Basilisk

Basilisks are large eight-legged lizard creatures that can petrify their prey. They can be found all over Faerûn.

The Bedine call basilisks hagar motab or "bringers of stone-death", and it is from a bedine explorer where most of the facts about basilisks come from.

Basilisks are lazy and cowardly creatures, but evilly cunning. They make their lairs in dark underground caves where there is a ready and easily accessible food and water supply. Easy to anger, though they never fight to the death if it can be helped. They have been observed to be irrational and possibly insane half the time but shrewd hunters the other half. When hunting they pounce from hiding and attack with their petrifying gaze and vicious bite. They only need to eat one large meal (the size of a deer or a humanoid) a month due to their slow metabolisms though will apparently gorge themselves to death if provided with enough meat. Something in the stomachs of young basilisks allows them to digest the petrified corpses of their remains as if it was still flesh and bone. The tiny creatures (only two or three inches long when just hatched) burrow slowly into the statue. They apparrently lose their ability to eat petrified prey when they mature to adulthood, an adult with no young who has petrified it's victim simply leaves the statue standing where it was hit, though greater basilisks are more likely to contemptuously smash a statue with a swipe of their tails.