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goanna

n. Any of various monitor lizards native to Australia.

Wikipedia
Goanna (band)

Goanna is an Australian folk rock group which formed in 1977 in Geelong as The Goanna Band with mainstay Shane Howard as singer-songwriter and guitarist. The group integrated social protest with popular music and reached the Top 20 on the Australian Kent Music Report Singles Chart with "Solid Rock" (1982) and "Let the Franklin Flow" (released under the name Gordon Franklin & the Wilderness Ensemble in 1983). Their debut album, Spirit of Place peaked at No. 2 on the related albums chart. They disbanded in 1987 and briefly reformed in 1998.

Goanna

A goanna is any of several Australian monitor lizards of the genus Varanus, as well as certain species from Southeast Asia.

Around 30 species of goanna are known, 25 of which are found in Australia. This varied group of carnivorous reptiles ranges greatly in size and fills several ecological niches.

The goanna features prominently in Aboriginal mythology and Australian folklore.

Being predatory lizards, goannas are often quite large, or at least bulky, with sharp teeth and claws. The largest is the perentie (V. giganteus), which can grow over in length.

Not all goannas are gargantuan. Pygmy goannas may be smaller than a man's arm. The smallest of these, the short-tailed monitor (Varanus brevicuda) reaches only 20 cm in length. They survive on smaller prey, such as insects and mice.

Goannas combine predatory and scavenging behaviours. A goanna will prey on any animal it can catch and is small enough to eat whole. Goannas have been blamed for the death of sheep by farmers, though most likely erroneously, as goannas are also eaters of carrion and are attracted to rotting meat.

Most goannas are dark-coloured, with greys, browns, blacks and greens featuring prominently; however, white is also common. Many desert-dwelling species also feature yellow-red tones. Camouflage ranges from bands and stripes to splotches, speckles, and circles, and can change as the creature matures, with juveniles sometimes being brighter than adults.

Like most lizards, goannas lay eggs. Most lay eggs in a nest or burrow, but some species lay their eggs inside termite mounds. This offers protection and incubation; additionally, the termites may provide a meal for the young as they hatch. Unlike some other species of lizards, goannas do not have the ability to regrow limbs or tails.

Goanna (disambiguation)

A goanna is any of several Australian monitor lizards of the genus Varanus.

Goanna may also refer to:

  • Goanna fish, Halosaurus pectoralis
  • Goanna (band), an Australian folk-rock band
  • "The Goanna", a codename for Australian businessman Kerry Packer, used in media reports about the Costigan Commission
  • Goanna (software), an Open Source rendering and layout engine
Goanna (software)

Goanna is a web browser engine used in applications developed by Moonchild Productions, notably the Pale Moon web browser and the FossaMail e-mail client. Goanna is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License version 2.

Goanna is a fork of the Netscape/Mozilla-sourced Gecko engine, and shares many of its features.

It is designed to support open Internet standards, and is used by different applications to display web pages and, in some cases, an application's user interface itself (by rendering XUL). Like Gecko, Goanna offers a rich programming API that makes it suitable for a wide variety of roles in Internet-enabled applications, such as web browsers, content presentation, and client/server applications.

Goanna is written primarily in C++ and is cross-platform, and runs on various operating systems including Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Its development is overseen by the Pale Moon community and the small development team responsible for its main application (Pale Moon).

Usage examples of "goanna".

There is very little room left for even a grasshopper to squeeze in, and some grumpy old ladies like Mrs Owl and Miss Goanna, glare at the younger ones as they try to find a spare seat.

Granny Goanna would eat a possum as soon as look at it, and as for Mrs Snake, she tried to kill me when I was a baby.

Tell him I thought the matter over, and decided that an army of his relations, if hidden in suitable places, could suddenly march out and attack Mrs Snake and Granny Goanna, as they come to steal the babies.

Mrs Snake and Granny Goanna are coming to steal all the babies that live in her tree.

When Mrs Snake and Granny Goanna come along wait for my order to advance.

Granny Goanna placed her two front legs on the tree and prepared to climb.

Thus it came to pass that Johnson, having got the tale by rote, Followed every stray goanna, seeking for the antidote.

Loafing once beside the river, while he thought his heart would break, There he saw a big goanna fighting with a tiger-snake, In and out they rolled and wriggled, bit each other, heart and soul, Till the valiant old goanna swallowed his opponent whole.

He briskly skinned and gutted the goanna, softened its flesh in the fire, and enjoyed a rich meal.

After a supper of kangaroo tail, goanna and the last crust of bread, washed down with rain water, they loaded more wood on the fire and slept warm and snug in the rough bush shelter around the fire.

I started a fire going, woke Kennie and we brewed tea and had a meal with large ants pestering us and a small goanna playing hide and seek in and out of a clump of spinifex.

Land-Rover, watched by a goanna and interrupted periodically by flights of small birds coming into the soak.

Therefore the bag of his wife was always filled with goanna tails, with great porcupines and birds and grubs, though the wife herself got the grubs as well as the fern roots.

Many of the goanna children were drowned, but some came up out of the holes and they climbed the tree.

Not Emu, or Goanna Lizard, or Kangaroo, not a Rainbow Serpent nor a Sky-God nor any of the Ancestors who were here in the Dreamtime.