[8] Extensive upland areas of the Australian Wet Tropics, such as the Atherton Tableland, were cleared for farming, largely between 1940 and 1990, leaving many scattered pockets of rainforest surrounded by open pasture.

The prickly skink is abundant throughout this area and has become a research subject for studies on the effect of habitat fragmentation on genetic diversity, gene flow and adaptation in a rainforest dependent species.

A 1993 phylogeographic study by Moritz and co-authors using allozyme electrophoresis and restriction mapping of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes found distinct genetic lineages in populations from the northern and southern wet tropics.

[6] However, the deep divergence between these lineages suggests much longer genetic isolation, with an estimated separation time of over five million years, and these populations may represent different species.

[12] However, these relatively slight differences show the difficulty of detecting effects of recent habitat fragmentation in a species with relatively low local population size and limited dispersal.