The new movie Rango, directed by Gore Verbinski of Pirates of the Caribbean fame, stars a gregarious chameleon going through an identity crisis. Stranded in the Mojave Desert at first, Rango soon finds his way to the aptly named town of Dirt with the help of a roadkill oracle. His wild adventures in the lawless town made us wonder if real chameleons’ lives are equally exciting.

We sought out chameleon expert Dr. Jim Murphy, Director of Herpetology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoo, and his former colleague Dr. Gary Ferguson, lead author of the book The Panther Chameleon, to separate the fact from the fiction in Rango.

Rango's World: Born in captivity, Rango is the family pet, living his life in a terrarium with a Midwestern family. 

Reality: Chameleons don’t make particularly good pets. They sometimes live just over a year, and do not respond well to the stress of the captive environment. However, there are three types dubbed the “weedy species” for their ability to adapt to a multitude of habitats, including captivity: the veiled chameleon (native to Yemen), the three-horned chameleon (Africa), and the panther chameleon (Madagascar).

Watching the new Green Hornet film, which stars Seth Rogen as a masked vigilante with a chauffeur sidekick, inspired me to find out more about its namesake in the natural world. Can hornets really be green? Well, no—they’re yellow, black and brown—but they do have plenty of other impressive characteristics you may not know about. Read past the jump for our list.

Lucy is part bonobo.

In the current issue of Nature you’ll find a much-awaited report on the bodies (as opposed to the heads) of the folks that lived at Dmanisi in Georgia (the former Soviet Republic) about two million years ago. The report was much-awaited because only the heads of four of the individuals discovered there have been thoroughly reported. That left many of us wondering what their bodies were like.

We knew their brains were small and early estimates of their height and weight showed they were small in body as well, but we didn’t have a good sense of their body proportions or skeletal details from the neck down. And the reason why we cared about their bodies so much was that a paradigm was about to be broken.