Given the sheer tonnage of snakes Bryan Grieg Fry has seen up close and personal in his decades as a venom researcher, the accolade "coolest snake I've ever seen" has to impress us at kingsnake.com just as much it did as the guys at NatGeo.



From National Geographic:

The creature he’s talking is new to science, having only been described in 2006. It’s the spider-tailed viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides) and it is aptly named.

The tail is bizarre. If you saw a close-up photo of it, you’d struggle to believe that there was a snake at the other end. There’s a large orange or grey bulb at the tip, and the scales just before that are bizarrely long and thin. Together, these features look a bit like the legs and abdomen of a spider or their close relatives, the solpugids or ‘camel spiders’.

The resemblance is even more striking when the snake moves. It keeps the rest of the tail still, while moving the tip in a disconcertingly jerky way.

Read the rest, and watch video, here.

Photo: Omid Mozaffari/National Geographic