Pet Snakes

Types Of Snakes

Snakes have been at the forefront of many a story since the dawn of time and yet there are mixed feeling about them. Elongated, beautiful, silky, and magnificent are how some people would describe these legless creatures. Snakes are called slimy creatures that are covered in scales by others. Serpentes which have no eyelids or ears like normal animals and have been sometimes even called legless lizards. Snakes fall into a category called squamate ectothermic. Squamate which literally means provided or covered with squamae or scales; scaly and ectothermic which means cold blooded. If you look up snake in the dictionary you find this description: any of numerous limbless, scaly, elongate reptiles of the suborder Serpentes, comprising venomous and nonvenomous species inhabiting tropical and temperate areas. Now that we’ve described and categorized them let’s go a little further and break them down. Just exactly how many kinds, types, and various other things of snake are there? The modern snake is broken into two groups: Scolecophidia and Alethinophidia.

Scolecophidia are a group of infraorder or ranking below a suborder which contains three families of snakes and twelve genera are recognized from them. Typically ranging in size from 10 – 100 cm in length but many are only 2 mm.

The three families are:

• Anomalepididae: found in Southern Central America and South America.
• Leptotyphlopidae: found in Africa, Western Asia and the Americas.
• Typhlopidae: long tailed snake found mostly in many subtropical regions all over the world.

Now although Scolecophidia are also known as thread snakes or blind snakes.

All other snakes that aren’t blind or thread snakes fall into the category of Alethinophidia. This category has 15 recognized families, 9 subfamilies, and 316 genera. The fifteen families are:

• Acrochordidae: Wart snakes
• Aniliidae: False coral snakes
• Anomochilidae: Dwarf pipe snakes
• Atractaspididae: African burrowing asps, stiletto snakes
• Boidae: Boas
• Bolyeriidae: Mauritius snakes
• Colubridae: Colubrids, typical snakes
• Cylindrophiidae: Asian pipe snakes
• Elapidae: Cobras, coral snakes, mambas, sea snakes
• Loxocemidae: Mexican pythons
• Pythonidae: Pythons
• Tropidophiidae: Dwarf boas
• Uropeltidae: Pipe snakes, shield-tailed snakes
• Viperidae: Vipers, pitvipers
• Xenopeltidae: Sunbeam snakes

Now although we can divide them down into many more categories and families we get the idea as to where each snake belongs. For although they all have their own category and whatever they all come from the same species… snake! And that the main thing. They all have overlapping scales covering their bodies and loosely articulated skulls. Also most of them can dislocate their jaws to make easy work of swallowing prey which are bigger then their own heads.

Snakes can be found on every continent except Antarctica, mostly because it’s too cold for snakes like it warm. There are said to be over 2,900 species of snake that range in size from 10cm thread snake to the anacondas which can reach a staggering 25 feet long. There is even a fossil that was recently discovered of a Titanboa which was measured at 43 feet long.