Magpie hunts a baby rattlesnake:

Parthenogenesis in anacondas

Some believe that [Vipera aspis. the asp] was introduced to Sicily by the Carthaginians during their conquest of the island in the years 398-368 BC, The basis for the speculation is that the Carthaginians were known to load a small boat with a collection of venomous snakes and push the boat toward enemy ships as a means of terrorizing their opponents prior to combat.

I'm skeptical, to say the least, but the claim is from Snakes, Gordon H. Rodda, Encyclopedia of Islands, ed. Rosemary G. Gillespie and David A. Clague, University of California Press, 2009, pg. 845.

A biofluorescent sea turtle!

Goannas are the best burrowers! Also, a conclusion that heartily pleases me:

....these new finds have shown that living reptiles.... are doing some incredibly complex things. Co-operatively built family burrows (McAlpin et al. 2011), warrens formed of numerous individual burrows, and – now – deep, deep, spiralling corkscrew-like burrows. The expectation that complex structures of this sort can only be attributed to mammals.... ha, it’s dead.

The Mozart Effect in practice:

Progeny (age 2): "What's this song about?" [It was Guy Clark, for the record.]
Me: "I don't know, we have to listen and see."
Progeny: "It's about a guy getting attacked by a big snake!"

Not actually an unreasonable guess around here.

A very estimable python

What it's like to be swallowed by a hippo

Also, sweet justice: Houston teen who found himself with a slew of severe injuries after the ashes from the cigar he was smoking mixed with the “combustible mixture” in his pocket while he and a friend were going to “blow up turtles.”

Can sea turtles magnetically sense longitude as well as latitude? Apparently.

Flying reptiles are in the news:

• Pterosaurs
• Malaysian flying snakes, plus flying snake videos

"The whole snake itself is just one long wing," Socha said. "That wing is constantly reconfiguring, it's constantly reforming and contorting... Parts of the body, depending on where they are in space, might be interacting with the wake from the front part of the body, and this might hurt or help or be neutral."

Flyingsnake.org will reward some browsing.

World's first illustrated Christian bible discovered at Ethiopian monastery

The world's earliest illustrated Christian book has been saved by a British charity which located it at a remote Ethiopian monastery.

The incredible Garima Gospels are named after a monk who arrived in the African country in the fifth century and is said to have copied them out in just one day.

Beautifully illustrated, the colours are still vivid and thanks to the Ethiopian Heritage Fund have been conserved.

Abba Garima arrived from Constantinople in 494 AD and legend has it that he was able to copy the gospels in a day because God delayed the sun from setting.

The incredible relic has been kept ever since in the Garima Monastery near Adwa in the north of the country, which is in the Tigray region at 7,000 feet.

Experts believe it is also the earliest example of book binding still attached to the original pages....

Though the texts had been mentioned by the occasional traveller since the 1950s, it had been thought they dated from the 11th century at the earliest.

Carbon dating, however, gives a date between 330 and 650 - which tantalisingly overlaps the date Abba Garima arrived in the country.

Apropos of Ethiopia, an Abyssinian member of our congregation recently told us about a monastery she'd visited several times in Eritrea. According to local tradition, the monastery's founding saint wished to settle atop a sheer plateau, but couldn't climb the necessary cliff. He prayed to the Archangel Michael, who kindly sent a giant python. The snake first offered to take them up in its jaws, but the monks would have none of it. So the helpful python, doubtless rolling its eyes, reversed directions and took them up in its tail.

Don't get bitten by a coral snake! Always good advice, but now ever more so, since apparently we're out of antivenom. And wouldn't you know it, the perfectly good stuff they use in Mexico isn't coming here due to FDA hurdles.

Man charged with assault and battery after allegedly using a 4 foot long ball python as a weapon.

Bastard. Python abuse would be a much more apt charge. If you're going to use a snake as a weapon, a ball python is an exceedingly poor choice, as they're generally frightened of absolutely everything except mice and dark places. If you have to pinch the snake's head to get it to open its mouth, you're really barking up the wrong tree. This guy should have a Burmese: for one thing, it might eat him.

New monitor lizard species discovered in the Philippines.

With a main body length approaching 1m, with an additional 1m-long tail, the lizard has dark skin covered by golden yellow spots and flecks.

Its legs are mainly yellow, and its tail striped black and yellow.

In some pictures, the animal also looks to have green or blue scales.

The new species, which is called Varanus bitatawa, is thought to survive on a diet of fruit, making it one of just three species of fruit-eating monitor lizards in the world.

(Hat tip: Cronaca)

New additions to the household

Many, but likely not all, of our readers are aware that we acquired a ball python last summer. Well, we thought he might like some company:

The larger one is about a year old and is named (what else?) Pythagoras. The smaller we just brought home tonight, and we have yet to settle on a name. Persephone is a strong contender. She's much more spry than Pythagoras has ever been, exploring, nosing about, gliding from hand to hand like your hands are a python treadmill. Pythagoras can be safely left to his own devices for a while; a glance every 30 seconds or so is sufficient to keep track of him, methodical and stoic as he is. But the new girl will bear much closer monitoring.

Ball pythons really are splendid, amiable little creatures. (In Europe they're often called royal pythons after their scientific name, Python regius, and I rather prefer that usage.) According to Mrs. P's investigations, they're often considered auspicious in their native West African scrub, and some cultures even offer little funerals and burials to dead ones. It's pretty remarkable to have an essentially wild animal that will let you pick it up and handle it with no objection. They're quite gentle and docile. Pythagoras has nipped each of us once, but both incidents had clear reasons; a ball python bit is a little more than sandpaper, but certainly less than needles. Of course, a lot of folks get squeamish about the idea of feeding them mice, but Mrs. Peculiar and I are not very sympathetic to the mammals. Mice have surely, through crop damage and disease, contributed vastly more to the sum of human misery than snakes have. We're the last people to object to a little honest carnivory, still less myophagy.

Having a ball python also brings home the biologic ignorance of the general population. People are incredulous that there exist pythons who will never be large enough to devour dogs, babies or oxen. After my nip, an otherwise well-educated person expressed concern about venom. But on the other hand, most people who meet them are enchanted, which is encouraging.

In any case, the new girl has a lovely golden sheen. They're amazingly soft when young. Pythagoras' hide is getting tougher, but even he still feels very soft and smooth until he's ready to shed. We're very eager to see what differences in personality we might observe between the two.

Hmmm... Chryse? Appollonia? Siegrune?

Update: We went with Hypatia, which goes pretty well Pythagoras.

Lizards Use Third Eye to Steer by the Sun

Small frogs employ giant spider bodyguards.

More pictures here.

Also, alligator vs. watermelon.

Fossilized remains of world's largest snake:

Titanoboa was 13m (42ft) long - about the length of a bus - and lived in the rainforest of north-east Colombia 58-60 million years ago....

The team of researchers led by Jason Head, from the University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada, used a known mathematical relationship between the size of vertebrae and the length of the body in living snakes to estimate the size of the ancient animal.

Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the beast's 13m-long body and 1,140kg (2,500lb) weight make it the largest snake on record.

"At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips. The size is pretty amazing," said co-author P David Polly, from Indiana University in Bloomington, US.

Be sure to read the article and see the photo of this thing's vertebra next to one from an anaconda. Damn!

Cronaca beat me to it.

Update: Via Tet Zoo, an excellent post on Titanoboa, including this observation:

Large population surveys of reticulated pythons have failed to find individuals longer than 6 metres. By contrast, Head's team analysed vertebrae from eight different specimens of Titanoboa and found that all of them were roughly the same size. A length of 13 metres was fairly ordinary for this extraordinary serpent.

This video is allegedly famous, but it's news to me. Morals of the story?

1. Africa is one hell of a tough neighborhood.
2. Do not screw with cape buffalo.

Two YouTubes in a row: apologies. But some things cannot be passed up:

Thank you, Rigor Vitae!