THE ANCIENT FAMILY OF LIZARDS 127 



without touching him, but to my surprise he fell 

 to the ground as if he had been stunned and lay- 

 there perfectly stiff. When I picked him up he 

 was still stiff, but I noticed that he had fallen as 

 if by accident under a leaf to which one claw 

 still clung carelessly. With my free hand I 

 fumbled for a bottle and found the cork hard 

 to pull out. All this time Anolis showed no sign 

 of hfe. When I thrust him head first into the 

 bottle his hind toes caught on the top, again as 

 if only by accident. 



Nothing else had showed me that he was still 

 alive, but these two accidents would have been 

 enough to make me suspicious, even if I had not 

 known all the time that he was a very much 

 alive lizard playing dead in the hope that I would 

 let him go. 



Once he was safely bottled I had plenty of time 

 to examine him. Of AnoHs' five-inch length, 

 about two-thirds was tail. Since his head and 

 mouth look something like an alligator's, one of 

 his names is alligator lizard. Like the kangaroo, 

 his jumping hind legs were long and his front legs 

 short. All his twenty long toes were fitted with 

 vacuum pads that help him climb. 



There w^ere many other Anolis around. Their 

 favorite position seemed to be on a tree trunk, 

 head downward and well out in a graceful line 

 (Fig. 55). I caught two more and tethered them 

 to my window screen by a bit of dental floss tied 



