Salem ― More than 50 people came to Burnett’s Country Garden at 380 New London Road on Sunday afternoon for “Jungle Jamboree,” an educational wildlife show that featured a 9-foot-long Burmese python, venomous scorpion and a lizard without legs.

The show gave 20 children the opportunity to get close to various reptiles, amphibians and arachnids while learning about the animals’ adapted features.

About 1:50 p.m., Cassaundra Blais, education director for the Riverside Reptiles Education Center, an Enfield-based reptile and amphibian facility that houses over 100 species, wheeled a cart stacked high with plastic coolers into the garden store’s tropical greenhouse.

The coolers, the same kind you’d see speckling the beach on a hot summer day, only had critters inside them on this cold and windy Sunday in mid-February.

“A lot of people think it’s funny that we use coolers,” Blais said. “But coolers are insulated. So when we do winter programs like this, if we take them out of a hot enclosure and we put them into a cooler, it stays warm, and then we open it later, they’re still warm in there.”

The coolers, which have breathing holes, can house the animals for several hours, she said.

From one of the coolers, Blais pulled a blue-tongued skink named Irwin, whose name was a tribute to late Australian zookeeper and environmentalist Steve Irwin. The species has several defenses to keep it safe from Australian predators.

The skink’s blue tongue makes the animal seem poisonous and therefore inedible to predators. Meanwhile, its gray and brownish coloration makes it look like one of Australia’s deadliest animals, the Death Adder snake.

Additionally, the animal can have its tail chopped off at any part and grow it back, Blais said.

Another reptile, an approximately 3 foot-long Cuvier’s Dwarf Caiman, has a habit of trying to jump from its container, Blais said. The cooler, thus, had a lock on it.

When she opened the case and held up the animal, which had its mouth taped shut, a chorus of incredulous “whoas” came from the crowd’s young children, many of whom sat cross-legged on a rug mere feet in front of Blais.

She highlighted the caiman’s thick, armor-like scales, partially webbed feet and strong tail like a “boat propeller,” before taking him around to the audience to touch its back and tail.

“The next one we’re going to do is another lizard,” Blais said, taking out Sandy, a female legless, or glass lizard. “It’s kind of rare. They don’t look like a lizard, they look like something else.”

She added that over millions of years of evolution, this species of lizard lost its legs and grew a hard-plated nose in order to make burrowing into the ground, where it lives, easier.

After viewing the three reptiles, along with a scorpion, salamander, box turtle, hissing cockroaches and two different snakes, the 50 humans who attended, with their own adapted traits, rated the show two “opposable” thumbs up.

Five-year-old James Flanagan, of East Hampton, said he liked the giant Burmese python most of all. His grandmother, Leslee Flanagan, from East Lyme, said she enjoyed learning about how the glass lizard adapted to “burrow down into the ground. I thought that was cool.”

“I thought they did a good job,” she said, adding Blais had a great speaking voice that was well-heard throughout the large greenhouse.

Eight-year-old Landyn Lavoie, of Canterbury, spent much of the show trying to maneuver a small blue digital camera, which dangled from his neck by a lanyard, close to the animals to get a good shot. Reptiles and amphibians are his favorite animals, he said, and though his favorite, the king cobra, had been noticeably absent from the show, he wanted some photographs to remember this moment.

Emily O’Hearn, of Oakdale, took her 6-year-old son, Logan, after seeing the event posted on Facebook. The event gave her family “something to do on a Sunday,” she said, and was good for Logan, who is a big fan of reptiles and famous biologist Jeff Corwin.

The event featured other activities before, during and after the show, too, including coloring pages, chalk, temporary tattoos, a scavenger hunt and an activity where children could make their own miniature garden in a flower pot.

d.drainville@theday.com