Giant lizard with two penises is peace-loving vegetarian
A man-sized lizard with two penises has been discovered in the rainforests of the Philippines. Fortunately, it’s a peace-loving vegetarian.
The giant reptile, a relation of the infamous Komodo dragon, was found by scientists exploring the southeast Asian country’s remote Sierra Madre mountains.
According to research published in the Royal Society’s Biological Letters, the lizard, known as Varanus bitatawa, is two metres in length and distinctively marked with pale yellow and green dots. Its most distinctive feature is its double penis, or hemipenes; an anatomical quirk it shares with some other snakes and lizards.
But researchers fear the creature could become extinct even before they have had a chance to properly study it. Although new to science, the lizard is hunted by locals as food and deforestation is eating away at its native habitat.
“It is an incredible animal,” said Rafe Brown, who led the team of researchers which made the discovery.
“It lives up in trees, so it can’t get as massive as the Komodo dragon, a huge thing that eats large amounts of fresh meat. This thing is a fruit-eater and it’s only the third fruit-eating lizard in the world.”
Brown said that ethnobiologists had become aware of the species after hearing stories about a lizard “that everyone liked to eat because their flesh tasted better than the ones that lived on the ground; this thing was described as bigger and more brightly colored.”
A two-month expedition in 2009 to find the lizard almost ended in failure until hunters who had heard about the scientists’ quest brought a barely-alive specimen to their camp.
“It was literally in the last couple days of the expedition, we were running out of money and food and this was the payoff: they finally got this gigantic animal,” Brown said.
“They are extremely secretive,” he added. “I think that centuries of humans hunting them have made the existing populations … very skittish and wary and we never see them. They see and hear us before we have a chance to see them, they scamper up trees before we have a chance to come around.”