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.

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

00:23they realized that it was a snake that had never been described by scientists before.

00:28So that was a little weird.

00:30So this actually happened in 1976.

00:34And so for 40 years, scientists have actually been looking for a living example of this snake.

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

00:44Which is not ideal for describing a species.

00:46And you kind of want to have as many individuals as possible.

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

00:52They looked around.

00:53They looked around some more.

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

00:59But the scientists decided, you know what?

01:01Let's just go with what we have.

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

01:07And because of how they found it inside the belly of another snake,

01:10they gave it a Latin name which translates into mysterious dinner.

01:14So that's the story of the mysterious dinner snake.

01:17So that's the story of the mysterious dinner snake.

01:21So that's the story of the many people.

01:22And what they found, the one, was haunted by the snake.

01:24So that's the story of the snake.

01:25And the story of the snake.