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Merged Uniped Snake

jamrat

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Haven't looked into it yet, but I wouldn't expect the Telegraph to be taken in by a photoshop job. I doubt it is impossible either.
 
No.

However, boas and pythons possess something called anal spurs, which are vestigial hip and leg bones tipped in a claw which makes them resemble toes. It is possible that there is a mutation that could cause the snake to grow multiples of these in something like polydactalism, which would create a mass of claws that might resemble a foot. It wouldn't actually be a foot, though.
 
Thanks for the replies. Mojo's link has hind legs on snakes for an example of atavism, but alas, the link to the citation is busted. Rogue1stclass' explanation sounds reasonable. I'll keep looking.
 
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Accord to the story, it was not just a foot, but a foot that the animal used to cling to the wall. I'm having a hard time believing that.
 
It may be just a snake that has eaten a small lizard, which has clawed its way out of the stomach? I have seen it with larger snakes reported in news articles. Last one I saw was a python? and an alligator?
 
It's apparent that the snake has recently ingested...Something....I was wondering about that too.
Still, if the critter was examined....
 
jamrat said:
Here's a story about a snake found in China that has a foot growing out of it. If true, that would be amazing to me, but it's hard to believe. The story is pretty thin and all my googling leads back to this one article. Please set this layman straight, is it woo or is it something that is possible? Or maybe in this case it's both.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6187320/Snake-with-foot-found-in-China.html
Click to expand...
Hey theres Satan. God forgot to take both legs off.
 
*NO* live snake would hold it's head like that. See how the whiter scales that go on the underside of the body are visible? In a live snake, you would not be able to see that so clearly. It looks to me like it was killed, handed over to a taxidermist to put the foot on, and stuffed. Snakes know very well which way is up and which way is down... they would not turn the underside of their body like that.
 
The article says she beat the snake to death and preserved it in alcohol, so I think it's safe to say that the picture is of a dead snake.
 
Silly Green Monkey said:
The article says she beat the snake to death and preserved it in alcohol, so I think it's safe to say that the picture is of a dead snake.
Click to expand...

Ah - I did not read the article, just saw the picture.

So if it's a dead snake... it does not seem that hard to add on parts and publish the picture as a joke. I suppose someone could do a close examination and determine one way or the other but I'm going for the joke or hoax explanation.
 
A snake grows a leg

The Telegraph reports (click on link for picture):

Snake with foot found in China
A snake with a single clawed foot has been discovered in China, according to reports.
telegraph.co.uk
Published: 10:30AM BST 14 Sep 2009

...
The snake – 16 inches long and the thickness of a little finger – is now being studied at the Life Sciences Department at China's West Normal University in Nanchang.

Snake expert Long Shuai said: "It is truly shocking but we won't know the cause until we've conducted an autopsy."

A more common mutation among snakes is the growth of a second head, which occurs in a similar way to the formation of Siamese twins in humans.

Such animals are often caught and preserved as lucky tokens but have very little chance of surviving in the wild anyway, especially as the heads have a tendency to attack each other.
Click to expand...

Full: telegraph.co.uk


Biologist PZ Myers commented:

Isn't pleiotropy handy?
Posted on: September 16, 2009 9:45 AM, by PZ Myers


How can this happen? Genes are pleiotropic — they tend to have lots of different functions. The genes involved in making a limb are also expressed in other places; for instance, the Hox genes that specify identity along the length of the body are also reused in specifying identity along the length of the limb. What that means is that when the snake evolved limblessness, it didn't do so by simply throwing away a collection of leg genes — it couldn't, not without also destroying genes that functioned in generating its body plan. Instead, it evolved genes or modified the regulation of genes to actively suppress limb development…but the genes to build a limb are still in the genome, and still functional, and still actively working in other ways.

What most likely happened here is that some environmental agent suppressed the suppressor, allowing the old developmental program for a limb to be re-expressed. The retention of such programs is, of course, evidence that this animal evolved from limbed ancestors.
...

...It could just be a poor lizard that punched a claw through the abdominal wall as it was being digested, and the snake was briefly trundling about in pain from the injury.

We need to do a dissection!
Click to expand...

[Sorry, for the repeat post, just saw the other thread. My search for snake tags didn't turn anything up before I posted.]
 
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No need for apologies Questioninggeller. That Myers link is just the sort of thing I'm looking for. It's all very fascinating.

From ponderingturtle's link comes this.

Exactly how the mutation causes the chickens to sprout teeth is unknown, Fallon notes, but a similar effect can be produced in normal chickens. Harris proved this by engineering a virus to mimic the molecular signals of the mutation and caused normal chickens to briefly develop teeth that were then reabsorbed into the beak.


I hope I live long enough to see the day when we can do something like turn on our prehensile tail gene. Probably not though.:(
 
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