Wiesmann — the Gecko

Here is the taxonomy, because on this page it matters.

Order Squamata contains the scaled reptiles: lizards and snakes. Snakes — suborder Serpentes — did not evolve alongside lizards; they evolved from within them. A snake is, cladistically speaking, a kind of lizard that has committed to a policy. Geckos are squamates. Snakes are squamates. They share an ancestor considerably more recently than either shares one with a tortoise.

So the Wiesmann gecko is a genuine relative. Not a metaphor, not a vibe — an actual, verifiable cousin sitting on the bonnet of a hand-built German roadster with a BMW engine in it.

The badge exists because of adhesion. Wiesmann’s founding claim was that its cars stick to the road the way a gecko sticks to glass, and the gecko’s adhesion is one of the genuinely astonishing facts in biology: millions of microscopic hairs called setae, each splitting into hundreds of finer tips, generating van der Waals forces across a contact area so large that a gecko can hang from a single toe. It is not suction. It is not glue. It is intermolecular attraction, scaled up by geometry.

The Ophidiary regrets its ruling and will not be revising it. This bestiary concerns serpents. A gecko has legs, eyelids and a functioning relationship with vertical surfaces, and any one of those is disqualifying.

It is, however, hereby granted the title of Nearest Relative, and its entry is placed first in Book VI as a matter of honour.