Posted on 09/14/2009 9:11:38 AM PDT by BGHater
A snake with a single clawed foot has been discovered in China, according to reports.
Dean Qiongxiu, 66, said she discovered the reptile clinging to the wall of her bedroom with its talons in the middle of the night.
"I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw," said Mrs Duan of Suining, southwest China.
Mrs Duan said she was so scared she grabbed a shoe and beat the snake to death before preserving its body in a bottle of alcohol.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
A snake with feet? Sounds like the U.S. Congress.
Looks like lunch tried to escape.
Looks like it swallowed something that tried to escape from its gullet.
That demeans snakes.
OMG...looks like we had the same thought at the exact same time. Any other FReeper and I wouldn’t be worried...
This is nothing more than a DEMOCRAT with the other foot either up its' A$$ or in its' mouth.
Embrace the power of the LAZ SIDE.
Trogdor rules!
maybe it’s really just a one-legged lizard?
Damn. Knew I should have wore underwear.
btttt
Yeah? Well, my "inner-Laz" ruined my T-shirt...
We have two-headed snakes? No wonder Olberman hates us.
The first time I saw a walking catfish in Florida, it shook me up a little.
Well if it was a one foot snake it can’t be 16 inches.
Beat me to it!
Isn't the PC term conjoined twins now?
Bump
Yup, the walking catfish are pretty freaky.
Florida has become a bit too exotic for my taste.
Oh, no, that big lump right where the leg sticks out of its stomach couldn’t possibly be something the snake swallowed!/SAR
What a shame she killed it. Would have made a fascinating zoo exhibit.
What evidence do you have to show that these are "vestigial" leftovers of limbs, and not budding antecedents that are evolving into limbs?
:-)
dragon?
Because that's not how evolution works. A species doesn't make some kind of collective decision to modify its morphology in some direction to fill some future ecological niche. Rather, natural selection gives preferential survival and reproduction odds for animals whose morphological characteristics give them some advantage over others without those characteristics.
Put simply, those little leg-buds would have to be useful for something in the here-and-now in order for them to be something that's evolving into legs (or leg-like structures). Does a snake with little leg-buds have any advantage over snakes without leg-buds - or do snakes with bigger leg-buds have advantages over snakes with smaller ones? If so, then they very well might be evolving into "legs". But it's pretty unlikely.
She saved it in alcohol. Do they eat the worm in China?
So, hundreds of millions of years ago, what was the advantage conferred on animals by leg-buds?
Joke rich environment....
So eventually, the vestigial legs will completely evolve away completely?
Snakes are relatively recent so I would suspect the leg is a throwback rather than a step forward.
I wonder which one decides which way to go...
Snakes eat rats, let’s not forget.
Ha!
The fossil record does not indicate migration onto land via a process of ever-growing leg-buds. Rather, it demonstrates that the ancestors of all land vertebrates were lobe-finned fish, such as the modern-day coelacanth. Legs evolved not from leg-stubs but from fins.
Fish have fins. Fins are generally frail, delicate things, great for pushing water around but not well-suited for structural support.
Of course, some fish's fins are thicker and more solid than others. In the open water, thicker fins would put a fish at slight disadvantage due to reduced maneuverability and increased calorie requirements. However, in very shallow waters, thick, load-bearing fins would be very useful, because they allow a fish to maneuver through mud and even hop from one shallow pool to another over very short distances. Fish that grow thicker fins would therefore have a survival and reproduction advantage in shallow environments, where they can get food and escape predators with relative impunity.
Long story short, there was definitely a survival pressure for some species of fish to grow their fins into thicker, more load-bearing structures to take progressively greater advantage of the land environment, which was otherwise unoccupied by any other vertebrates at the time (but filled with tasty tasty plants and some insects). The process by which they did this doesn't have to require any kind of intent on the part of the fish itself nor of any other thinking being.
This relates strictly to vertebrates, of course. I'm unfamiliar with the evolution of arthropods, whose leg structures are completely unrelated. But a few minutes on Wikipedia will help you out.
That is, assuming, you actually want to know. If you're just playing a game of gotchya, please don't waste my time. But like I said, I'm assuming you're asking in good faith.
Thanks for the info!
*smack smack*!!!
Probably not, actually.
There's probably no disadvantage in having such tiny little leg-buds. That is, within the variance in size of existing leg-buds, there's no corresponding variance in survival. There's no reason to assume that snakes with smaller leg-buds have any reproductive advantage over snakes with larger leg-buds.
Those buds might eventually go away as the genes that encode for the formation of those buds change into meaningless, unusable DNA sequences through random mutation. However, such mutations would have to occur throughout the entire snake population on Earth in order to fully lose those buds forever (to be fair, such mutations don't have to occur at the same time nor at the same location in the DNA sequence; the point is just to mess up the DNA's ability to code for whatever protein forms those buds). When or if that happens, the broken codon that once coded for the buds will continue to exist in the DNA of the snake species, just one more of the hundreds of thousands of useless DNA sequences that every species carries around to hearken back to our evolutionary history.
I wasn’t kidding. I saw my first fish walk across the road while taking a canoe trip near Orlando. It was freaky.
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