Animals: Two-Headed Turtle

Rare and monstrous, a lively two-headed turtle last week was givingFlorida herpetologists and animal behaviorists instructive entertainment. Besides having two heads, the creature has two pair of front feet, two fore openings in its carapace.Otherwise its parts are normal.

Life is a perpetual dilemma for the turtle. The heads apparently do not realize, as do joined human twins, that they have a common destiny. The two pair of front feet always attempt to crawl in divergent directions.

Both heads have sullen, stubborn ultra-turtlish expressions. The right head is bolder than the left. First to emerge from the sheltering shell after a fright is the right head. That head usually makes the first snatch at food. Food always causes a contention between the heads. One tries to pull food from the other. They tug until the fly, cricket, or scrap of meat tears apart.

In water, however, the two heads restrain their selfishness. While one or the other feeds under water, the other head keeps above water and does the breathing.

Australia’s “Prenty”

Out of Australia came a story of two large creatures. One was an old mining prospector called ”Big Jim,” 6 ft. 8 in., 250 Ib. “Fossicking” for opals on the Stuart Range of Central Australia,* he heard a peculiar sound. Looking up he beheld an enormous reptilian beast close ahead of him. Big Jim snatched up some rocks, slung them at the creature. It lashed its tail and charged, uttering a roar which sounded to Big Jim like the mingled bark of a dog and the growl of a lion.

Big Jim ran away, came next day upon Fred Blakeley of Sydney who also was “fossicking” in the district. Mr. Blakeley, brother of Arthur Blakeley. Australian Minister of Home Affairs, at once went to the scene of Big Jim’s big scare, found the reptile’s traces. Evidently it was a monster lizard. From front claw to hind claw it measured 6 ft. 3 in., which indicated a total length of about 15 ft.

Australians have heard stories before of huge lizards in their continent’s desolate interior. They have given the species, of which no specimen is known to have been killed, the name “prenty.” Queensland has ocean-going crocodiles, second cousins of lizards, 33 ft. long, largest on earth. It has huge monitor lizards which can run, swim, climb facilely. The largest monitor lizards known are savage “dragons”on the East Indian islands Komodo, Rintja and Flores. They attain loft. lengths. There is good reason to assume that the scary “prenty” is an Australian monitor.

The world may soon have verification of that supposition. Now in Australia to investigate its animals and insects is Harvard’s Professor William Morton Wheeler with a party of U. S. naturalists.

*Opals are iridescent bits of silica which sometimes permeate fossil débris.