Culture
The Bangkok Park Crawling With Huge Lizards
City officials have started to relocate the creatures.
It’s been like a scene out of a low-budget horror movie in Bangkok’s Lumpini Park lately: hundred of lizards, some of them up to 10 feet long, roaming around scaring the bejeezus out of people.
The reptiles are technically monitor lizards—a term that applies to a number of large lizards native to and common in Asia, Africa, and islands in the Pacific. Kevin de Queiroz, the curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, tells CityLab that the Lumpini lizards appear to be water monitors, a variety common in Bangkok.