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While snakes are passive and rather expressionless beasts, lizards can display considerable intelligence and character. One such reptile we had was a mastigure, which I christened Dandy, owing to his great partiality for dandelion flowers. One must, I think, face the fact that mastigures are not the most attractive of lizards, and Dandy was a particularly unattractive member of his species. Nevertheless, his eager personality made him a likeable creature.

He had a blunt, rounded head; a fat, flattened body; and a heavy tail covered with short, sharp spikes. His neck was rather long and thin, and this made him look as though he had been put together out of bits of two totally unrelated species. His colour could be described only as a rich, dirty brown.

Dandy's liking for dandelion flowers amounted to an obsession. He had only to see you approaching the reptile house with something yellow in your hands, and he would immediately rush to the front of his cage and scrabble wildly against the glass. If it was a dandelion you were carrying, you had only to slide back the glass front of his cage and he would gallop out onto your arm, panting with emotion; then, closing his eyes, he would stretch out his long neck and, like a child waiting to have a chocolate popped into its mouth, would open his jaws. If you pushed the flower into his mouth he would munch away in ecstasy, the petals dangling outside his mouth and making him look as though he had a bright yellow military mustache.

- From The Cold-Blooded Cohort by Gerald Durrell

- Image - Egyptian Mastigure by Eitan F. via Wikipedia