Komodo dragon

The Komodo dragon is the largest lizard alive today. It is a kind of monitor lizard, and it lives in the wild only on a handful of Indonesian islands: Komodo, Rinca, Flores, Gili Motang and Gili Dasami. Most of them live inside Komodo National Park, which was set up in 1980 to protect them. Scientists from outside the region first described the species in 1910, after hearing rumours of a land crocodile.

A big male can grow to about 3 metres long, and a typical wild adult weighs around 70 kilograms, as much as a grown man. Komodo dragons are apex predators, which means no other animal on their islands hunts the adults. They are listed as Endangered because people have taken over parts of their small island homes, and climate change is likely to shrink those homes even more.

What it eats

Komodo dragons eat almost any meat. Young ones catch insects, small lizards, snakes and birds. Adults mostly hunt Javan rusa deer and wild pigs, and sometimes even water buffalo. They hide beside trails and ambush prey, or eat the bodies of animals that have already died. They flick their long, forked yellow tongues to collect smells, and can sense rotting meat up to about 4 kilometres away. One meal can be huge: a dragon can eat up to 80 percent of its own body weight at once.

A venomous bite?

Komodo dragons have sharp, curved teeth and glands in the lower jaw that make venom. The venom stops blood from clotting, so a bitten animal loses a lot of blood and goes into shock. For many years people believed germs in the dragon's mouth killed its prey slowly, but scientists now think the deep cuts and the venom matter far more. Researchers still debate how strong the venom's effect really is compared with the damage from the bite itself.

Family life

Females lay their eggs around September, often about 20 at a time, frequently inside old nest mounds built by a bird called the scrubfowl. The eggs take seven to eight months to hatch, so the babies arrive around April, when there are plenty of insects to eat. Because adult dragons will eat young ones, hatchlings spend their first years living in trees. A Komodo dragon takes 8 to 11 years to grow up and may live about 30 years.

On the globe

The model shows the world's largest lizard on Flores in Indonesia, with its heavy body, long tail and forked tongue. Zoom in to see its claws, scaly skin and long tail up close.