Dragons

In a Railway Express depot on Manhattan's loth Avenue one morning last week three lizards sprawled in their crates and hissed their sullen woe. They were waiting for a U. S. customs officer to let them be hauled up to The Bronx Zoo. They could afford to wait. They had come a long way. In space it was 11,000 mi., from the Island of Komodo between Sumbawa and Flores in the Dutch East Indies. In time it was more than 60,000,000 years.

All that afternoon at The Bronx Zoo pop-eyed New Yorkers crowded around the lizards' cage. They gaped at the mottled grey hides, tough and beaded as an Indian bag. They blinked at the great red mouths and serrated teeth, the long forked yellow tongues flicking in & out like a snake's. They shuddered at the wicked claws, long and sharp as a good-sized leopard's. Well might New Yorkers gape, blink, shudder. To most of them a lizard was a six-inch creature which eats flies and scuttles under leaves. These lizards were 9 ft. long, and could swallow whole the hindquarters of a wild boar.

Scientists who were told of these beasts 25 years ago laughed lightly, assured tale-bearers that such things had not walked the earth since Eocene times. Natives who passed Komodo described something which sounded like a dragon. Everyone knew that dragons were as mythological as the Minotaur. But the tales kept coming and in 1912 Major P. W. Ouwens of Java's Buitzenborg Zoo dispatched collectors to Komodo. They brought back creatures which not only closely resembled an Eocene reptile but were also almost exact replicas of the St. George dragon. Zoologist Ouwens named the new species Varanns komodoensis. The lay world called it dragon lizard.

The lizards have since been found on a few neighboring islands, but most are on Komodo. Komodo is a volcanic island 22 mi. long and 12 mi. wide, covered with bleak, crumbling mountains, grassy plains, thick jungle. Besides dragon lizards it supports many a deer, boar, water buffalo, bird, snake, insect and a miserable Dutch penal colony. The lizards claw out great caves in the mountains, roam down to prey on deer, boar and smaller animals. They walk with bodies well off the ground, can run fast, swim, stand on their hind legs like dinosaurs. They are keen-eyed, keen-eared, highly emotional. Angered, they hiss like boilers. Frightened, they vomit.

Until last month there were only four live Komodo lizards in captivity, two in London, one in Amsterdam, one in Berlin. In 1926 Naturalist Douglas Burden brought two to Bronx Zoo, but they pined away in 40 days. Last week's arrivals were escorted by two young Harvardmen, Lawrence Tarleton Knutsford Griswold and William Harvest Harkness, who captured 43 lizards on Komodo in box traps baited with deer carcasses. They loosed all but eight, gave four by agreement to Java's Sourabaya Zoo. One of the remaining four died of seasickness on the way to the U. S. Another, ailing, was restored by a stiff dose of castor oil.

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