This Monstrous Monitor, considerably larger than today's largest monitor lizard, the Komodo Dragon, once roamed Australia. I had my castaways encounter something decidedly similar in the first Mora novel, COAST OF SPEARS (Book One of the Malvern Trilogy). 'Coast,' although not my first-written fantasy novel, actually goes back the furthest in its conception, all the way to ideas I had as a teen. It only took forty years or so for them to find their way to a book.
I do mention other smaller monitors elsewhere in the Mora novels. Some of them still rather large, perhaps, but none have been life-threatening. So far!
