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Oklahoma iguana gets loose, sunbathes in middle of busy street until police arrive

Posted at 12:56 PM, Jul 26, 2019
and last updated 2019-07-26 12:56:25-04

LOCUST GROVE, Okla. - Oklahomans spotted Spike – an iguana – sunbathing in the middle of a road, and trying to catch him proved to be a little difficult.

"I walked down to the post office, there was something in the middle of the road," Marea Breedlove said.

Breedlove was running errands Tuesday when she noticed the reptilian oddity.

"The closer I got I was like, 'That's not a dog or a paper sack, that's a big iguana,'" she said.

A large iguana sunbathing in the busy road.

She went inside the library where she works to grab her phone, and when she came back, Spike was on the move.

"He came back on the grass, made his way over to the tree, made his way in the tree," Breedlove said.

A library patron helped find a pet carrier and the Locust Grove Police came by for the unusual call that went out over their radio as a Godzilla sighting.

"In my career usually (it's) pigs, cows, animals like that, but never a lizard," an officer said.

An officer climbed the tree grabbed the lizard by the tail and safely got him into the crate.

"I just didn't want anything to happen to him, I knew he belonged to somebody," Breedlove said.

Meanwhile, just a block away, Spike's owner Patricia Burks was frantically searching for him.

"I was looking all over outside, kept coming in the house, looking in the house, making sure he didn't climb back into the window or something," Burks said.

Spike likes going outside to roam the yard and usually comes back with no problem.

"I come in the house for just a second, went straight back out, he was gone, nowhere to be seen," Burks explained.

She said he must've gotten through a gap in the fence and then made his way to the library next door.

"Instead of coming back to the porch he thought he'd go for a stroll down to the library," Burks said.

She went to the police station to bail Spike out.

The library director and the police chief now have Spike's owner's phone number in case he ever gets out again.