This beautiful lizard is a RED Ridge-tailed monitor or SPINY-TAILED MONITOR from northern and north-western Australia.  These lizards are also commonly known in the reptile hobby as ACKIES, an odd reference to the lizards' scientific name Varanus acanthurus.

As you can see here, the pattern and colouration on the monitor's body is absolutely beautiful!

The family of lizards to which this monitor belongs contains the true giants of the lizard world, including the enormous Komodo dragon.  Like all monitors the ridge-tail is strictly carnivorous, eating a variety of insects and other small animals as well as the occasional small mouse.

As you can see from the picture above, the ridge-tailed monitor's head is quite bird-like in its appearance, and I think they closely resemble the velociraptors from the movie Jurassic Park!  He is an extremely active and inquisitive animal and enormous fun to watch as he hunts for food, burrows into his  enclosure's substrate or just basks under his very hot basking lamp!

The name of these monitors comes from the fact that they have exceptionally spiny tails as you can see below, these spines being quite hard and sharp to the touch:

These spines are very important to the monitor and are not just there to look pretty, even though they certainly do!  In their native Australia these lizards spend much of their time in rock crevices, and they use their spiny tails very effectively by wedging them at the openings of these crevices making it impossible for predators to get to them!