Komodo dragon

The Komodo dragon is the largest lizard on Earth. A big grown-up male can stretch as long as three metres from nose to tail-tip and weigh as much as a grown person and more. It has a strong, heavy body, sturdy legs, a long tail, and rough grey scales that make its skin look a little like a suit of armour.

Komodo dragons live wild in just one part of the world: a small group of warm, sunny islands in Indonesia, including the island called Komodo. They like dry, open places such as grassy plains and forests. Each dragon mostly lives on its own, resting in the shade when the day is hottest and moving about to look for food in the cooler afternoon.

One of the dragon’s best tools is its tongue. It flicks its long, forked, yellow tongue in and out to taste tiny smells floating in the air. This clever trick helps it work out where a meal might be, even a long way off. Komodo dragons are meat-eaters. Grown dragons hunt large animals like deer, wild pigs, and water buffalo, and they also eat animals that have already died. They have around sixty small, jagged teeth, and they can swallow surprisingly big pieces of food.

Baby Komodo dragons have a clever way to stay safe. When they are small they spend much of their time up in trees, out of reach of bigger dragons on the ground. As they grow they come down to live on the land. Sometimes a mother dragon can even lay eggs that hatch without a father at all, which is very unusual in the animal world. Komodo dragons can live for about thirty years.

There are only around three thousand Komodo dragons left in the wild, and their numbers are slowly going down. They need wild land and plenty of wild animals to eat, and both of these are becoming harder to find. Special parks in Indonesia now look after the dragons and their islands, so these amazing lizards have a safe place to live.