Snake Species Found in Another Snake’s Stomach

A snake pulled from inside another snake's stomach was a species unknown to science — Cenaspis aenigma!

Transcript

00:00 What do you get when you pull a snake out of the belly of another snake?

00:04 In this case, a new species.

00:10 Not just a new species, but a new genus, which is like one step above a species.

00:14 So it's really amazing.

00:15 Snake swallowing snakes is actually not that big a deal.

00:17 They kind of do it all the time.

00:19 But when people pulled the snake out of the belly of another snake, they realized that

00:24 it was a snake that had never been described by scientists before.

00:28 So that was a little weird.

00:30 So this actually happened in 1976.

00:35 And so for 40 years, scientists have actually been looking for a living example of the snake,

00:40 because the snake that they found, only example of its species, it was partly digested, which

00:45 is not ideal for describing a species.

00:47 And you kind of want to have as many individuals as possible.

00:49 So they went to the place in Mexico where the snake was found.

00:52 They looked around.

00:53 They looked around some more.

00:55 They looked around for four decades, and they didn't find any snakes.

00:59 But the scientists decided, you know what, let's just go with what we have.

01:03 So what they did was they published a study describing this new species of snake.

01:08 And because of how they found it, inside the belly of another snake, they gave it a Latin

01:11 name which translates into "mysterious dinner."

01:15 So that's the story of the mysterious dinner snake.

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