Wow! I had never heard of this lizard before, so I had a little Google. Apparently they use their tail to block their burrow from predators. Are these rare in collections?
Thanks. They are an unusual sight; I think this was my first encounter with the species in a zoo. There are some in private hands though.
Colouration is variable between the two, with X. batilifera being more drab in colour. Scalation differs, smaller nuchal crest, minimal elongated scalation around the ears. Tail shape is more discoidal and flattened vs taylori. The whorling scalation on taylori almost forms a vertebral ridge where batilifera does not and scalation whorls out to the sides. Hope that helps? I tried to make it easy to understand. Some terms can be found via internet search. Cheers.
There are a whole bunch of differences between the two, but the main and by far easiest difference to use is the shape of the tail, as also highlighted by the repective common names of the two. It's show well here: Xenagamas phylogeny Xenagamas (scroll down) Without going into the scientific lingo, whenever I've seen the two I've felt that batillifera had a fairly "normal", if bloated, tail (not all that different from a number of other reptiles), while the tail of taylori looks remarkably odd and unlike anything else. I've seen the ones at Malmö a few times and they're taylori. I believe they're labelled as such, too. The two Xenagama used to be very rare in captivity, but after some successes with breeding by private keepers they started appearing more regularly.