The Land Crocodile of Komodo and the First Komodo Dragon Specimens

In the early 1900s, Dutch sailors based on Flores carried strange stories to Westerners. People around Labuan Bajo, in western Flores, and on Komodo Island spoke of an animal they called boeaja darat. In Malay, a land crocodile.

Hunters from the pearling fleets working at Komodo supplied the numbers. The animal, they said, grew to 6 or 7 metres. There was talk of a Sergeant Beker who had shot one of about 4 m. Nobody confirmed it.

The reports reached Lieutenant Jacques Karel Henri van Steyn van Hensbroek, a Dutch colonial infantry officer and civil administrator at Reo, on the north coast of Flores. Captain W. L. Einthoven introduced him to Pieter Antonie Ouwens, head of the Zoological Museum at Buitenzorg, on Java. December 1910. Their correspondence began.

The lieutenant went after the rumour. By one account he landed on Komodo with soldiers and killed one of the animals to examine it. It measured 2.20 m. He sent the skin and a photograph to Ouwens.

The local hunters knew the animal well. It lived mostly on land. It dug holes under stones and rocks and sheltered in them at night. It was active only by day, alone or in troops. It ate only meat, taking the wild pigs and birds the hunters shot and left on the ground.

It was very deaf, they said, but it saw well. Its long neck was very mobile. A hunter could make noise without alarming it, as long as it could not see him. Despite an awkward build it was quick, walking on the balls of its feet with its body held off the ground. It bit. And it defended itself with powerful blows of the tail.

Ouwens wanted more than a skin and a photograph. He sent a native collector from the museum to Komodo. Helped by the Radja Bitjara and local people, the collector came back with two adults, 2.90 m and 2.35 m long, and two very young animals of about 1 m. The young were still alive when Ouwens wrote his paper.

He described an animal dark brown above, with a very long yellow tongue, sharp compressed teeth and a tail keeled on top. In 1912 he published "On a large Varanus species from the island of Komodo" in the Bulletin du Jardin botanique de Buitenzorg. He proposed a name, should the animal prove undescribed. Varanus komodoensis.

The land crocodile was real. It was also smaller than the stories. Modern males reach about 3 m, and the largest wild specimen measured was 3.04 m. The giants of 6 or 7 metres, and Sergeant Beker's 4 m animal, were exaggerations. A parallel legend, told by Bernard Heuvelmans, has an unnamed aviator returning with tales of "fierce and monstrous dragons, at least four meters long." Nobody believed a word of it. Even the beginning is disputed. National Geographic has the lieutenant learning of the lizards from Ouwens. Ouwens's own paper says the reverse.

Protection followed. The Sultan of Bima moved to shield the animal, and by 1931 it was listed as fully protected under the Wildlife Protection Law. In 1926 W. Douglas Burden led an expedition to Komodo that filmed the animals alive. He gave them their popular name, the Komodo dragon, and his expedition is said to have inspired Merian C. Cooper's King Kong. In 1955 Heuvelmans retold the story in On the Track of Unknown Animals, the founding book of cryptozoology. A rumoured monster. Confirmed.