Everything we believed about the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex is probably untrue, says a leading paleontologist at world-famous Yale University.

G. Evelyn Hutchinson, assistant curator of the Peabody Museum in New Haven, CT, says our usual picture of of T-Rex—a mad, rampaging carnivore with a million long, sharp teeth, and funny little Thalidomide hands—actually bears no resemblance at all to the great dinosaur who lived a million years ago and has long been the favorite of the younger set.

G. Evelyn Hutchinson

“No resemblance?” Professor Hutchinson corrects himself. “Well the funny little Thalidomide arms, that’s probably right. And he had some long, sharp teeth, though probably not a million of them. And a carnivore, yeah, I think he was probably a carnivore. You know, the way a lot of birds are carnivores. That means they eat meat.”

But T-Rex ate other things as well. “Yes! Avocados, very fond of avocados,” Prof. Hutchinson assures us. “And eel, he liked eel. Who doesn’t? We have reason to believe he liked smoked eel. We found eel bones by an ancient campfire that may have been kept by a tribe of T-Rexes. And wild rice. We have found evidence of wild-rice grinding in his back teeth, and remnants of rice in his fossilized spoor. If he’d stuck around a little longer, T-Rex could have invented sushi!”

Tyrannosaurus Rex could have invented sushi.

Most surprisingly, Tyrannosaurus Rex, whose name actually means Thunder Lizard, was a gentle creature and attentive parent to his offspring. Mommy T-Rex typically laid between three and six eggs in a clutch. A clutch is a kind of nest-like basket which the T-Rex parents built when they settled down to have a family.

The baby T-Rex hatchling was not as gentle as it appears.

Only Mommy could lay the eggs, but Daddy and Mommy took turns sitting on them. Usually only one or two hatched, because the others got smashed from all that sitting! But then the one or two babies grew up quickly, as they had lots to eat. Mommy and Daddy T-Rex took turns gathering nuts and animals for the children’s dinner.

While one of them hunted and gathered food, the other parent protected the offspring from the many predators that thrived in the prehistoric world, and loved to sink their teeth into juicy fat baby T-Rexes!

“They mated for life, you know,” Prof. Hutchinson reports. “Like pigeons.”

Ukraine dictator Volly Zelenskyy has accused the former USSR of releasing reptile bioweapons upon his breakaway province. He says this is why he has lost half his territory in recent weeks.

Giant mutant albino two-headed snakes are just a few of the genetically engineered monsters attacking the breakaway province.

Among the invading reptiles released by Moscow in recent weeks, Zelenskyy has identified skinks, basilisks, earless monitors, gila monsters, green iguanas, and at least one tortoise.

Bred for giantism in highly secret biolabs beyond the Urals, the reptiles were first spotted in Chechnya during one of the many nuclear disasters of the 1990s.

Since then, hundreds of further varieties have been bred throughout the former Soviet Union, Zelenskyy claims.

In March Zelenskyy ordered the release of the Kiev Zoo’s giant mongoose in order to battle the scaly invaders, but the animal escaped to the Pripet Marshes in the northwest and has not been seen since.

Ukraine has lost more than half its territory to the thundering creatures.

Biologists from the Kursk Oblast Research Institute (Курський обласний науково-дослідний інститут) have speculated that some of the giant reptiles are live-bearing hermaphrodites, able to reproduce spontaneously without laying or incubating eggs.

This could account for the sudden rise in their numbers, the scientists say.

A former Borscht Belt comic, known for his “blue” humor, Zelenskyy has suggested that he may resort to tactical nuclear weapons to defeat the invading monsters.

Zelenskyy

During a recent “ice-cream summit” at NATO headquarters, American President Joe Biden promised to ask his people in Congress to ram through another $40 billion dollars’ worth of aid, including reptile-targeting warheads.

Biden has expressed the hope that Moscow leader Vladimir Putin will die of polonium-induced cancer before nuclear war is necessary.

At least one giant tortoise, estimated at over 12 yards long (1097 cm), threatened the outskirts of Kiev (Keev) in March 2022.

Four Hindustani males are under arrest in India for the wanton rape and abuse of a Bengal monitor lizard in a tiger preserve. They were discovered by a forest guard and later found to have videos of the animal abuse on their smartphones.

Torture and slaughter of rare lizards is everyday sport in Hindustan!

Not that it makes any difference, but their names are Sandeep Tukram, Pawar Mangesh, Janardhan Kamtekar and Akshay Sunil.

According to the Indian Penal Code, anyone who voluntarily commits intercourse with an animal “shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”

The “intercourse” presumably took place with the animal’s cloaca, a word which comes from the Latin word for “sewer.”

Bengal monitor lizards can grow up to five and a half feet long and weigh almost 16 pounds. They are currently categorized as reserve species under the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972.

In addition to the video of the monitor being sexually abused, officials found photos of various animals such as porcupines and deer on the smartphones. It is not known whether sex acts were involved.

Animal abuse is rife in South Asia, where human life is cheap and there is little respect or love for God’s creatures.

Report via Yahoo! News.

“Here he is—your Komodo Dra-a-gon!” The Komodo Dragon is another kind of monitor lizard.

A marathon interview/colloquy with Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and a Ms. Interlocutor named Carole Mallory appeared in Esquire in May 1991. The whole thing may be found (reprinted in 2012) here, and it is intriguing for many reasons.

Today we’ll deal with one or two. The interview answers the old question, What commonality can we find between Norman Mailer and iguanas? Surprisingly enough, there is none. One would expect this bibulous controversialist to live in a house filled with fornicating lizards, much as the 1940s Ernest Hemingway in Cuba surrounded himself with dozens of rutting, un-spayed and -neutered semi-feral cats who had the run of the Finca. But no, Mailer never seems to have had pets at all. No doubt of one of his six (seven?—check) wives and eight (ten?) children had the usual menageries, but Norman was evidently not an animal person, certainly not one to surround himself with reptiles.

I don’t even recall anyone so much as calling Norman Mailer “reptilian.”

However, way down deep in the interview they get to talking about Tennessee Williams, and Gore uncorks his well-told tale about how Time magazine damned every play or film script the Bird ever wrote, from The Glass Menagerie onward, until about 1963 when he gave us The Night of the Iguana. Which Time—mirabile dictu!—praised to the skies.

The reason for all this, says Gore, is that Tennessee was a “fag,” and while Harry Luce was alive and active (he died in 1967, was retired by 1963) no known homosexual was going to get a good review in the Time-Life stable. But now it was 1963, and we know what Philip Larkin said about that.

The whole thing amused Gore greatly, so much so that he mischievously excerpted every trashy, innuendo-filled notice Time ever ran on Tennessee Williams, 1945-1962. Gore published this, anonymously, in Esquire, on a single page. The capper at the end was the obsequious, fawning review of Iguana—ironically a lurid, confused drama, never considered to be front-rank Tennessee Williams. But nevertheless a resounding hit with Bette Davis, soon to be a Major Motion Picture with Ava Gardner and Richard Burton.

Esquire illustrated this cut-and-paste job with a mockup TIME (or rather T*M*) cover on the facing page. Here we had Tennessee-and-typewriter slowly emerging from a fetid swamp. The illustration was by Al Jaffee, who the following year would begin a 15-year stint of producing back-cover comic “fold-ins” over at Mad magazine. Unfortunately there are no iguanas in the Jaffee painting:

It was a favorite subject of Gore’s because he had had almost the same problem with the New York Times. In his early 20s he had written a bony, naturalistic novel about queer relationships and queer High Society (suspiciously well-informed; more than a hint of roman à clef in parts). The NYT wouldn’t take advertising for it, or publish a review of a Vidal novel till the 1960s . . . by which epoch Gore had become quite rich on movie scripts and some Broadway hits of his own; fie on you, Times!

Remember that recipe for potted hare which began, “First catch your hare”?

Who wouldn’t be beguiled by the lovely instructions in a recipe that begin:

• Kill the iguana by cutting off its head!

• Open the belly lengthwise and remove all the entrails!

And this is just one iguana stew recipe popular in the Caribbean, where the simple, happy folk have plenty of time to experiment with the local gamemeat. This recipe from Uncommon Caribbean calls for one iguana, but, alas, the size is not specified. (At least two feet long, we should think.)

If you don’t have wild iguanas locally, you can order frozen iguana meat from one of the online exotic meat dealers.

Or, alternatively, you could substitute a large chicken or guinea fowl!

If you’d like a more exacting recipe more suitable to North American tastes, perhaps you should try this one, which involves whiskey and cocoanut milk!