It’s not a scorpion at all! It’s called a Vinegaroon! it has 2 claws, like scorpion but where a scorpion has a stinger, the vinegaroon has a squirt gun! And the vinegaroon also has two legs that it uses to taste under logs for insects and spiders, which it eats. Look to the right of this photo, in the adjacent column, and see Bill handling a vinegaroon on a NBC TV’s pre-school program The Sunnyside Up Show ! Have a peek!

Of the weird, perhaps the weirdest, is the Mata Mata Turtle, from South America. This turtle resembles most a log, having fallen into a small pond in the tropical rainforest. It is a small fish specialist, eating nothing else.

The Green Basilisk looks like an ordinary lizard, and so it would be, if it didn’t an extraordinary ability to rise up on it’s hind legs and run on the surface of water!

Perhaps the only snake that can claim the title of “cute,” the Western Hognose is a an adorable little snake with a shovel on it’s face. That shovel is used to look for toads under ground, but it can also play dead, and when threatened in the wild, make a stink that can put a skunk on notice!

Resembling more of a “road pizza” toad than anything actually alive, the Surinam Toad spends its life in the water. Nearly blind and almost totally unable to walk they live in murky water feeling around for small animals which are flipped into it’s mouth with it’s 3 fingered alien-like hands.

Pretending to be dead can be a very useful skill if your normal predators like fresh food! The Feigning Death Beetle does just that when attacked by tarantulas. the big spiders hit like a the beetle like freight train and the beetles fall over, looking dead. The tarantulas much prefer live food, so they may ignore the beetle’s apparent corpse.

This is actually a Burmese Python! But it’s a Blue-Eyed Ivory Burmese Python! A rare breed of the snake that looks like a blue eyed ghost of it’s relatives!

Looking like the were chipped of candy, the Caramel Burmese Pythons are one of the rarest of the Burmese Python breeds. These two were born twins! These guys were born here, produced by two of our own pythons!