Interesting! That makes mosasaurs (basically monitor lizards adapted to live exclusively in the ocean) make more sense.
Careful! This isn’t that kind of forum.
What if it used its fire breath?
I dunno, it looks like a particularly large dragon, but not unrealistically so. I’ve seen lots of monitor lizards on Java, and Komodo dragons on Rinci. To me, the photo looks reasonable.
As to the behavior of the guy, what he’s doing is probably unwise, but if the dragon is sated after a big meal, it is probably pretty logy. And if this guy is one of the handlers/tour guides who work on Rinci and Komodo, he’s probably very familiar with their behavior.
On Rinci (and probably Komodo too, but I don’t know because we didn’t go there), you can hike all around the island with a guide, and see lots of dragons pretty close up along the way. The guides carry big forked sticks just in case, but nothing untoward happened while we were there and I suspect that’s the norm.
Yeah, but there’re other differences between glass lizards and true snake, like the latter having a longer body and shorter tail in comparison to the former (the cloaca in GL is found nearer to the center; in snakes, it’s nearer to the “end”). And, y’know, the having eyelids thing.
Giant monitors might have coexisted on Flores Island with miniature humans, although I guess the whole Homo floresiensis hypothesis is still controversial.
They’re about yea big, but only this tall.
If we are talking about the world’s largest living reptile I’ve heard that Leatherback sea turtles can be up to 1000lbs? But probably one of the Crockagators would be larger.
I was on Komodo last year and saw a number of the dragons. They were mostly sheltering from the sun. Their colouring works surprisingly well as camouflage.
All Champagnes are sparkling wines, not all sparkling wines are Champagne.
I don’t know about fire, but I’d guess that a monitor lizard’s halitosis would be bad enough to qualify as a breath weapon.
Now that we’ve established that the “lizards” aren’t a proper clade, what about the fragile-tailed lizards (a category which I assume doesn’t include the Komodo or Gila)? You know, the ones whose tails break off easily so they can escape predators (including glass snakes, hence the “glass” part of their name). Are they a clade?
No. In fact, the propensity for tail loss varies even within a family. Caudal autotomy occurs commonly in the Gekkonidae (geckos), Anguids (which includes glass snakes/lizards), Teiidae (whiptails), Scincidae (skinks), and Iguanids (iguanas). It does not occur in Gila Monsters or monitors.
Saltwater crocodiles regularly exceed 2,000 lbs., and there are fairly convincing estimates of 4,000 lb. salties based on skull measurements.
Except that all snakes are of the suborder Serpentes, and have characteristics besides being legless reptiles that are different than the other types of legless lizards, which fit into other suborders of Squamata. I suppose we could call them “serpents”, as distinct from “snakes”, and let any legless lizard be a snake.
Currently, lizards is a polyphyletic group but snakes is not.
And you can’t even define “snakes” as being “legless lizards”, because some snakes aren’t quite completely legless.
I’ve been talking about the popular use of the term, not the scientific one. This would be just more linguistic hair-splitting on the basis of cladistics of the type I’ve been criticizing. If you’re discussing herpetology, fine, you can talk about Serpentes along with other clades of Squamata. The fact that Serpentes is a clade within Squamata doesn’t require one not to call other legless lizards snakes.
Right, but if you recognize snakes linguistically there would be justification to also recognize around 10 separate clades of lizards that would be of equivalent taxonomic rank.
I would’t consider that having some internal vestiges (and in some cases external spurs) qualify as having legs. But yes, that distinction is not as clear-cut as some other features of skeletal and other anatomy.
A while back, Old Spice put out a series of deodorants named after exotic islands. Komodo was one of them. The commercial had their “manly black guy” spokesman riding two Komodo dragons like a trick rider.
It disappeared from the lineup before the rest, in spite of having what I thought was the best scent. I figure the reason was “Who names a deodorant after a place that sounds like ‘commode’?”
Actually, my first thought was that some Marketing “genius” needed to remove their dorsal organ cluster from their aboral orifice and think for a change. :dubious:
My point was that there are characteristics that set Serpentes apart from other “legless lizards”. But you are correct that those characteristics are not as obvious as major structural changes like no legs.
I think I need to backtrack on this one. Science seems to be full of situations where they take a common word and apply it in a scientific manner as part of a system, and then the definition of the word has to adjust to fit the scientific application as the system gets modified to fit new information.
For example, the highly controversial discussion about how to define “planet”. Or the excitement we all feel when we try to decide if birds are dinosaurs. Or do we categorize sharks and dolphins and whales as “fish”.
I suppose in the same vein, we can differentiate between the scientific category of “serpents” and the common use of the word “snake”.
That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m objecting to (and I’m a scientist). It’s OK to have a popular definition of a word, and a more restrictive scientific one, but that doesn’t make the original popular definition wrong. There’s no reason to change the popular definition of a word just because scientists use it in a different way.
But there’s no reason to restrict the perfectly good English word serpents that way. Scientists can always just say they are talking about Serpentes when they want to talk abou that clade. Non-scientists can call any legless Squamata a snake, regardless of what clade it’s in.
The terms “frog” and “toad” have no scientific meaning, nor do “turtles” and “tortoises” represent clades. They refer to appearance and way of life, not taxonomy. There’s no reason snake and lizard shouldn’t be used the same way.