Collecting Reptiles is No easy Matter

Running, leaping, burrowing, creeping over the floor of the vast inland desert valleys of the Southwest, are the relics of a hundred million years ago. They are the aristocrats among the backboned animals, if aristocracy be judged only by antiquity of lineage. Compared to these animals, the occupants of the motorized juggernauts that flow in ceaseless streams across our country are mere parvenus. These relics of a bygone age are the reptiles. They range from the tiny gecko, a green-gold and black lizard with a squeaky voice and heavy-lidded, jeweled eyes, to the dust-colored giants of the desert reptile world, the risky and sullen-looking diamond- back rattler, voiceless save for its buzzing rattle and deaf to even its own dubious music. Before the war, and now once more, hurrying cars bore thousands of passengers to the desert every spring and winter weekend. Among these was always a small minority of vehicles carrying odd assortments of human beings, devotees of reptile study.

This piquant group included the vice-president of a large and successful corporation, the well-known curator of a zoo, college professors, students, high school teachers and their pupils. In expanding to these, there were the non-scientific seekers for thrills, the merely inquisitive, and professional reptile collector! Eking out a precarious livelihood, and men with the big-game-hunter complicated seeking danger in this game-less modern world by pursuit of the puny but venomous rattlers. Among the scientists the shoptalk is cryptic. Their discussions are interlarded with scientific names, references to Lors and Dors (Live on Road and Dead on Road, i.e., traffic survivors and traffic fatalities), weather forecasts, radiation and convection, humidity, wind velocities and appropriate deviation of error.

Most of these experts are primarily concerned, in one way or another, with the biological secrets still locked i» the gradually pulsating, 6caly breasts of these uncommunicative beasts. Millions of years have elapsed since the "age of reptiles," yet the presence of these living relics poses many questions of survival based on habits, pliysiology, climate, and topography. These and other questions must be answered, and thus conduce to the knowledge of the whence and whither of other forms of life; of the life histories of all animals. The collared lizards flourish on the rocky, boulder-strewn slopes of the mountains in the desert country, relics of the age of reptiles. Collecting reptiles is no straightforward matter.

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