| Author s PrefaceTravel, for travel s sake, is to my mind a waste of timeand energy and an unnecessary expense. It is so muchbetter to arrive. But alas, I m obliged to travel to satisfymy vice. Let me make this clear: My vice, for that s whatit is, is the study of animals. This unreasoned passion hasoften taken me to remote parts of the earth. What have I not endured in order to have a fleetingglimpse of a rare species of monkey hidden away in thefoothills of the Annamite monntains? And when I thinkof the number of times my passport was stamped, theamount of dust I inhaled and the pounds I sweated off,before being able to observe a tribe of proboscis monkeysin Borneo . . . no, I don t like travel. The reason for setting off this time was two strangeanimals, or rather reptiles. One was the Komodo lizard,a kind of antediluvian monster straight out of popularlegend, which lives on a small, remote Indonesian island.About twelve feet long, it weighs all of three hundredpounds. The other was the sphenodon of Stephen Island,Sphenodon punctatum to the knowledgeable. It is notmuch to look at-thirty inches long at most, thin, littledifferent from any ordinary lizard. Bnt it existed in itspresent form 250 million years ago, long before the dino-saurs and brontosauruses appeared on earth. More amazing still, this living fossil, which flourishedduring the Triassic and Jurassic periods, possesses a thirdeye-the parietal eye, which corresponds to the pinealgland in mammals. These two reptiles are of great interest. Unfortunately, |
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