Project Description

Nicknamed by the hotel owner’s children, this rubber museum cast of a Monitor Lizard was mistakenly labelled as an iguana by its previous owner. These modern day reptiles live in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. They are meat eating carnivores, and possess a primitive third eye on the top of their skulls that can detect movement, light and dark. Paleontologists think that ancient ancestors of the Monitor Lizard crawled into the oceans, and became the giant mosasaurs of the Cretaceous. Sophie the Tylosaur swimming on the ceiling of Paleo Joe’s represents a mosasaur, and a distant cousin of Igmont.