BLUE TONGUE SKINKS

Dear Forum,

First of all thank you for the possibility for being here, I hope I can contribute to this forum in time. I have read the posts regarding the rules, I will try to abide them as best as I can.
I really need someone experienced to help me out and share some solid knowledge regarding the problem I have.

The story:
I have been keeping reptiles for one and a half decades. I got my experience mostly from keeping snakes and monitor lizards, blue tongue skink keeping is something very new to me. Even before getting any of them I have read many articles
and watched a lot of videos on youtube. After getting to know about this wonderful species I decided to get a few animals maybe try to breed them in the future. Even my family found these little critters amazing so we all thought it will be a wonderful thing to introduce even to my 2 years old kid who already loves animals. Here in Hungary getting these animals right now is very difficult, they are just simply off the market for some reason. Luckily I have a friend who was collected a few animals from multiple sources. Once I asked if he wants to sell maybe 2 he turned me down but not long ago he ran into serious financial problems and contacted me about selling all of them.

Here where my problems began:
My friend and I agreed that I will get them slowly one by one. I told him once I have an enclosure fully ready and the information about the animal I am about to get I'll buy it ... then the next when I am ready for it and so on. A few weeks ago my friend asked me if I could hurry up because he is not warming the racks anymore and it is getting really cold at nights. I asked him what temperature the animals are kept in, I was a bit surprised how could a room get so cold it could be problematic. It turned out my friend was keeping the animals in a "wintergarden" a small building separated from the house, isolated only with a thick layer of glass ... He told me at nights the animals in the lower levels of the rack system had to endure about 7 degrees in celsius!

I immediately told the guy to bring the animals over even I was not ready for their arrival at all. Now I am here with animals in boxes, my flat is full of work in progress terrariums cause even I know they can be kept in racks I am a display-enclosure fan and I wanted them to be in a good place after the conditions they had to suffer. The reason I am writing here is I don't even know what kind of skinks I have right now, I only have guesses at best.
I would like to ask the advanced circle of this community to help me out cause I want to set the right temperature, the right humidity for the animals with using the right substrates etc etc. If it is possible I would like to know about the genders as well but right now the most important thing is to have the right conditions/environment for the animals.

This is a very frustrating situation for me even for my family cause the warehouse like conditions I have now and I would like to at least know what I got from my friend cause he does not know either. He thought skink is skink and kept them like this manner. The animals arrived with thick and multiple layers of dried skin over their bodies, the first week I didn't do anything after I arrived from work but soaking them and carefully take the dried skin off. One of them couldn't even open his/her eye, the scales on the animal were pointing out from the body and felt really dry. (Now he is better due to hydration)

I have attached pictures of 6 animals out of the 8 I got. The remaining 2 are similar to one of the animals I posted a picture about.

Thank you very much in advance!

The animals:

They appear to me to be merauke, Irian jaya and classic Indonesian, all being gigas (Indonesian) species. They need very high humidity (80% or close to it). Would suggest a substrate that promotes that. Impossible to determine gender. Sorry for your situation but I applaud your efforts to make a better life for them. They don't appear to have had such a good one so far.

G'day mate.
I can't help you much on these guys, I really just have the basics on my eastern bluetongues. HOWEVER I can tell you this. There is no external way to sex these lizards. People will spin you yarns about body shapes and colouring, yet experiments have found this to only be 40 - 50% accurate AT BEST. I was sold 3 lizards who had signs of being male... I got 3 females when properly checked.

My advice would be to find a herp vet and get them checked either via the new dye methods or ultrasounds.

Hi guys! Thank you for the help, I will try to set up their age with high humidity. Well I thought it won't be that easy to determine their gender it is not that important right now, was just thinking maybe

As substrate I set up reptibark, cocofiber and some topsoil's mixture so the substrate can hold the humidity. I'll spray them twice a day. Have a stable temperature gradient from 35 degrees to 24 degrees (35 being the hot spot) in the tanks already set up. Hope they will like it.

If you guys can give me any extra tips about anything that can help me improve their life I would be glad to hear it.

Some of the already set enclosures: