Why iguanas are freakin’ awesome

• When they swim they can’t be bothered to use their legs. They just let their limbs dangle casually as they propel themselves aalong with their tail.

• Got your tail trapped in the car door? No problem if you’re an iguana – they can just casually shed it and carry on with their day no problemo.

• In central and South America they’re called “chicken of the tree”. This is because they live in trees and go well in stir fries.

• They have 3 eyes, man. Like cyclops, tripled. The third eye is a transparent scale on the top of their head. They use them to make sure there’s no dragons circling above their head waiting to devour them.

• Even though they’re pretty fast and swift and speedy, they like chillin’ man. Sittin’ on a log casually chewing on a plum, lazily creeping a few inches or two ever so often. Listenin’ to Bob Marley. With a steely glint in the eye as if to say “I’m gonna CUT you, punk”.

• Look at their teeth:

• In wintry Florida, iguanas get really cold and go into a comatose state. They lose their grip on tree branches and go splatt onto the tarmac below, giving them the nickname “kamikaze iguanas“. When it gets warm again they revive and waddle off.
• “I knew of a gentleman who was collecting them off the street and throwing them in the back of his station wagon, and all of a sudden these things are coming alive, crawling on his back and almost causing a wreck.”

• They’re manly enough to eat cacti.

• If you throw one off the roof of your house, it’ll be fine. They can fall from 15 metres and survive. Whether this is dependent on having random foliage around to grab on to on the way down I am not certain.

• Their collective noun is “a mess of iguanas”.

• Male iguanas have two penises. So if one gets stuck in the car door along with the tail, all’s fine.

• They like living in trees so much that they’ll only come down to have sex (or to lay eggs, or move to a more exciting tree).

• Evidently they like extreme dieting. If all humans averaged 2m tall and weighed 5kg…we’d be so thin that we wouldn’t even exist.

• Just look at it. It’s cool and it knows it.

Yeah, I know, this article kinda deviates from the norm of this blog. But I figure it’s vaguely related to science, and it’s nice to have a bit of excessive frivolity once in a while (if my posts aren’t frivolous enough already).