SURE, MICHAEL Phelps may have snapped a string of Olympic records like so many Rice Krispies in milk, but what was this child of Poseidon up against, anyway? Elite human athletes from 250 countries.

A small, speckled, asparagusgreen chameleon of Madagascar, by contrast, holds a world speed record among just about all of the nearly 30,000 different animals equipped with four limbs and a backbone.

Admittedly, it’s not a record many of us would aspire to best. As researchers recently reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the entire life span of the Furcifer labordi chameleon — from the moment of conception to development in the egg, hatching, maturation, breeding and right through to its last little lizardly thud to the ground — clocks in at barely a year.

That hypercondensed biography, the scientists said, may well make the chameleon the shortest-lived tetrapod on Earth, a creature chronologically more like a butterfly or a sea squirt than like the other reptiles, frogs, birds and mammals with which it is taxonomically bundled.

Equally bizarre, said Christopher J. Raxworthy, an author of the new report, the chameleon spends some two-thirds of its abbreviated existence as an egg buried in sand, with a mere 16 to 20 weeks allocated to all post-shellular affairs.

Moreover, the chameleons operate by a synchronised schedule, hatching, growing, mating and dying at more or less the same times and at the same pace throughout the year.

As a result, said Raxworthy, associate curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, “if you go into a forest during the dry season, the whole population of chameleons there will be represented by eggs.” Counterintuitive though it may seem, the extremity of F. labordi’s schedule could prove valuable for tracking down genes and other biological factors that promote longevity. The researchers observed that the chameleon is not merely short-lived as a matter of averages.

It is an obligate annual species, destined for death after a single spin around the sun, and that stated fate differs markedly from the varying degrees of perenniality found throughout the tetrapod clan.

Scientists have determined that many essential features of an animal’s portfolio are linked, among them whether at birth it looks fetal and helpless like a newborn kitten or precocious and competent like a neonatal giraffe; how big the average litter is; the speed with which the animal reaches sexual maturity; the length of time between births; and the pace at which an adult ages.