One Of My Favorite

A couple days ago, I was looking in an animal book. I noticed lots of fantastic things as I skimmed through the book to find the lizard section. The first page about lizards was the bearded dragon.

Bearded dragons are lizards that live in the deserts, savannas, scrublands, and subtropical forests of Australia. 

They are caught and kept as pets around the world. They obtain their name from the spikelike ridges on their necks. They are known by reptile hobbyists as “beardies.”

The common name of this lizard is the bearded dragon. Its scientific name is Pogona. There are eight species of bearded dragon, plus a range of different colors. Its average lifetime in the wild is up to 10 years, but in captivity the bearded dragon can live 7 to 15 years. Bearded dragons can grow to be as big as 16-24 inches in length.

The desert where bearded dragons come from is a place where it hardly rains. Animals adapt to the dry environment with remarkable ways of obtaining and storing water. For the Pogona genus, one of those unique methods is by capturing water on its own body throughout rare bouts of rain. The lizards have been studied standing on their hind legs with their heads sloping downward, lapping up the water with its great tongue as it flows down their faces.

Bearded dragon’s shade-shifting behaviors are a bit like those of the chameleon. The chameleon's changing colors are more recognizable than the bearded dragon’s. But also, the bearded dragon can separate parts of the body it wants to change color.

In hotter times, the lizard will air lighter colors to reflect the rays of sun. In cooler weather, it will air darker colors to help it absorb the heat and keep its body temperature of 95 degrees.

The bearded dragon’s high speed is 9 mph. The lizard rarely runs this quick though because it normally has a stationary life. When time does come for quickness, the bearded dragon raises up on its rear legs and runs like a person. It transfers more weight in the back of the body. Being upright benefits the dragon for increased velocity.

The bearded dragon is one of my favorite lizards. It has lots of amazing and fascinating ways and habits to survive in the wild. I am glad that God created the bearded dragon. “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beast of the earth after their kind; and it was so.”

~Isaac