A father and his two sons sat in the jungle, trimming the wood they had just chopped. The humid heat, the jungle’s windless silence, and the work’s monotony had so sapped the men’s alertness that they never even saw the giant lizard until it was nearly upon them. It had seemingly appeared out of nowhere and was now advancing, its forked tongue flicking rapidly in and out of its mouth, its seven-foot-long body tensed in a crouch.
As the monster charged, the three men leapt up and began to run. Unfortunately, one of the sons crashed against a low-hanging vine. In an instant the monster seized him by the buttocks and tore off a large chunk of flesh. Although the others managed to drive the lizard back into the jungle, the damage had been done. Within half an hour the young man bled to death before the eyes of his helpless father and brother.
This nightmarish story is not fiction; it happened in Indonesia a few decades ago. The killer was the world’s largest lizard, the Komodo monitor, alias the Komodo dragon. (It gets its name because it belongs to the group of lizards known as monitors and because it lives on the tiny Indonesian island of Komodo.) While its usual diet consists of animals rather than people, some large individuals do become dangerous to humans. Their victims have included European tourists as well as Indonesian villagers.
When European scientists finally learned of the Komodo dragon’s existence in 1910, they were astonished that such a large animal had escaped their notice for so long. Not surprisingly, they immediately began asking some obvious questions, to which we have only recently begun to get answers. For example, how big does the lizard really grow? Why does this largest of lizards live on tiny, obscure Komodo, of all unlikely places?
What does it normally eat, when it’s not stalking unwary fathers and sons? How does it capture its normal food?
