Lizards - Tumblr Posts
No one:
Absolutely no one:
Not a single soul:
Me: I know the reproductive biology of several dozen reptiles, horses, cats, kangaroos, foxes, wolves, humans, and several other species including fictional ones like Naga and Kitsune!
source - http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/14th-century-illuminations-for-dantes-divine-comedy/
I wanna go herping so bad
So today I made 2 discoveries!
#1: There exists an "emotional support" rubber chicken, complete with removable vest:
#2: My bearded dragon, Saffron, is approximately the size of a rubber chicken:
I have done a Thing™ with this information.
BEHOLD! A MAN CHICKEN
That is an excellent lizard! A bit jealous, I've only ever seen one lizard in the UK (still yet to see a slow worm 🙁 ), pretty sure that was on a beach near Lyme Regis, many many years ago...
Love the hrutdearya peeking out at the sun from its home!
Bestiaryposting Results: Miscellaneous Lizards
Slightly delayed, sorry. What happened there is I drafted it, looked at the time, thought I should give it a couple more hours to make sure everyone had time to post their stuff, and then... forgot to go back. Anyway.
Our second week of miscellany, where we have a bunch of the critters who didn't get their own entry grouped together. This one is the shortest, with just three lizards to look at.
If none of that made sense to you, you can find answers at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting.
To see the entries for the three lizards in question, click here:
And to see next week's miscellany so you can participate, click here:
Without further ado -- and crossing our fingers that the tagging system is cooperating this time -- here are some lizards below the cut.
@coolest-capybara (link to post here) has drawn all three, along with a bonus... well, the post says it's a scorpion, but I thought those looked different... anyway. The smaller lizards are darling, and I think the celestial look of the Rukhgarukh came off really well here. (And thank you for providing alt text.)
@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) has done some quality pencil sketches that also led me to learn cool things about the tuatara. I think the Nglushogog turned out particularly well here; the draconic vibe is interesting.
@cheapsweets (link to post here) has done a pencil sketch of the three -- I like the Nglushogog again here. The whole "lizard with the face of a frog" thing is honestly turning out more interesting than I expected. And hey -- in the bottom right -- what is that? Looks a bit like a scorpion to me.
@strixcattus (link to post here) has drawn some interestingly varied lizards, and included some nice lettering for us. I think this is the first one where the Hrutdearya really stands out to me -- it just looks so small & cute. As always, I recommend reading the linked post for Strixcattus's work, as she writes naturalistic descriptions to go with the illustrations -- I think the one for the Nglushogog is clever, and also hits pretty close to the mark in one particular way... we'll get to that.
@wendievergreen (link to post here) has drawn some very realistic-looking lizards by doing mashups between various Oregonian species. All extremely solid, in my opinion; I especially like the coloring on the Rukhgarukh. Also the exclamation point over the "scorpion" is a nice touch. More details in the linked post (and thank you for providing alt text).
So! Aberdeen bestiary.
This is actually just the illustration for Lizard. Which... I guess? Come on, monks, surely you've seen a lizard, what are you doing here? Why does it have that face?
Nglushogog
The Nglushogog gets no illustration of its own -- that single sentence describing it occurs in the intro to the brief "lizards" section. However, I can tell you that it is the botruca or botrax. (The entry uses both -- it mentions the "botrax" in a list of lizards at the start, then notes that the "botruca" is called that because it has a face like a frog.) This is not particularly helpful, however, because that is not a real lizard. The Medieval Bestiary website provides a little more information on it at this link here, and suggests that this was actually originally just the entry for a frog (or toad). This theory is supported by the fact that, according to the Aberdeen Bestiary, it is named after the Greek word for "frog". Which... close enough; Wiktionary tells me that Ancient Greek* for "frog" is batrakhos, and that seems plausible to me because we have the English word batrachian. (Even though Tumblr thinks we don't and has red-underlined it.) So probably somehow** "frog" turned into "frog-like lizard that has the same name as a frog".
*I'm specifically using the Ancient Greek forms here because I'm pretty sure those are the ones our authors would be most familiar with unless they happened to be writing from the Eastern Mediterranean.
** Looks like it might have been Isidore of Seville's fault, which... shocker. Or at least, he's the earliest source bestiary.ca has listed for that entry, and we know that he's where the Aberdeen Bestiary gets its etymological trivia, so it seems likely that he did that.
Hrutdearya
This is a very interestingly-stylized interpretation of "looking through a crack in a wall". Who built that little archway, and does it actually help with the sun-gazing?
Anyhow, this is the saura, which... well, I can't say it's not a real lizard, but it's also clearly the result of a misunderstanding. As we all know from (I assume) reading about dinosaurs, saura is just Ancient Greek for "lizard". So probably this was originally supposed to describe something all lizards do, and this bestiary turned it into a specific type of lizard.
Rukhgarukh
This one, as you can tell by it looking absolutely nothing like it, is a newt. It has stars on it because the Latin for "newt" is apparently stellio. It's possible that the artist did not realize it was supposed to be a newt. It's possible it wasn't supposed to be a newt originally, but I don't have time to look into that right now.
Anyway, that's lizards. Tune in next week for some snakes, a category to which the above legless critter apparently does not belong.
Curse you and your superior lizard knowledge!
(I kid, I kid. I should have been more diligent in my fact checking as well.)
But! If you check out the original post, the lizard in question is a Komodo Dragon, which is a type of monitor lizard.
To further clarify, the second gif features Odin, a Savannah Monitor dressed as a Night Fury (from How To Train Your Dragon).
Have you seen our new security monitor yet?
actually, males can exist, but their pathetic and are entirely unneeded
Listen to Folk, Viking metal feels like:
Now I’m ready to fight with Lizards looool
Today all four of my weather apps said the same thing - rain all day, and lots of it. However, the rain only lasted until around ten, and then I didn’t see a drop the rest of the day. Even now, tucked into my tent, there’s nothing outside. Now the apps are saying the rain is coming tomorrow or tonight. So I’ve placed my tent on a slight ridge, and strung it up pretty tight. I hope it pours tonight, so I can walk in dry weather tomorrow.
Maybe the four-leaf clover I found this morning had something to do with it?
Also, I’m not sure if that lizard is local to the area, or an escaped pet off on a whirlwind adventure.
Topic of the day: lesbian lizards.
There's a species of lizards that are entirely female (they really said no boys today honey) living in North America and Mexico. So how do they make baby lizards without males?
They reproduce by parthenogenesis (and are one of the few if not the only species of animal to reproduce only by this method). Parthenogenesis is a reproduction form where the female sexual cells develop without the masculine ones (eggs undergo a chromosome doubling after meiosis, developing into lizards without being fertilized), and it can happen in insects, birds, fishes and reptiles.
The desert grassland whiptail lizard (Aspidoscelis uniparens) does this, but! The ovulation is enhanced by female-female courtship and mating (pseudo-copulation) rituals that resemble the behavior other lizards that reproduce sexually.
So they are the absolute only-female lesbian queens.