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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick.

And we're back today with the second part in our series on the Gila Monster and its close relatives, the beaded lizards.

In part one of this series, we talked about the basic biology and distinguishing characteristics of these lizards.

They're armored skin,

their nest raiding behavior, and their awesome and terrible venom, which they deliver by chewing into the flesh of those that dare to threaten them. If you haven't heard part one,

we would recommend you go back and listen to that one before you listen to today's episode.

But today we're back to discuss more about the heloderma lizards, as they're called,

including traditional beliefs, historical misconceptions, and some about their evolutionary history.

Now, a couple of texts that we highlighted in the last episode as being two of our major sources.

One of them is Encyclopedia of Reptiles and Amphibian Second Edition by Cogger and Zwifle.

That came out in 1998.

I think the version I had was 2005 reprint.

And then more essentially to what we're talking about here today,

biology of Gila monsters and beaded lizards by Daniel D. Beck from the University of California Press.

That's a good book. And I looked up Daniel Debeck last time. He's a biology professor affiliated with Central Washington University, I believe, retired now.

Yeah, yeah. And certainly our knowledge of Gila

monsters continues to expand and grow. And so in this episode and the next episode, in the last

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