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

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

00:04In this case, a new species.

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

00:14So it's really amazing.

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

00:17They kind of do it all the time, but when people pulled the snake out of the belly of

00:22another snake, they realized that it was a snake that had never been described by scientists

00:28before.

00:29So that was a little weird.

00:30So this actually happened in 1976.

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

00:39because the snake that they found, only example of its species, it was partly digested, which

00:45is not ideal for describing a species and you kind of want to have as many individuals

00:48as possible.

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

00:52They looked around, they looked around some more, they looked around for four decades

00:57and they didn't find any snakes.

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

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

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

01:11name which translates into mysterious dinner.

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