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The dragons’ lair looks deceptively ordinary: a pair of pale green portables, tucked behind the reptile enclosure at Melbourne zoo.

But the plain exterior belies its hidden treasures. Inside, dozens of Victorian grassland earless dragons, blissfully unaware of their status as Australia’s most imperilled reptile, are basking on rocks, gobbling up crickets or lapping up “dew”, expertly misted by their keeper Zac Harkin.

For 50 years these critically endangered creatures were thought extinct. But following their rediscovery in 2023, Zoos Victoria is not taking any chances.

The new dragon conservation centre at Melbourne zoo has room to accommodate hundreds, housed as singles or pairs in open-air glass condos, each one furnished with living plants and artificial burrows made of PVC piping.

The occupants would be small enough to pass for a plastic toy, if only they weren’t so fast. Harkin is working to breed enough of these “pocket rockets” to support their recovery in the wild, each one sporting five white racing stripes, tiny scales and “fangy little teeth”.

Here, genetically distinct males and females are paired before winter, giving them a chance to settle in before breeding season kicks in.

But a couple that looks good on paper doesn’t always work out in practice, Harkin says. Even a tiny lizard can be fearsome. “They stand on their tippy toes, arch their backs, mouths open,” he says.

When a pairing is successful, females can produce up to two clutches of about four eggs – each one roughly the size of a Tic Tac. The hatchlings, which arrive about two months later, are fully formed miniatures, a touch bigger than a thumbnail and lighter than a gram.

Since the dragon’s remarkable rediscovery, zoo teams have been closely monitoring the remaining wild population, and successfully breeding the species – an effort that can now be ramped up thanks to the new custom-built facility.

Melbourne zoo, in Royal Park north of the city, is not far from their original habitat, the volcanic plains and grasslands that stretched between Melbourne and Geelong prior to colonisation. Dragons once occupied suburbs like St Kilda, Moonee Ponds and Sunbury, before housing development and agricultural expansion whittled their grassland habitat down to 0.5% of its prior extent.

Garry Peterson, acting director wildlife conservation and science at Zoos Victoria, says the goal is to reach more than 500 dragons – twice the size of the estimated wild population – enough to insure against extinction, and to begin reintroducing animals back into the wild.

Success isn’t about having dragons at the zoo, he says. “Success is having more populations established in the wild, because we have a conservation breeding program.”

Reintroducing the dragons across more sites is crucial, because – through a combination of luck and circumstance – the last wild cohort survives on a single plot of private grazing land, west of the city.

It’s a precarious situation, says the University of Melbourne’s Prof Brendan Wintle, and one that rests heavily on the current owners, whose careful management over decades has kept the species “in the game”.

Wintle, a lead councillor with the Biodiversity Council, welcomes the investment in captive breeding, but says securing the home of the dragon’s “last miraculous wild population” should be a priority for state and federal governments.

“We’re very grateful to the goodwill of those current landholders, but that’s their retirement, their investment. I don’t think, as a nation, we can just put the onus on them.” Governments should offer to purchase the land, he says, so it can be managed as a conservation reserve in perpetuity.

A Victorian government spokesperson says the state is “continuing to acquire and rehabilitate land to create the western grasslands reserve”, a planned 15,000 hectare conservation area of remnant native grassland west of the city. So far, about a quarter has been secured.

Bringing the species back from the brink is possible, Wintle says, but requires urgent action.

“Obviously if you’ve got all your eggs in one basket, which we currently do at the moment, it’s very fragile. One bit of bad luck in that place – whether it’s disease, whether it’s fire, whether it’s predation, it could even be predation from other native species – you could see the end of the species in the wild.”

“This species is sitting right on the edge of the cliff,” he says. “We just need the wind to blow the wrong way, and that’s the end for the wild population of this fantastic species.

“It would be a great tragedy to lose a species twice.”