Adnoartina, recorded also as Adno-artina, is the gecko ancestor of the Diyari, the lizard being whom these desert people held especially sacred. His story is an account of how the rock and the red ochre of the country came by their colour. In the telling preserved by C.P. Mountford and the artist Ainslie Roberts, Adnoartina and the dog Marindi hunted the same quarry and fell to quarrelling; the gecko ancestor seized Marindi by the throat and bit through it, and the blood that gushed out poured over the rock and stained it the deep red it has kept ever since, while the ochre of the country is reckoned that same blood. In defending himself the gecko set the shape and the upheld, curling tail by which his kind has been known from that day. The episode of Marindi's reddening blood is recorded in central-Australian ethnography as early as Horne and Aiston's Savage Life in Central Australia (1924).