Dragon Lizards

Consternation sent animals racing to their jungle cover on the Island of Komodo (one of the Dutch East Indies). A bird droned like a million flies above the trees.

It did not flap its wings. Alan Cobham, British aviator in the plane, looked down and started with amazement, for scowling up at him from beneath their heavy orbital ridges were the very dragons of his nursery books. And they were alive--huge, dark monsters nine feet long, who raised themselves on post-like legs to glare at the strange thing in the air. They showed no fear: during a million years all beasts on Komodo had fled from their voracity.

The plane swooped low, roaring. That at last was intimidating. The beasts dropped to their bellies and scuttled into the swamps of Komodo.

Some years ago a Dutch engineer swore that he had seen these monsters. Men disbelieved him. They might not have believed Aviator Cobham. But two years ago William Douglas Burden of Manhattan led out an expedition, found the creatures, killed three, caught two more. The live ones he gave to the Bronx Zoo. They soon died and are now being pickled. The dead three he gave to the American Museum of Natural History, whose experts found them to be gigantic lizards, related to the monitor lizards of Australia.

Museum taxidermists embalmed the three specimens, stuffed them, placed them in a realistic setting of Komodo reeds and trees.

Last week, when the museum's new Hall of Reptiles was opened for the first time by President Henry Fairfield Osborn, distinguished visitors could see two nightmares poised fighting over a wild boar. A third one, a female, glared, waiting division of the lizard kill.