A team of scientists has published a study detailing "dwarf dragons," which are nearly spitting images of the beasts you might see on "Game of Thrones" sans wings and the ability to breath fire.

Like the computer-generated, fire-breathing lizards in HBO's wildly popular original series, these dwarf dragons, also known as "woodlizards," can come in vivid shades of green or red with scales like mailed armor. The multi-institutional team of researchers published their work in the journal ZooKeys.

"I started working with woodlizards in 2006 as part of my postdoc at the Smithsonian Institution under the direction of Kevin de Queiroz," study co-author Omar Torres-Carvajal, of the Museo de Zoología QCAZ in Ecuador, said in a press release. "At that time only seven species of woodlizards had been described, and they were recognized in the literature as one of the less diverse groups of South American lizards. During the last few years we doubled the number of known species of woodlizards, showing that the diversity of these conspicuous reptiles had been underestimated.

"That more than half of the diversity of a group of large, dragon-looking reptiles from South America has been discovered in recent years should be heard by people in charge of conservation and funding agencies."

Queiroz, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, said these dwarf dragons have managed to fly crawl under the radar despite their notable appearance and size.

"Woodlizards are fairly large and conspicuous, so it's interesting that roughly half of the currently recognized species have been discovered in the last 10 years," he told Smithsonian.com. "This illustrates how much we still have to learn about South American reptiles."