Komodo (island) and Botanical Gardens in Bogor, Java. The records that Ouwens made are the first reliable documentation of details about what is now called the Komodo dragon (or Komodo monitor). Ouwens was keen to obtain additional samples. He recruited hunters who killed two dragons measuring 3.1 metres and 3.35 metres as well as capturing two pups, each measuring less than one metre. Ouwens carried out studies on the samples and concluded that the Komodo dragon was not a flame-thrower but was a type of monitor lizard. Research results were published in 1912. Ouwens named the giant lizard "Varanus komodoensis". Realizing the
Lizard Island saw here were Lizards, and these seem'd to be pretty Plenty, which occasioned my naming the Island Lizard Island." Cook climbed the peak on Lizard Island to chart a course out to sea through the maze of reefs which confronted him and the island's summit has since been called ‘Cook's Look’. By the 1860s the island was being used by sea cucumber fishermen who found that the waters contained substantial quantities of the creature which was a popular delicacy in Asia. In 1879, Captain Robert Watson with his wife Mary Watson, two servants and baby son, modified an abandoned cottage