NEW YORK-
They slither and slide, crawl and glide–and fascinate (or frighten) every inch of the way.
From iguanas and geckos to pythons and milk snakes, a new exhibit looks at the amazing diversity in the world of squamates–known simply to most of us as lizards and snakes. "Lizards & Snakes: Alive!" opens Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History.
The show, featuring around 60 live specimens from five different continents, hopes to educate viewers about a part of the animal kingdom that's labored under a bad reputation since biblical times. (Apple, anyone?)
"They're innately fascinating," said Darrel Frost, lead curator of the show. "These things are so unlike us, they exist in a sensory milieu that we really can't relate to … They're pretty exotic."
The first thing the show tries to make people understand is that snakes and lizards aren't separate categories; snakes are actually a subset of lizards, just minus the legs.
The show groups them in different ways, starting with iguana-type lizards that hunt during the day and use their vision to track down their prey. It proceeds up to snakes that use their tongues as sensors to "taste" the air around them and sense what's in their environment.
Along the way, different sections of the show examine how squamates move, how they sound, how they hunt. An interactive module allows viewers to pretend to be a snake on the hunt for a mouse.
The stars of the show are the animals themselves. The exhibit revolves around the numerous glass cases containing recreated habitats, providing a close-up view of squamates from around the world. Each case displays information not only on the squamate inside, but also on its relatives and its place of origin.
There's the Rhinoceros Iguana that opens the show, a lettuce-eater that seems to spend most of its time staying absolutely still.
There's also the Frilled Lizard, with a thin fold of neck skin that rises up like a collar; it served as the inspiration for one of the dinosaurs in the movie "Jurassic Park."
Viewers will also see chameleons, which can look in two directions at one since their eyes move independently of one other; a basilisk that can actually sprint fast enough to run across water; Gila Monsters, one of only two types of lizards that are very venomous; a 14-foot-long Burmese python; and even the fossil head of a giant snake that lived in Australia some 40,000 years ago.
For the more thrill-seeking, there's the chance to look at dangerous snakes like the Eastern Green Mambas and the Red Spitting Cobras. Different types of snakes have venom that acts in different ways, Frost said. Some venoms are toxins that destroy the heart and nervous system, while others act as digestive agents, he said.
"You can find these hideous photographs where people have been bit and essentially the meat just sloughs off the bone," he said. "It's not anything you ever want to have happen to you."
The museum has put together a range of programming to coincide with the show, including lectures, children's workshops and summer camp sessions. After its showing in New York, the exhibit will travel to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta and eventually to the San Diego Natural History Museum.
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Also opening in July:
— "Rembrandt and his Circle: Drawings and Prints," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, July 11 through Oct. 15: The museum celebrates the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth with this show displaying a selection of 58 drawings from the artist and his students.
— "Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings from the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer," Neue Galerie New York, July 13 through Sept. 18: These five paintings were at the center of a Nazi-era stolen art controversy, and were returned to descendants of the family that originally owned them after seven years of legal efforts. One of the paintings was purchased for the museum for a record-setting price of $135 million.
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