Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My dad lives on the east coast and he emailed me this crocodile monitor picture from the Miami Zoo. I guess the cage systems they use for their animals are pretty eye appealing. They try to make them as natural as possible.

Great looking monitor. In my opinion, there's nothing better looking than a varanid in a large naturalistic cage. More zoos need monitors in my opinion. When people think of lizards, they think of under active geckos (not quite lazy though) that are small and are viewed as dumb animals. What better for a zoo than a large (a lot of my friends even call my 14" yellow ackie a big lizard lol), active, and intelligent. And many times eye catching. Sorry if I stole your post, I like rambling haha. But great animal, and if you have more pictures to post, by all means do so.

Jason

Yeah its probably hard if not impossible to build a natural cage in northern climates but in hotter climates it can work. I saw one water monitor in a cage once where they had so much vegetation you could not see the lizard. A little too natural if you ask me. hahaha

I think alot of cages are done more for human benefit then lizard benefit. The lizards probably do not care if their environment is pretty as long as they have a places to hide and bask. But zoos are under a lot more pressure then a private collector since tons of people are watching their animals daily.

I was looking up some pics of croc monitors pretty mean teeth.

Hmmmm...I reckon Komodo's are longer.

Again, nice pictures. I would love to see a croc monitor, and a long list of other Varanids (Hint, hint FR, my birthday is in a few months lol).

But the croc monitor is the longest lizard, even longer than the komodo. The longest Komodo I've heard of was around 10 feet, there have been reports of 12 foot croc's. But considering how the tail accounts for more than 2/3 of the total length. So the SVL on a 12' croc would be around 4', but a 10' Komodo's SVL would be about 5' or so. Croc monitors win by technicalities really haha.

I'm sure alot of croc monitors seem like they are 12 feet when they are in the wild but in reality the vast majority of them are half that when full grown. I'm yet to see one that big there may be some, but I've never seen anyone prove it. I think Komodos win the size contest hands down, weight, snout to vent, snout to tail. Anyway you measure them.

When I said reports, I did actually meant in captivity. Adult males easily reach 8 feet. Croc monitors only beat Komodos by TL. They couldn't compare by weight.

I've only seen photo's of komodo's in the 10 foot range, never croc monitors. Safely behind my computer screen.

Alot of poor people tend to exagerate the size of their native animals...they get bored.