Some little girl stumbled over a remarkable fossil in India. It is believed to be the biggest snake that ever existed, as long as fifty feet between the pointy ends. Which is a lot of snake. The good news, for the easily freaked out, is that it was probably one of your fatter stubbier snakes, and those tend to be not as zippy. They just sit around sniffing things until something gets close enough to nab. That might not be reassuring, I don’t know.
They had to extrapolate to come up with their fifty feet. They found only 27 vertebrae and some snakes can have over six hundred: 450 in the body and over 200 in the tail. Which was startling to me. I tend to think of snakes as being all tail. But of course they’re not. Snake skeletons have pelvis remnants, but you have to know to look for them; you never hear of a snake described as wide through the hips. Alternatively, you can just check where the poop comes out, and everything south of there is tail.
Assuming you have just a skeleton and want to know where the body leaves off and the tail begins, which hardly anyone ever does, it’s at the point where there are no longer any ribs.
And if you just have the middle bits, how do you know you have a fossil snake and not, say, a prehistoric dachshund? They could be much bigger than the current version, after all. Many animals that aren’t horses were much larger in earlier times. Sloths, for instance. Or cockroaches. But the experts are definitively fingering the snake cohort. Snakes have a special extra joint between their vertebrae which allow the bones to go up and down and back and forth but not rotate against each other, so the snake doesn’t kink up like a hose. My own spine can also bend every which way so I’m not sure what the big deal is, but maybe my spine isn’t long enough to kink.
In fact, my spine isn’t long enough for a lot of things. Basically, it keeps my head off my butt.
Speaking of my head, I have long been cautioned not to eat anything bigger than it. But snakes are totally allowed to. They can swallow prey altogether bigger than they are, and then they just have to move it on through and chemically digest the thing because they don’t have molars. It looks horribly uncomfortable to me, like if I swallowed a sofa, but there are probably advantages to eating something so large you don’t need to bother again for a good long while. There can be problems, however. If it takes too long to motor your wildebeest down your food tube, it could putrefy before you can get it to your anus, and gas up, and then you’re in nine kinds of trouble. If you see a large snake with a gigantic bolus that looks unusually active, like it might go off, run even faster than you would have.
To avoid this, pit vipers start out by injecting venom into their prey which not only calms it down but turns its insides into an apathetic goo.
Hips or no, snakes do a fine job of getting around without any legs, because their belly scales are just grabby enough to get a purchase on things and then all the southward bits can catch up. Legs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, anyway. A friend who was watching me go full-out running for third base once said to Dave, “I don’t get it. Everything’s moving, but nothing’s going forward.” Most if not all snakes move faster than I do.
I do get a little extra pep in my step when I get surprised by one, though.
I once found a tiny snake skeleton in the damndest place: under my kitchen counter. (Apparently I don’t sweep under there often enough or far enough back. How it got into my house in the first place mystifies me. ) I was surprised to find what looked like a pelvis on it. It was tiny and fragile, so unfortunately it did not hold up to my ham-fistedness. It was a lovely little thing, and I feel sorry for it getting in here, not finding proper food, and dying under the counter.
Are you sure it was a snake skeleton and not a lizard, like a skink (some species of which have tiny legs) or maybe a salamander? The remnants of pelves in snakes are really small and tend not to look all that different than ribs.
There were no legs, and the pelvis was REALLY tiny. It was a snake. We don’t have lizards around our yard, but we DO have snakes.
I would have liked to see it.
Unfortunately, it was so fragile and dried out when I found it that it broke apart with my handling of it. I would have kept it otherwise.
Maybe it was a tiny dinosaur.
Snakes fascinate me. The area around our cabin in the Adirondacks is home to a population of Timber Rattlesnakes (“Black Phase,” which means they don’t immediately look like your typical rattler as they are black with yellow markings instead of the reverse). Across Lake George is another population, in yellow phase. But (and this may be horrifying to hear if you don’t know) they can swim across lakes. Luckily those yellow ones seem to stay on their side. Ours only appear occasionally, when they’re disturbed by “sustainable” logging every few years. They are polite and rattle as they go by to let you know. Haven’t seen one yet this year but the season is young.
I really don’t think snakes should swim, but no one consulted me.
We had a cat who loved to hunt snakes in a grassy area behind the house that we called the Serengeti. In summer he would bring a snake or two into the house just about every day. Nearly all of them were still alive so we would just catch them and toss them off the back deck. I’m sure he caught the same snakes multiple times. Our current pair of cats are indoor dwellers. Fortunately, we don’t have any poisonous snakes around here.
Technically you won’t find any poisonous snakes any where. Poison is intrinsic, as in if you touch it or eat it, you can suffer consequences. Think of toads and poison dart frogs for instance.
Many snake species are venomous. Venom is delivered. You can touch a snake or eat it and not suffer ill effects. It needs to bite to deliver its venom.
Now I know some of you have been waving your hands furiously to deliver a correction about my statement that many snake species are venomous. We tend to think of venom being limited to things like cobras and rattlesnakes and coral snakes and sea snakes and copperheads and cottonmouths and…
But it turns out that many snake species we consider harmless are equipped to deliver venom. It’s generally relatively harmless to humans, but can be a problem for the snake’s intended prey, like invertebrates, fish and frogs.
If you’ve ever been bitten by a water snake or a garter snake, you’ll notice that the wound bleeds freely. In these species the modified saliva acts as an anticoagulant. No big deal for a big mammal, but a problem for a worm or an insect.
Speaking of worms, there are specialized worm eating snakes which have overpowered venom that will drop a human. Evolution being what it is, sometimes the adaptations are a bit overboard.
Murr, I kept waiting to read where you elaborated on your teaser statement about snakes not being compared to buses!
I was also surprised by your statement that snakes can have over 200 caudal verts. That seemed really high given my experience. A quick Google showed the number could vary between 10 and 205. Now I want to see a snake with a really long tail!
Most of the snakes I’ve handled in New Jersey have been species that dissuaded being picked up by secreting foul smelling substances from their cloacas. So I pretty quickly learned what was tail and what was not!
You might be thinking that everything that comes from the cloaca would be foul smelling. True, but some species have developed defensive secretions that are particularly nasty smelling and can deploy them at a distance. I was photographing a snake once with my digital camera held at arms length (I’d learned that many animals will tolerate a camera at close range, but will try to escape if a hand comes towards them instead). Later I noticed that the camera reeked of snake defensive odor. The camera hadn’t touched the snake, but apparently the snake was able to spray it.
Recently I learned that some snakes, like lizards practice autotomy, the ability to break off the tail to escape predators. I had grabbed onto the tail of a fleeing water snake and ended up with just the tail. I was really surprised as I’d captured a number of snakes over the years by grabbing their tails. Either I’d grabbed north of the cloaca or a snake that wasn’t so equipped.
Nasty smelling fumes from the cloaca? Are you sure that you’re not confusing snakes with Trump? 😈 I’m sure that I’d much rather be around a snake.
Why did you need to bring that horrible man into a fun conversation?
I thought only salamanders did that! Do the tails grow back?
Bruce, thanks for the interesting snake lesson and for sharing the distinction between poisonous and venomous. Along with Murr’s post, I’ve learned some new things about snakes today!
By the way, there is a tail dropper slug too.
I think I’d call that more of a body dropping slug.
My brother and I used to play with small snakes as children, we’d go out beyond the town limits and put some in our pockets and head off to school where we’d let them go in the classrooms…
As an adult I did once come upon what appeared to be a very large pile of dog poop which turned out the be two of our deadly brown snakes curled up enjoying some early spring sunshine. I backed away very quietly and left them to it.
When I was a kid I heard an odd sound coming from a nearby marsh and when I investigated I found two snakes wrapped around each other in a tight screw (just gonna leave that one there) spinning in the water, which produced the odd sound. It’s the perennial question of mating or fighting and how can one tell the difference?
I saw something similar years back when I still owned a swimsuit. There is a small wooded area near us with a creek running through it. There is a huge rock near a waterfall, and Paul and I would go there, have a picnic on the rock, then he would take a nap while I would splash around in the creek. (I never learned to swim, so that was the best I could do.) One day, there were a bunch of small snakes in the water near the rock. They were obviously mating… maybe even having an orgy. They were in a frenzy. We enjoyed watching them, but they probably thought we were creepy.
Our most common newt does a whole mating ball. With lots of friends.
As usual—funny as hell, and we also learn something new. 👍
With any luck, some of it can be unlearned later.
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met Him – did you not
His notice sudden is –
The Grass divides as with a Comb –
A spotted shaft is seen –
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on –
He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot –
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone –
Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me –
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality –
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone –
Emily Dickinson 1865
I’m disappointed–this one can’t be set to “Hernando’s Hideaway”. Most can.
Carolyn
The grass divides as with a comb!