How the Komodo dragon got its name

Dragons. Fire-breathing and flying, dragons are completely fictional creatures. Or are they? Although it lacks the fairy-tale beast’s fantastical abilities, the Komodo dragon is very real. Komodo dragons are the largest living lizard species in the world. The biggest recorded specimen weighed 366 pounds and was 10.3 feet long. Paradoxically, their geographic range is the smallest of any large predator, limited to five of the Lesser Sunda Islands: four in Indonesia’s Komodo National Park, plus the island of Flores. Fossil remains suggest they’ve lived there for nearly a million years. Locals refer to the lizards by various names, such as ora, buaya darat, or biawak raksasa Their scientific name is Varanus komodoensis, meaning “monitor lizard of Komodo.” Komodo dragons were given this scientific name when European explorers encountered them in 1910, after Dutch colonizer Lieutenant. van Steyn van Hensbroek Lieutenant heard rumors of a large “land crocodile” in the Lesser Sunda Islands. He led an expedition to Komodo, capturing, killing, and sending a photograph and the skin of the first documented Komodo dragon to museum director Peter A. Ouwens. Ouwens used these materials to publish a paper announcing Hensbroek’s encounter with “a Varanus species of unusual size” to the world. At the end of the paper, he suggested it be named V. komodoensis. So why do we know them as Komodo dragons? In September 1926 two live specimens were brought to the Bronx Zoo after the first expedition seeking to retrieve one alive. The leader of this expedition was American naturalist W. Douglas Burden. With their massive size and prehistoric presence—although obviously scaled down—Burden thought the lizards looked like actual dragons. The term Komodo dragon was born from his 1927 book, Dragon Lizards of Komodo. He also published popular articles about the Komodo dragon in prominent journals at the time, forever branding them as dragons rather than lizards.
They may not fly or breathe fire, but Komodo dragons have captivated the public ever since.