Monitor lizards

I also watched...

I used to dabble in the Varanus forums back in the day, the monitors, and watching Frank Reitz.

You'd think our guys were bad watching those guys.

They would argue...

But considering that in them many things contrary to our faith are written, we have believed that they ought all to be rejected, lest perchance we should transfer the joy of Christ to Antichrist.

While therefore we were considering these things, there came holy men, Parmenius and Varanus, who said that your holiness had found a Hebrew volume written by the hand of the most blessed evangelist Matthew, in which also the birth of the virgin mother herself and the infancy of our Savior were written.

And accordingly we entreat your affection by our Lord Jesus Christ himself to render it from the Hebrew into Latin, not so much for the attainment of those things which are the insignia of Christ as for the exclusion of the craft of heretics, who in order to teach bad doctrine have mingled their own lies with the excellent nativity of Christ, that by the sweetness of life they may hide the bitterness of death.

It will therefore become your purest piety either to listen to us as your brethren entreating or to let us have as bishops exacting the debt of affection which you may deem due.

I believe it is.

Became reptile wranglers for a day when a large monitor lizard was found trapped in a storm drain.

The St. Louis County Animal Care and Control said the lizard, an Asian water monitor, was spotted in a storm along Niles Place on the southwest side of town.

It was fished out of the drain, taken to the county's animal shelter on a stray hold.

Oh, so it's a stray monitor lizard.

Those things are huge, or they can be huge.

Well, there you go.

like that.

She looks like that, what is it, a mongoose from Rescuers Down Under? What is that?

Oh, yeah.

That

Owens examined the skin, reviewed the photograph, corresponded with Van Steen van Hensbroeck about the circumstances of the collection, and in 1912 published the first scientific description of the animal.

naming it Varanus comodoensis, the Komodo monitor, the largest living lizard on Earth, an animal reaching 3 metres in length and 70 kilograms in weight, sometimes more.

A predator capable of taking deer, wild boar and water buffalo, full-grown water buffalo, animals that outweigh the lizard by a factor of five or more, brought down not by brute force but by a combination of ambush, speed and a bite that delivers both venom and a catastrophic bacterial infection.

The Komodo dragon has a forked tongue, that samples the air for chemical traces the way a bloodhound samples the ground for scent, flickering in and out, tasting the molecules left behind by prey animals that pass through hours or even days before, following a chemical trail through the savannah with a persistence that borders on mechanical Its teeth are serrated, curved and blade-like, designed not for chewing but for slicing, for opening wounds that will bleed and fester, and weaken the prey over the hours and days that follow the initial attack.