Dragon Net

Although my family prefers to believe dragons come from the pen of James Owen, some scientists now claim dragons come from the land Down Under. At least, the Komodo kind of dragon and its much larger, extinct relatives.

For the last 4 million years, Australia has been home to the world’s largest lizards, including the 16-foot-long giant (5 meters) called Megalania, once the world’s largest terrestrial lizard but which died out some 40,000 years ago.

They wonder why the Komodos of Australia died out. For a change the explanation for a vanished species is not that hungry 19th century British sailors ate them all:

Were humans involved? “We have no evidence for this because the youngest Komodo fossils in Australia are around 300,000 years old, well before humans arrived. So we don’t know whether the Komodo dragons in Australia died out before humans arrived or after. So the jury will remain out on this question until a better fossil record is found.”