Snakes

SERPENS by Guido Mocafico. Serpents In Genesis 3:1-5 it is the serpent’s power that leads Eve to disobey God’s command and consequently cause the downfall of man and thus expulsion from the garden of Eden.

The original tempter of Eve the temptress, the serpent has come to represent desire, lust and ultimately evil. Regardless of ones position on women’s rights and religion, the serpent is one of the oldest mythological symbols in a variety of historical contexts. ‘More wise than any beast of the field’, as the bible describes, the serpents strength and consequently power over human kind provides this cold-blooded creature a position of greatness and respect.

They can kill with just one venomous bite: the serpent has come to represent the dual nature of good and evil, life and death. Guido Mocafico captures this dual nature in his photographs of snakes. Aside from large bodies of work for books and exhibitions, he has also produced an impressive array of commercial and editorial shoots. Boomslang Snake Packs a Deadly Bite. Karl Patterson Schmidt: The Herpetologist Who Documented His Own Death For Sc... Karl Patterson Schmidt was an eminent American herpetologist—one who studies amphibians and reptiles.

He worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and then for the Field Museum in Chicago, during which he made several expedition to Central and South America to collect specimens for the museum. He was also the president of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. During his long scientific career, Schmidt handled countless deadly snakes. But in 1957, he made the fatal mistake of underestimating the toxicity of a juvenile boomslang snake, sent to him by the director of the Lincoln Park Zoo for identification.

While examining the serpent with his colleagues, the agitated snake opened its mouth and buried its fangs into the flesh of Schmidt’s left thumb. “I took it from Dr. Less that 24 hours later, he was dead. He wrote in his journal: 4:30 - 5:30 PM strong nausea but without vomiting. After waking, Schmidt continued recording his observations: Snake skeleton [more bones than any other animal!] A snake skeleton consists primarily of the skull, vertebrae, and ribs, with only vestigial remnants of the limbs.

Skull[edit] The skull of a snake is a very complex structure, with numerous joints to allow the snake to swallow prey far larger than its head. The prefrontal bone is situated, on each side, between the frontal bone and the maxilla, and may or may not be in contact with the nasal bone. The premaxillary bone is single and small, and as a rule connected with the maxillary only by ligament. The paired vomer is narrow. The palatine bone and pterygoid are long and parallel to the axis of the skull, the latter diverging behind and extending to the quadrate or to the articular extremity of the mandible; the pterygoid is connected with the maxillary by the ectopterygoid or transverse bone, which may be very long, and the maxillary often emits a process towards the palatine, the latter bone being usually produced inwards and upwards towards the anterior extremity of the basisphenoid.

I. A Snake With A Single Foot Discovered In China.