Are you working with content?Our free online plagiarism checker has a high level of accuracy offering you the exact uniqueness percentage and will help you avoid major problems with your texts.Upload your content safeassign free and observe the result in a few seconds and make sure that our plagiarism checker is the best! Check your paper for plagiarism right now! Snakes are elongated, legless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes.2 Like all squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads with their highly mobile jaws. To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes’ paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung.
Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs about twenty five times independently via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards.3 Legless lizards resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae).Living snakes are found on every continent except Antarctica, and on most smaller land masses; exceptions include some large islands, such as Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, the Hawaiian archipelago, and the islands of New Zealand, and many small islands of the Atlantic and central Pacific oceans.4 Additionally, sea snakes are widespread throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans. More than 20 families are currently recognized, comprising about 520 genera and about 3,600 species.
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56 They range in size from the tiny, 10.4 cm (4.1 in)-long Barbados thread snake7 to the reticulated python of 6.95 meters (22.
8 ft) in length.8 The fossil species Titanoboa cerrejonensis was 12.8 meters (42 ft) long.9 Snakes are thought to have evolved from either burrowing or aquatic lizards, perhaps during the Jurassic period, with the earliest known fossils dating to between 143 and 167 Ma ago.10 The diversity of modern snakes appeared during the Paleocene period (c 66 to 56 Ma ago).
The oldest preserved descriptions of snakes can be found in the Brooklyn Papyrus.
