There can be few experiences more rewarding for a biologist than discovering a new species. A researcher can gain immortality by adding to the tally of the 1.2 million organisms described in specialist literature.
Given that it will almost undoubtedly outlive them, scientists often agonise over what scientific name to give their new discoveries.
You could go for modesty, choosing the name of a fellow scientist - and you never know, they might one day engage in a spot of mutual professional backslapping and name something after you.
Or you could pick someone famous. The former United States president, George W Bush, his vice president, Dick Cheney, and defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, have had beetles named in their honour: Agathidium bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi.
It was this latter route what was taken for a species of wood lizard discovered this year. But its moniker has much more relevance to the UAE than the Bush administration beetles.
Although the lush Peruvian rainforest where it was found could not be more unlike the UAE's scorching desert, the creature owes its discovery to a very prominent Emirati.
The lizard in question has been named after Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.
It was discovered in Cordillera Azul, a national park in central Peru, by Dr Pablo Venegas, a biologist at the Centre of Orinthology and Biodiversity in Lima, thanks to a grant from the Mohammed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, which financed his expedition.
Because of the Crown Prince's involvement - he started the fund with an endowment of €25 million (Dh120m) and it has since made more than 800 grants to projects helping to preserve the world's dwindling biodiversity - Dr Venegas decided the new species should be called Enyalioides binzayedi.
Characterised by a dramatic series of scales that project from the back of its skull, E. binzayedi has been unveiled alongside another new species found in the same area, Enyalioides azulae, in a paper published in the scientific journal ZooKeys.
The two species have striking colour schemes, with the males a mix of green, dark brown, black and other colours.
Dr Venegas was "very surprised" to discover the two species of lizard because he had gone to the Rio Huallaga river basin in Cordillera Azul in search of frogs, new species of which he had discovered in the past.
But he remained alert to the possibility that new species of Enyalioides might be out there to be discovered. A co-author of his recent paper, Omar Torres-Carvajal, of the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador in Quito, had previously found an undescribed species from the same genus in a museum collection, raising the question of whether the creature would be found in the wild.
"When I found the first new species, E. azulae, I thought, 'this is the new Enyalioides [that Omar found]'," Dr Venegas said.
"But some weeks later, reviewing the collected specimen and showing the pictures of it to Omar, we concluded I had discovered another species, completely different from the species reviewed by him.
"I returned to Cordillera Azul to start a monitoring plan for harlequin frogs and found more E. azulae, and my second surprise was the second new species, E. binzayedi."
But as rewarding as the discovery of the second species was, to confirm it he needed more specimens.
Because the only place it had been found was sleeping on vertical bush stems at night, that meant he was in for a long, dark, uncomfortable hunt for the lizards, which are about the size of a human hand.
"I was condemned to spend hours at night, like a hunting dog, searching for wood lizards," Dr Venegas said.
It rained almost constantly.
"The national park is far away from the last little villages, and the trail to the park is one of the most horrible I have walked in my life," he said. "All the time it was raining, and the mud was softened by many people with horses that use this trail to go to their houses and croplands."
But for him, the discovery was worth it. He has produced a detailed description of the external features of E. binzayedi and E. azulae, highlighting the unique characteristics that distinguish them as a species.
E. binzayedi's crest scales is probably its most noticeable feature.
"I don't know of other species of lizard in Peru, apart from the green iguana, that has this tremendous crest," Dr Venegas said.
The finds increase to nine the total number of Enyalioides species found in Peru. The two new species live at the same altitudes, and were found in the same area and it may be that they are restricted to the Cordillera Azul.
And although little is known about their habits, Dr Venegas believes the key difference between the two may be the types of insects they choose to eat.
Important as they are, the finds are no more than a scratch in the surface of the rainforest's uncharted biological wealth.
Dr Venegas himself already found 10 previously unknown types of lizard and 14 frogs, and is certain there are many more new waiting to be discovered.
"Peru has a complex geography and diverse terrain. It has not been adequately collected in herpetological terms and some regions have not been explored at all."
