Endangered
Yellow monitor
Varanus flavescens
The yellow monitor or golden monitor is a monitor lizard native to South Asia.
Appearance
The yellow monitor is a medium-sized monitor, measuring between 45 and 95 cm (18 and 37 in) among them the tail and weighing up to 1.45 kg (3.2 lb). Its snout is short and convex, measuring a little less than the distance from the anterior border of the orbit to the anterior border of the ear. Canthus rostralis distinct. Its nostril is an oblique slit, a little nearer to the end of the snout than to the orbit.
The digits are short with the length of the fourth toe, measured from its articulation with the tarsus to the base of the claw, not exceeding the length of the femur.
Range and habitat
The yellow monitor occurs in the flood plains of the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. It inhabits wet areas, the edges of forest and vicinity of human settlements and agricultural land. The yellow monitor or golden monitor is a monitor lizard native to South Asia.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
The yellow monitors thermoregulates by moving between sunny and shady areas, similar to other diurnal lizards.
In crisis
The yellow monitor is threatened by hunting for its meat and skin in all range countries. Its preferred habitat is threatened due to encroachment, pollution and conversion to landfills. Direct killing is the major threat to the yellow monitor in Kanchanpur District of far-western Nepal, as local people are afraid of it.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Yellow monitor is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Yellow monitor, Wikidata item Q598687. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
