Ed Yong has an excellent review of new research which casts substantial doubt on the trivia chestnut that Komodo dragons kill their prey with their extremely pathogen rich saliva. The more prosaic answer seems to be that they utilize poison, not particularly surprising or trivia worthy for a reptile. But the truth is not always sexy.
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For the longest time, people believed that the world's largest lizard, the Komodo dragon, killed its prey with a dirty mouth. Strands of rotting flesh trapped in its teeth harbour thriving colonies of bacteria and when the dragon bites an animal, these microbes flood into the wound and eventually…
Definitely breaking new ground around here. A recent paper in PLoS ONE examines the hypotheses surrounding the ecology and evolution of Komodo Dragon saliva. For those of you whose Komodo Dragonology is a little bit rusty, the saliva of Komodo Dragons can lead to infections that weaken or even…
[From the archives; originally posted November 22, 2005]
Carl Zimmer has a post today about the work of Dr. Bryan Grieg Fry on the evolution of snake venom. If that name sounds familiar to those of you who aren't reptile specialists, you may have run across Dr. Fry's homepage, or you may have…
It's a dinosaur tooth, and clearly one that belonged to a predator - sharp and backwards-pointing. But this particularly tooth, belonging to a small raptor called Sinornithosaurus, has a special feature that's courting a lot controversy. It has a thin groove running down its length, from the root…
It's unclear to me whether this substance should be called a "poison" as you have called it, or a "venom". Usually poison refers to a toxin taken through eating or drinking, whereas venom is associated with a bite. But then again, venom is usually injected, and here it seems the toxin is kind of just introduced into a tear-wound via contact with the mouth.
So it's a bit of both?
"The more prosaic answer seems to be that they utilize poison, not particularly surprising or trivia worthy for a reptile."
Pretty large for a venomous reptile, though. That's always trivia-worthy. (heaviest, but not the longest)