Living Dragons [antikvár]

R CHAPTER 1 Varanids - the Real Dragons Belief in the existence of winged, fire-breathing dragons was a common feature of medieval folklore and eastern mythology. The sort of dragon so nobly slain by St George, or to be found writhing across Chinese tapestries, never existed, save in the over-vivid imaginations of superstitious artists and story-tellers. But there are dragons living - dragons of sufficient size and ferocity to have taken a toll of human life. To find them, you would have to travel to Indonesia. There, half way along the chain of islands which stretches from the eastern tip of Java into the Banda Sea, between the islands of Sumbawa and Flores, lies tiny Komodo, a mere 29km (18 miles) long and just 19km (12 miles) across at its widest part. On the rocky hills of this tropical islet are to be found real-life dragons -Komodo dragons, more properly Komodo monitors, more properly still Varanus komodoensis, giant members of the extensive family of monitor lizards which today extends across the Old World from Africa to Australia, but which once was also represented in North America and Europe. Some of their distant relatives still persist in the USA and Mexico - the Gila monster and the Mexican beaded lizard. These are apparently primitive survivors of an ancient stage of monitor evolution and hold the distinction of being the only living poisonous lizards - poisonous enough to have killed people on occasion. Fossils from rocks dating back to the Age of Reptiles, over 65 million years ago, disclose a race of extinct sea dragons that were also relatives of the monitor lizards and reached lengths of 15m (50ft) or more. Denizens of Cretaceous seas, in the days when Tyrannosaurus stalked the land preying on its fellow dinosaurs, the sea dragons were mosasaurs, totally adapted to life in shallow < A komodo dragon (Varanus komodoens/s) on the lookout for prey or larger rival lizards of Its own species. tropical waters and apparently living mostly on fish and the now defunct cephalopods which are known as ammonites. THE KOMODO DRAGON Komodo dragons do not fly and do not breathe fire but, in every other respect, they fully merit their emotive name. It is a measure of Komodo's remoteness that this massive reptile, up to 3.5m (lift) long, was unknown to science until just before the First World War. One of the Lesser Sunda islands, Komodo is only about 520km2 (200 sq. miles) in area. It is very hilly, rising to 825m (2,700ft) in the interior, and covered largely by savannah, although the hilltops are clothed in forest. For an Indonesian island it is surprisingly dry, most of the January monsoon rains falling on Java and Bali before they reach Komodo on their southeasterly track. Human habitation, even towards the end of the twentieth century, was limited essentially to a small village of native huts. In the nineteenth century, this obscure corner of the Dutch colonial empire was truly an outpost of Western civilization. In December 1910, P.A. Ouwens, who was connected with the botanical gardens at Buitenzorg (now Bogor, 19km/30 miles south of Jakarta in Java), was introduced to J.K.H. van Steyn van Hensbroek, an infantry lieutenant at that time serving as a civil administrator on the island of Flores. Komodo is located in the narrow strait between Flores and Sumbawa and, as part of his duties, Hensbroek was required to visit it on a