“You need to get enough power in your X-rays to penetrate multiple layers of snake,” Gray said. And though coils may appear sophisticated, they’re a pain to scan. Formaldehyde locks tissues in whatever position it’s placed in, meaning a coiled snake will be coiled for eternity. The day earlier, Sheehy had asked Jaimi Gray, an evolutionary morphologist and CT-imaging specialist at the museum for advice on how to pose the snake in preservative to enhance the soft tissue contrast. Credit: The Florida Museum of Natural History RIP to both of these dudes. The results of this autopsy were published Sunday in the journal Ecology. But did it choke, or was it bitten by its prey from the inside? This question could only be answered by a CT scan, which could peer inside the snake’s body like a digital autopsy to understand where and how things went so wrong. It seemed obvious that the snake had died while eating the centipede. When the entwined corpses were hand-delivered to his home on a Saturday morning, Coleman whisked them away to the Florida Museum. He emailed back and asked for the specimen to be sent to him immediately. “I was just, like, flabbergasted,” Sheehy said. But now here was a rim rock crowned snake whose peculiar passing revealed new insight into how it lived its life-chowing down on big snacks. “You can look and look and look and look and look and look, you can spend years doing it and never find one,” Sheehy said. The snakes burrow underground in limestone, meaning scientists know almost nothing about what the snakes eat or how they spend their days. The photo depicted the rim rock crowned snake Tantilla oolitica, a rare species that is even more rarely seen. Sheehy III, a researcher and the herpetology collection manager at the Florida Museum, opened the email, he couldn’t believe his eyes. A biologist with Fish and Wildlife recognized the small pink snake, snapped a picture and emailed it to a slew of snake experts. The duo died in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, where they were discovered, still entangled, by a park visitor. Upon encountering a leggy feast-a scrumptious Caribbean giant centipede-the little snake opened its jaws and began swallowing the centipede until something went haywire, killing everyone involved and leaving the snake still mouthing the centipede’s derriere, like an earthworm attempting to eat a comically long sub. In February, in Florida, a pink snake about as long as a banana shot for the moon but definitively did not land among the stars.
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