Quote Originally Posted by Hulihzack View Post
As far as I know, Komodos are the only monitors that have been proven to have any real venom. Monitors (wild ones at least, don't ask me about captive) have infectious saliva due to their rather unclean diets. So rather than a venom attacking the nervous system or cardiovascular, it just gets really infected.

Tegus and monitors do have an anticoagulant in their saliva, and that I can say from first hand (literally, my own hand) experience. A 3 foot tegu bit me and it bled for 3 days straight, non stop.

Zack:

Komodos were widely thought to kill prey by septicemia - bacterial infections of the blood - that was proven to be untrue.

The problem with that theory is that the death of large prey occured too quickly to be attributable to systemic bacterial poisoning. It's one of those urban legend things - sort of. While they have a mouth full of many strains of nasty bacteria, that's not what was causing rapid swelling and blood pressure/clotting changes.