Snake is an animal that most people are afraid of! Let’s not forget that is associated with the bad in the minds of everyone!
But is also a veri fascinating animal! So let’s find out some facts and trivia about this misunderstood creature!
- Snakes are elongated, legless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes
- Like all squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales
- Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors
- Enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads with their highly mobile jaws
- To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes’ paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side
- And most have only one functional lung
- Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca
- Lizards have evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs
- About twenty-five times independently via convergent evolution
- Leading to many lineages of legless lizards
- Legless lizards resemble snakes
- But several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears
- Which snakes lack
- Although this rule is not universal
- Living snakes are found on every continent except Antarctica
- And on most smaller land masses
- Exceptions include some large islands, such as Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, the Hawaiian archipelago, and the islands of New Zealand
- And many small islands of the Atlantic and central Pacific oceans
- Additionally, sea snakes are widespread throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans
- More than 20 families are currently recognized
- Comprising about 520 genera
- And about 3,600 species
- They range in size from the tiny, 10.4 cm (4.1 in)-long Barbados thread snake
- To the reticulated python of 6.95 meters (22.8 ft) in length
- The fossil species Titanoboa cerrejonensis was 12.8 meters (42 ft) long
- Snakes are thought to have evolved from either burrowing or aquatic lizards
- Perhaps during the Jurassic period
- With the earliest known fossils dating to between 143 and 167 Ma ago
- The diversity of modern snakes appeared during the Paleocene epoch (c 66 to 56 Ma ago)
- The oldest preserved descriptions of snakes can be found in the Brooklyn Papyrus
- Most species are nonvenomous
- And those that have venom use it primarily to kill and subdue prey
- Rather than for self-defense
- Some possess venom potent enough to cause painful injury or death to humans
- Nonvenomous snakes either swallow prey alive or kill by constriction
