The golden age of zoology was the 19th century, and the islands of South-East Asia were particularly rich hunting grounds. Indeed, it was on an expedition to the area that Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection and, through a letter to Charles Darwin describing his hypothesis, panicked Darwin into publishing his own thoughts on the matter in “The Origin of Species”. It might therefore be thought that by now the area’s jungles would have been picked clean of large, showy species. Not so, apparently. This week Biology Letters, one of the journals of the venerable Royal Society of which both Wallace and Darwin were fellows, describes something novel from northern Luzon, in the Philippines, that is large, showy and also slightly strange. It is a monitor lizard as long as a man is tall, which is a close relative of the notoriously carnivorous Komodo dragon, yet which is, itself, vegetarian. Varanus bitatawa is, as is often the way of these things, well known to local hunters. Until Luke Welton and Rafe Brown of the University of Kansas came along, though, it was unknown to science.
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