Monday, Mar. 22, 1926
Lizards
Last week another merchant was stricken with natural history fever. His case was more virulent than those of Mr. James Simpson of Chicago and Mr. Walter P. Chrysler (TIME, March 8), who respectively financed but did not accompany the Roosevelt-Field Museum trip for Ovis poli (just returned from Turkestan) and the Smithsonian Institution trip for live wild creatures (just embarked for Africa). Mr. Jesse Metcalf of Manhattan, manufacturer of woolens (Metcalf Bros. & Co.), is to be not only the financier but the leader of a Bronx Zoo trip to the Dutch East Indies, to the island of Komodo in particular. Mr. and Mrs. Metcalf are to be accompanied by Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy, assistant director of the American Museum of Natural History, and Mrs. Murphy. They are to depart, by chartered schooner, in the summer.
Like the Roosevelts, these huntsmen will seek an almost fabulous creature. Like Dr. Mann of the Smithsonian forces, they will try to take the creature alive as well as dead. It is an anachronism from the age of reptiles that they have in mind a lizard that is known to grow to the size of a crocodile, that is, 18 to 21 feet long; a carnivore, a night prowler, a fleet traveler on large but silent feet, which raise his snaky chest and belly clear of the ground. He is called "boeaja darat" and "land crocodile" by the Dutch, who have shot him as long as 12 feet. He is an object of abject terror among the island natives because of his habit of devouring his food with ferocious nocturnal noises. He is fairly easy to hunt, being deaf. He is, scientists believe, a cousin of the smaller monitor lizard (ravager of crocodile eggs) which the Smithsonian men hope to get in Africa; that is, of the family Varanus. If found he will be called Varanus komodensis, last of the great race of dinosaurs.