LIZARDS 



Chapter 11 



In folk-lore and mythology dragons play an important part. It is an 

 interesting conjecture that prehistoric man may have seen giant lizards and 

 handed down the story. Although the dinosaurs, which belong to a different 

 subclass of reptiles from the lizards, had probably all perished several million 

 years before man arrived, very large lizards may have still survived. To drag' 

 ons were attached most of the wild-animal horror tales of imaginative travelers. 

 The dragons of many of these stories were not extremely big, however, as the 

 hero could and often did slice off the head of a dragon with one blow. In 

 Raphael Sanzio's famous painting of St. George and the Dragoyi, the latter is 

 pictured as about ten feet long. Lizards as long as this still survive in the 

 Dutch East Indies. The Douglas Burden Expedition, collecting for the Ameri' 

 can Museum of Natural History, captured several of these dragon-lizards, 

 Varanus \omodoens\s, and recorded that one damaged a horse so severely that 

 the injured animal had to be shot, and another lizard swallowed the whole hind 

 quarters of a deer. Fortunately for the beautiful maidens in distress, most of 

 the "dragons" of today are small, and the great majority of North American 

 species are less than a foot long. Alligators, anatomically different from lizards 

 and belonging to a different order of reptiles, attain considerably greater size, 

 and individuals of fifteen feet in length were fairly numerous in Florida before 

 unrestricted hunting greatly thinned their ranks. 



In many parts of the country where lizards are scarce or rare, the term 

 "lizard" is applied to the local salamanders. The latter are readily distinguished 

 from lizards by their complete lack of scales and by their moist skins which 

 confine them to damp habitats. A very few of the native lizards apparently 

 lack scales, but have external ear openings not possessed by salamanders. Some 

 of the legless lizards, such as the glass snake, are often confused with snakes, but 

 may be identified as lizards by the presence of more than two scales or plates 

 before the anal opening. 



Lizards, more than most reptiles, are adapted for living in a warm climate. 

 Therefore, most of the native species are found in the southern states. When 

 kept as pets, they lose all ambition and usually refuse to eat after summer tern' 

 peratures no longer prevail. In keeping with their love of sunshine many 

 lizards have become desert dwellers, burrowing into the sand for warmth as 

 soon as the sun begins to sink. If the midday heat becomes excessive, however, 

 they then also retreat to their sand burrows. As with snakes, recent studies 

 have shown that even the desert-dwelling forms cannot survive long exposures 



357 



