Pregnant Woman Saves Pets from Burning Building

This week in Independence, KY, an off-duty animal control officer rushed into a burning apartment complex to rescue over thirteen pets - two dogs, six cats, a snake, a bearded dragon lizard, a rabbit, a lovebird, and a tank of fish.

Amy Leslie, who is in her second trimester of pregnancy, is shrugging off those who call her a hero, but I do indeed hope she receives some sort of award or prize or special recognition. (Not since Pee-wee's Big Adventure have I known such bravery and love of animals.)

Lizards for Liquor

From News of the Weird:

In Morehead, Ky., in December, two men, ages 44 and 18, were charged with theft for allegedly swiping an 18-inch-long bearded dragon lizard from the Eagles Landing Pet Hospital and trying, in two beverage stores, to exchange it for liquor.

The full story, found on WHAS-TV, gets even kookier: they also took it a gun shop and tried unsuccessfully to pawn it.

Stupider still, when they entered the pet hospital to steal the lizard, they signed in at the front desk with real name, address, and phone number.

Weird Lizard of Madison County

The Kentucky Bigfoot cryptozoology website went so long without any updates that I'd just about given up on it... but lo and behold, I stuck my beak in there last night and found that a new sighting report had been filed back in February:

"I am a night time truck driver that goes down I 75 to williamsburg, ky. I believe I was south of Richmond, KY. I saw something next to the concrete barrier that divided the north and southbound interstate. I was on the southbound side. I thought at first it might be a rabibit, but this thing either jumped the highway or was so fast I didn't see it running. It crossed about 20ft. in front of my truck, easily getting to the other side and disapeared into the woods. I have never seen an animal like this before. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

It looked like it didn't have any fur on it, looking like it was just grey skin. It to me looked like a small reptile or even a small dinosaur. It may have been a couple feet or so long. It looked like it had small dark eyes on the side of it's head. I also saw a long tail on this thing. It was very very fast and a normal animal I would have hit it, as I was going 65 in a 70 mile speed zone. It happened so fast I didn't notice if it had ears or not. It truly looked like something out of jurisic [sic] park."

Wait, what? Small reptile or even small dinosaur? Was it the Milton Lizard? Or the "Reptilian Wild Man" of 1878? Or William Branham's Biblical Serpent-Dude?

The Milton Lizard

In the summer of 1975, a cryptid described as resembling a 15-foot monitor lizard was sighted multiple times at Canip Creek, near the town of Milton, in Trimble County. It's come to be known as the Milton Lizard, sometimes called the Canip Monster.

Clarence Cable, manager of the Blue Grass Body Shop, saw the hissing creature come out from behind some wrecked vehicles. Cable said it had "big eyes similar to a frog's... Beneath its mouth was an off-white color and there were black and white stripes cross ways of its body with quarter-sized speckles over it."

The lizard was described by Cable as having a long forked tongue and huge, bulging, froglike eyes. Its skin was said to be black and white striped, and with small speckles. After the concentrated flurry of sightings in 1975, it was never seen again, leaving Fortean researchers to wonder.

Some have theorized the Milton Lizard might have been a monitor lizard (pictured above) that somehow got released into Kentucky's ecosystem.

(The city of Milton's other claim to fame, incidentally, is that the Rat Pack film Some Came Running was filmed here.)

The Wall Lizard

The high diversity of Kentucky's terrain is unmatched by possibly no
other state but Texas - mountains, forests, swamps, highlands,
lowlands, everything but deserts. This means that when you transport a life form here that's not indigenous, there's a really good chance that it will be able to carve out an ecological niche for itself.

There's no better testimony of this than in the case of the Wall Lizard, which is increasingly common here but never existed in the United States until just a few decades ago. In September 1951, a young boy named George Rau released ten Wall Lizards into the Ohio Valley's ecosystem. He'd obtained them while on a trip to Italy, brought them back to the states, and set them free in his back yard in Cincinnati, on the Ohio/Kentucky border.

Today the Wall Lizard is thriving exponentially in northern Kentucky and southern Ohio, to such great extent that it's now considered a native species, although it's acknowledged as an introduced one.

Rau's experiment in European reptile introduction didn't stop there, however: in 1958, returning from a trip to Spain, he brought back specimens of a strange blue-bellied lizard he'd found there, and once again, he released them into the wild at the Ohio/Kentucky border. It has been reported that interbreeding occurred between the two lizards he released, thus creating a new, third, anomalous lizard!

These lizards are often referred to as the "Lazarus Lizards" because Rau was related to the Lazarus family, once well known locally for their Lazarus line of department stores (now merged with Macy's).