the.com/snakes
limbless, jawless overachievers who conquered every continent except Antarctica without a single arm
means Snakes are elongated, limbless reptiles that swallow prey whole and slither across nearly every landscape on Earth.
from From Old English 'snaca,' tracing back to a Proto-Germanic root '*snak-' meaning 'to crawl' or 'to creep' — the same slinking ancestor that likely gave us 'snail' and 'sneak.' The deeper Proto-Indo-European root '*sneg-' carried the sense of crawling, so the very name describes the motion. (Note: 'serpent' came later from a different family — Latin 'serpere,' also 'to creep' — meaning two unrelated languages independently named the animal after the same low, gliding movement.)
- unhinged jaws
- stretchy ligaments swallow prey wider than their heads
- no eyelids
- they sleep with eyes open behind clear scales
- tongue smell
- forked tongues taste the air in stereo
- lost legs
- some pythons keep tiny leftover hip bones
- heat vision
- pit vipers see prey by body warmth
black mamba — fastest venomous snake in africa, strikes at 12.5 meters per second
king cobra — longest venomous snake, up to 3.3 meters, found in southeast asia
anaconda — heaviest snake species, can weigh over 550 pounds in the amazon
inland taipan — most venomous snake on earth, one bite has enough venom for 100 humans