Komodo Dragon: A Killing Machine

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A Komodo dragon lounges near the Komodo National Park welcome center on Rinca Island. Photo: Rachel Nuwer

The Most Infamous Komodo Dragon Attacks of the Past 10 Years

by Rachel Nuwer Smithsonian.com

Mr. Safina, a local guide working at Komodo National Park, took a particular relish in describing the way a Komodo dragon’s strong jaws can snap a man’s leg in two. He’d lived on Rinca – a speck of land off Indonesia’s Flores Island, and one of the five places Komodo dragons reside – his whole life, and he was used to the various horror stories that surfaced every now and then after a tourist wandered off the trail or a kid got ambushed while playing in the bush. Standing in front of an assembly line of water buffalo, deer and wild horse skulls – dragon chow – Mr. Safina laughed while gesturing to a row of little wooden crosses stuck in the nearby mud. On each stick, a date and a foreigner’s name was scrawled in white paint. “Those are tourist graves!” Mr. Safina joked. “No really, they’re actually just baby mangrove markers that tourists bought to restore the forest. Now, are you ready to go see the dragons?”

Like so many other tourists, for me, a trip to Indonesia was not complete without a detour to see the world’s largest lizard in its natural habitat.



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