reptiles

"Un piccolo di caimano nato prematuro pesa tre chili e otto."

"Avendo tempo, il caimano resisterebbe anche di più sott’acqua."

"Durante la stagione delle piogge il caimano si stufa."

"È rarissimo vedere un caimano che spia i compagni mentre fanno il bagno."

"In the middle of the lake you don't make fun of the caiman."

"La femmina del caimano, che per brevità chiameremo caimana, se provocata, suda."

"Anche se una piroga resta a lungo nel fiume non diventerà mai un coccodrillo."

"Il coccodrillo! Anche lui si è inventato tutto! Sicuro! Il coccodrillo... Chi mai crederebbe a un coccodrillo? Uno che sta tutto il giorno nudo sulla spiaggia.. con la bocca aperta.."

"By the Cretaceous crocodilians of essentially modern form were the theropods main competitors. Yet crocodilians appear to be less abundant in most Mesozoic deposits than they are later in the mammal-dominated Cenozoic. Not only that, but they tended to be small-bodied: few specimens were as big as American alligators or Nile crocodiles. It is possible that theropods were eating the crocs. Even today, big cats once in a while kill a fairly large crocodilian. A tyrannosaur could have swallowed one whole, and gone into the water after them. Constant attacks could have suppressed croc populations, and favored the smaller, harder to catch species."

"Yuk! I don't like crocodiles. I tried them once... they were stringy."

"Poi [Dio] creò il coccodrillo, e subito dopo la maglietta. Così mise il coccodrillo sulla maglietta, e fu un grande successo."

"The priests' crocodiles⁠ not only recognize the voice of those who summon them and allow themselves to be handled, but open their mouths to let their teeth be cleaned by hand and wiped with towels. Recently our excellent Philinus came back from a trip to Egypt and told us that he had seen in Antaeopolis an old woman sleeping on a low bed beside a crocodile, which was stretched out beside her in a perfectly decorous way. They have long been telling the tale that when King Ptolemy⁠ summoned the sacred crocodile and it would not heed him or obey in spite of his entreaties and requests, it seemed to the priests an omen of his death, which came about not long after; Cwhence it appears that the race of water creatures is not wholly unendowed with your precious gift of divination.⁠"

"Wilt thou draw out the crocodile with a hook and with a cord wilt thou press down his tongue? 2 Wilt thou put a rope in his nose? and wilt thou hollow out his jaw with a thorn? Will he multiply supplications to thee? will he speak soft things to thee?"

"The crocodile eats the man and then mourns him."

"Zoos mislead their visitors by the way the species are housed. Birds are in the Bird House, of course, and crocodiles are always segregated to the Reptile House with the other naked-skinned, scale-covered brutes. So the average visitor leaves the zoo firmly persuaded that crocodilians are reptiles while birds are an entirely different group defined by "unreptilian" characteristics - feathers and flight. But a turkey's body and a croc's body laid out on a lab bench would present startling evidence of how wrong the zoos are once the two stomachs were cut into. The anatomy of their gizzards is strong evidence that crocodilians and birds are closely related and should be housed together in zoological classification, if not in zoo buildings."

"In America lo sai che i coccodrilli vengon fuori dalla doccia?"

"Good well-dress'd turtle beats them hollow,— It almost makes me wish, I vow, To have two stomachs, like a cow!" And lo! as with the cud, an inward thrill Upheaved his waistcoat and disturb'd his frill, His mouth was oozing, and he work'd his jaw— "I almost think that I could eat one raw."

"Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help."

"The turtle trapped 'twixt plated decks Doth practically conceal its sex I think it clever of the turtle In such a fix to be so fertile."

"Slugs have ridden their contempt for defensive armour as much to death as the turtles their pursuit of it. They have hardly more than skin enough to hold themselves together; they court death every time they cross the road. Yet death comes not to them more than to the turtle, whose defences are so great that there is little left inside to be defended. Moreover, the slugs fare best in the long run, for turtles are dying out, while slugs are not, and there must be millions of slugs all over the world over for every single turtle."

"The turtle obviously had no sense of proportion; it differed so widely from myself that I could not comprehend it; and as this word occurred to me, it occurred also that until my body comprehended its body in a physical material sense, neither would my mind be able to comprehend its mind with any thoroughness. For unity of mind can only be consummated by unity of body; everything, therefore, must be in some respects both knave and fool to all that which has not eaten it, or by which it has not been eaten. As long as the turtle was in the window and I in the street outside, there was no chance of our comprehending one another. Nevertheless, I knew that I could get it to agree with me if I could so effectually buttonhole and fasten on to it as to eat it. Most men have an easy method with turtle soup, and I had no misgiving but that if I could bring my first premise to bear I should prove the better reasoner. My difficulty lay in this initial process, for I had not with me the argument that would alone compel Mr. Sweeting to think that I ought to be allowed to convert the turtles — I mean I had no money in my pocket. No missionary enterprise can be carried on without any money at all, but even so small a sum as half a crown would, I suppose, have enabled me to bring the turtle partly round, and with many half-crowns I could in time no doubt convert the lot, for the turtle needs must go where the money drives. If, as is alleged, the world stands on a turtle, the turtle stands on money. No money no turtle. As for money, that stands on opinion, credit, trust, faith — things that, though highly material in connection with money, are still of immaterial essence."

"Optimist" is a word which here refers to a person...who thinks pleasant thoughts about nearly everything. For instance, if an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say, in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well, this isn't too bad. I don't have my arm anymore, but at least nobody will ever ask me if I am right-handed or left-handed", but most of us would say something more along the lines of "Aaaaah! My arm! My arm!"

"Ida: Personally, Veda's convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young."

"Each predator directly exerts a negative effect upon its prey, but predators may also provide indirect benefits to their prey. In ecosystems, such benefits are effected via indirect trophic pathways that can provide a more than compensating positive influence. The ecosystem of the Big Cypress National Preserve (southwest Florida) appears to contain an unusually high number of such predators—most notably, the American alligator, Alligator mississippiensis... the predation by alligators on snakes and turtles accounts for most of the trophic benefits bestowed. The actions of alligators in modifying their physical environment contributes to the maintenance of biotic diversity. It appears that the trophic influence of this species adds further evidence to the important role it plays in the functional ecology of the cypress wetland."

"Guru Pitka: Rajneesh, I'd like an alligator soup, and make it snappy. Because alligators are snappy, and at the same time, I want it prompt."

"We fired our cannon 'til the barrel melted down, So we grabbed an alligator an' we fought another round. We filled his head with cannon balls an' powdered his behind, An' when they touched the powder off, the 'gator lost his mind."

"A note to our enemies. You think you know America, but you only see the tiny, inept, incompetent, cowering political tip of a very big, very capable iceberg. ... You don't know the swamp folks in Cajun country that can wrestle a full-grown alligator out of the water."

"ALLIGATOR, n. The crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World. Herodotus says the Indus is, with one exception, the only river that produces crocodiles, but they appear to have gone West and grown up with the other rivers. From the notches on his back the alligator is called a sawrian."

"In their evolution, we see that the earliest pterosaurs were small, and yet still unecessarily heavy and clumsy, both in the air and on the ground, but 160 million years of refinement has honed their abilities to the limit of incidental engineering. Despite their enormity, they were unbelievably lightweight; even the biggest ones were estimated at less than 500 lbs. They had hollow pneumatic bones of large diameter but only millimeters thick, making a strut-supported tubular frame that's surprisingly strong and highly resistant to the stresses of aeronautics. They also had extraordinarily powerful wing muscles, and this made them capable of vaulting airborne in a single bolt. Once in the air, muscle strands and tendons in the membrane of the wing itself worked with a network of pycnofibres to give them all the data they needed for subtle adjustments to the shape of the wing. The portions of the brain which were dedicated to flight, balance and visual gaze stabilization in birds are all larger and more adapted in pterosaurs. In fact, scientists are now convinced that these animals had such a mastery of flight, that the larger ones could even cross oceans, going 80 mph at 15,000 feet for thousands of miles on a single launch."

"Most people think of pterosaurs as "flying dinosaurs". When I was a boy, I remember the other kids called them "dinosaur-birds", but they were neither dinosaurs or birds. The first problem is that most people don't know any more about the fossil record than what they've seen in a few plastic pieces in a prehistoric playset. Not only do they typically think that all these things are dinosaurs, they might even think that these are all the fossil forms that are known. They have no idea how rich the fossil record is."

"Let's just ruin all the movies about pterosaurs: they could soar like airplanes, but they couldn't hover like hummingbirds. They couldn't carry things in their feet either, they couldn't perch on tree branches like birds, they didn't look like "bird-monsters", and they didn't look like "lizard-bats". They didn't have four-fingered wings like bats; their wings were based on an elongated pinky finger. The only thing bat-like about them was the way they walked; on all fours. So what are the possibilities for fluffy pterosaurs? We know they were a very diverse and almost certainly colorful group. They looked like a wide range of things, from fluttering bats to darting falcons. Some had powerful shell-crushing jaws and some had ridiculous crests, and some were quite huge. For decades, we were told that Pteranodon was the biggest animal that ever flew, then they discovered Ornithocheirus, then Quetzalcoatlus, then Hatzegopteryx (an apex predator)... These were capable killers of even human-sized prey, with a skull larger than that of even the biggest carnosaurs."

"Under her old pink gateways, where Time a moment turns, Where hang the orange lanterns and the red hibiscus burns, Live the harmless merry lizards, quicksilver in the sun, Or still as any image with their shadow on a stone."

"On sunny slab of the ruin the furtive and fugitive lizard,"

"The lizard with his shadow on the stone Sleeps like a shadow,"

"Meagre as lizards;"

"Ανίκα δὴ καὶ σαῦρος ἐφ’ αἱμασιᾶισι καθεύδει."

"And many an emerald lizard with quick ears Asleep in rocky dales;"

"Did giant Lizards come and crouch before you on the reedy banks?"

"Just as a house lizard runs about on the surface of a pitcher lying in open space, so do the human beings move about comfortably all around the Earth."

"Nunc varia in gelida sede lacerta latet:"

"Are you happy if you aren’t conscious of being happy? What is consciousness? Is consciousness the great boon we consider it? Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher? Better off in what way and for what? There have been lizards for longer than there have been philosophers. Lizards do not bathe, do not bury their dead, and do not perform scientific experiments. There have been many more lizards than philosophers. Are lizards, then, a more successful species than philosophers? Does God love lizards better than he loves philosophers?"

"Dinosaurs are not lizards, and vice versa. Lizards are scaley reptiles of an ancient bloodline. The oldest lizards antedate the earliest dinosaurs by a full thirty million years. A few large lizards, such as the man-eating Komodo dragon, have been called "relicts of the dinosaur age", but this phrase is historically incorrect. No lizard ever evolved the birdlike characteristics peculiar to each and every dinosaur. A big lizard never resembled a small dinosaur except for a few inconsequential details of the teeth. Lizards never walk with the erect, long-striding gait that distinguishes the dinosaurlike ground birds today or the birdlike dinosaurs of the Mesozoic."

"Lizards have been the subject of speculation and superstition among our ancestors for thousands of years, especially in those areas of the world where they are most numerous. People's curiosity about the animals with which they share the earth is one of the few characteristics which sets the human being apart from other species; which are, by and large, only interested in the animals they can eat, be eaten by, or mate with. Although some of the larger lizards may play a part in the nutrition of certain groups of humans, and a very small number may cause people pain or discomfort, they normally live in peaceful coexistence with us, except when we destroy the habitat in which they live."

"And the green lizard, and the golden snake, Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake."

"Snakes drink by suction, not by lapping."

"All snakes drink and die when deprived of water."

"On her way to work one morning Down the path along side the lake A tender hearted woman saw a poor half frozen snake... "Take me in tender woman Take me in, for heaven's sake Take me in, tender woman," sighed the snakeShe clutched him to her bosom, "You're so beautiful," she cried "But if I hadn't brought you in by now you might have died" She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed and held him tight Instead of saying thanks, the snake gave her a vicious bite..."I saved you," cried the woman "And you've bitten me, but why? You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die" "Oh shut up, silly woman," said the reptile with a grin "You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in""

"The numerous snakes and other animals which inhabit arid mountains, or plains destitute of water, can only quench their thirst with rain or dew. Snakes require but little water as long as they live in the open air. It is an established rule that no water is found in the maw, stomach, or entrails of snakes killed in the open air. Even when destroyed by or in piece of water. Snakes are never seen to go to drink in any part of the world."

"Watch out for two-legged snakes."

"Today, two serpent motifs are commonly used to symbolize the practice and profession of medicine. Internationally, the most popular symbol of medicine is the single serpententwined staff of Asklepios (Latin, Aesculapius), the ancient Greco-Roman god of medicine."