ABBA at karaoke. When I asked him about a dusty human skull that rests on the windowsill of his cluttered office, he picked it up, looked into its empty sockets for a moment, and then replied, “I have no idea who this is or where it came from.”