
http://graphics1.snopes.com/photos/anim ... /burst.jpg
Who's Saurian Now?
Claim: Photograph shows a snake that burst trying to eat an alligator.
Status: True.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2005]
Is this real?
Origins: We're used to the idea that snakes can distend their jaws to swallow food many times the size of their own heads, but we're not quite used to idea that they might literally eat themselves to death trying to swallow prey too big for their own good (and body size).
That's evidently what happened in the above-displayed photo taken in Florida's Everglades National Park on 26 September 2005. A 13-foot Burmese python attempted to swallow a 6-foot American alligator, resulting in both animals' being found dead with the gator's hind end protruding from the snake's burst midsection. It isn't clear whether the python was simply stretched too far trying to swallow the alligator, or the gator clawed a hole in the python with its back legs as the snake attempted to ingest it. (It isn't even clear whether the alligator was still alive at the time the snake encountered it, or whether the python merely came across and ate a gator that had already died or been killed by something else.)
Three other gator-python encounters have been documented in the past three years, all of which ended with the gator's successfully escaping from or killing its serpentine attacker.
Last updated: 5 October 2005
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