It was during an expedition to northern Madagascar that the German-Malagasy research group found two specimens of the chameleon Brookesia nana, a species group where the world's smallest chameleons are counted.

One of them, a male, was measured at 13.5 millimeters in length, making it the world's smallest reptile discovered so far, according to the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich, reports the BBC.

The other was a female who measured 29 millimeters.

"The nano-chameleon's home has unfortunately been the subject of devastation, but the area was recently protected so the species will survive," says Oliver Hawlitschek, a researcher at the Natural History Center in Hamburg, writes the BBC.

"Spectacular case"

According to researchers, the lizards hunt small arachnids in the rainforest and hide from predators at night among leaves and grass.

In a blog post, Mark Scherz, one of the participants in the group, calls the lizard "a spectacular case of miniaturization" as the rainforest area where it was found is still well connected with other forest areas in the northern part of the island.

- So this new little chameleon breaks the pattern that the smallest species are always discovered on small islands.

This indicates that something else allows or causes these chameleons to decrease in size, he writes.

In their report, the researchers now propose that the chameleon be listed as endangered to protect the species' future survival.