The two-fingered sloths are slightly bigger than the three-fingered, but neither compare to the Megatherium — The Giant Ground Sloth.

Coming from Greek, its name means ‘Giant Beast’, and with good reason. These long extinct creatures were around the same size as our elephants of today, and few land mammals could compare to that.

The last that walked the earth died around 12,000 years ago, but by that point had been doing so for millions of years³.

Sloths today are more comparable to the size of 18 month old children. Talk about downsizing.

Of Costa Rica’s four monkey species, the Howler monkey is the largest, and by far the loudest.

It didn’t earn its name over nothing — its howls can be heard over a mile away through thick rain forest, otherwise it can be heard as far away as three!

Some Mayan tribes even viewed the Howler Monkeys as gods, and Copán, an ancient Mayan city, was famous for its depictions of Howler monkey gods⁴.

Like Howler monkeys, the Spider monkey’s name is not a coincidence either. When hanging around, these monkeys sometimes have a spider-like appearance.

Spider monkeys use their long tails as a fifth limb, grabbing onto branches and swinging through the trees where other monkeys simply use their tails for balance.

It’s a good job that they do have such useful tails, too, because they don’t have any thumbs.

The origin of the capuchin monkey’s name isn’t quite as evident as the other monkeys of Costa Rica.

When Portuguese explorers made it to the Americas in the 1400s, they saw these monkeys and said they resembled a certain group of Franciscan friars — the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin.

The friars wore brown robes with large hoods, and the explorers thought that the monkeys looked like the friars with their hoods down, and so named them Capuchin⁵.

The wildlife of Costa Rica isn’t just on land, though. While not always easy to see, and especially so during the day, Costa Rica’s beaches become nesting grounds for Green sea turtles.

During mating season, females swim up to the beaches and drag themselves away from the water’s edge and under the cover of the tree line, leaving long tracks in their wake.

Once she’s found a good spot, after a good few minutes of slowly crawling across the beach, she begins using her rear flippers to flick out sand and creates a hole around 27-55cm deep (11-22”) and then goes into a trance-like state where she then fills said hole with anywhere between 80 and 200 eggs!⁷

It’s not over yet, though. After all of that, she’ll then cover the nest with sand, and in doing so create a fake ‘nest’ that tricks hungry predators into searching in the wrong spot.

Then, all that’s left for her to do is drag herself back into the ocean. All in all it takes somewhere between an hour to an hour and a half.

Even though the sea turtles go to great lengths to reproducing – coming out under the cover of darkness, hiding their nests in the tree line, swimming over 2500km of the ocean just to return to the beach where they themselves hatched – nothing is guaranteed.

Firstly, there are predators that scour the beaches looking for these eggs. If the eggs aren’t found and the hatchlings make it out of their shells, they may not be able to dig their way out of their sandy nests.

From there, they have to crawl all the way across the beach and into the ocean, to which they are usually guided by the moonlight’s reflection on the water’s surface, but ever increasing human developments has led to an array of well-lit hotels and restaurants that confuse the hatchlings into crawling in the wrong direction, away from the sea.

And even then, for those hatchlings that do make it into the water, there are even more predators waiting to gobble them up. So the odds are well and truly stacked against them.

It’s estimated that only around 1% of hatchlings ever make it to sexual maturity.

Now, by this point it should be abundantly clear that Costa Rica has an abundance of beautiful animals in and around its borders, but we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the bounty of reptile species spread across the land like butter on a crumpet – filling every nook and cranny the country has to offer.

Whether you find them beautiful or not, they’re not going anywhere any time soon. Or at least, we should all hope not.

So, starting with one of the more abundant lizards the country has to offer; the green basilisk.

The green basilisk actually goes by a few names, two others of which are the plumed and double crested basilisk. This may not seem immediately obvious why when looking at this female, but that all changes when you spot a male.

The males, with their dinosauresque appearance, have plumes on the back of their heads and crests running down their backs and tails, hence these two other names.

But these are only two of this mighty little beast’s other names. Its fourth and final name comes not from its appearance, but rather a unique talent that it employs when evading predators.

Green basilisks are more often than not found by running water. As such, if they’re threatened and have nowhere else to go, they’ll drop down from the trees and simply dash across the water, earning it the name Jesus Christ lizard.

It seems that they can only keep this up for a short time, though, around 15ft, or 4.5 meters. But it’s enough to give them a head start, whereafter they’ll continue their escape by swimming, at which they are also quite adept.

There’s also no shortage of iguanas, though the term iguana actually refers not only to this animal, but the whole suborder of lizards. This specific iguana though, has been dubbed Iguana iguana, just in case there was any doubt.

Their more common moniker is the common green iguana, which should help clear things up if nothing else. Although… not all of these common green iguanas are green, either… they can be green, of course, but also red, brown and sometimes even blue.

They can also sometimes change colour, as is the case during mating season, when both males and females can partially or completely turn a more reddish hue, the males more vibrantly so⁸.

The basilisk lizards we just talked about are also members of the same family, but given that the common green iguana can grow to almost twice the size of the green basilisk, there should be little confusion distinguishing between the two.

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