This fabulous animal is an extremely friendly Australian BEARDED DRAGON named Boris.  These wonderful lizards get the name 'bearded' because of their ability to extend their throats, making them look a bit like beards, which they will especially do if they ever feel threatened or scared in order to make themselves look much more big and scary than they actually are!

As you can see from these pictures of Boris, bearded dragons love being outdoors on hot sunny days.  This is because they need lots of exposure to the ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun and when in kept in captivity they need artificial UV light in their enclosures, in the form of specialist fluorescent lighting designed for reptiles, in order to keep them healthy and happy!  

Bearded dragons have especially beautiful eyes as you can see here:

A bearded dragon's eyes provide extremely good all-round vision which enables them to spot danger quickly.  This was brilliantly demonstrated whilst Boris was in the garden one day  when a light aircraft flew overhead.  Boris immediately reacted to it by looking straight up at it and going into his threat posture.  He flattened his body, opened his mouth and puffed up his 'beard', all of which are done to make him look much bigger and more scary than he really is to potential predators!  I took a photograph as quickly as I could once I realised what he was doing, but as it only lasted a few seconds I sadly didn't quite catch him in full-on 'threat display' mode.  Despite this, the picture below still gives you at least some idea of his reaction:

Despite having the freedom of my back garden to explore, Boris usually just finds a nice comfy area of grass to lie on and then sits back to soak in the sunshine, hardly moving at all for as long as I feel the weather is nice enough to keep him outside!  The picture below shows him resting in the sun and also shows his shortened tail.  When bearded dragons are babies they try to show their dominance over each other by nipping each other's tails and back legs.  Often this leads to damage to these areas and Boris would have lost the tip of his tail when he was very young, long before I owned him.  It does not bother him in any way and he is 100% healthy and gorgeous too!

I previously had a female bearded dragon living with Boris, who was named Matilda.  Before she left my collection she laid a clutch of 16 eggs and a couple of months later these eggs hatched.  Here is a picture of how the eggs looked shortly after being laid:

And this is how the eggs looked just a few days before they started to hatch:

As you can see, the eggs had grown a large amount during the time they were in my incubator.   This is because the shells of a reptile's eggs are soft and leathery, rather than being hard and brittle like a bird's eggs, and during their incubation they absorb a lot of water from their surroundings as the embryos inside the eggs grow bigger and bigger.

The picture below shows one of the baby bearded dragons after it had just slit through the shell of the egg using its special egg tooth.  Babies often wait for several hours in this position before fully emerging, and this one certainly did just that.

Here is the baby shortly after emerging fully from the egg.  Its skin is still moist from the yolk sac inside the egg, so a few bits of vermiculite (the material in which the eggs are incubated) are still stuck to his or her body!

This is how the baby looked after drying out and you can clearly see the beautiful patterns that these lizards have as babies.  They are just like miniature versions of their parents and they are completely on their own from the moment they hatch, with no parental care at all.  In the wild, if an adult bearded dragon did see a baby one, there is actually a good chance it would see it as a good source of protein and eat it.

Here is the same baby as it appeared one day later, looking quite at home in its new enclosure and very beautiful indeed! 

Baby bearded dragons grow very rapidly indeed and require lots of good quality food (a mixture of live insects such as crickets / small locust / waxworms etc. and fresh greens and other salad vegetables) in order to develop healthy bodies.  They also require exposure to UV light for a large portion of the day in order for their skeletons to grow strong and healthy.