Snake with foot found in China

You be the judge; is it fake? Is it dinner sticking out, perhaps he had lizard for dinner?

Snake with foot found in China
A snake with a single clawed foot has been discovered in China, according to reports.

Published: 10:30AM BST 14 Sep 2009

Snake that grew a foot out of its body Photo: CEN/Europics
Dean Qiongxiu, 66, said she discovered the reptile clinging to the wall of her bedroom with its talons in the middle of the night.

"I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw," said Mrs Duan of Suining, southwest China.

Duan said she was so scared she grabbed a shoe and beat the snake to death before preserving its body in a bottle of alcohol.

The snake – 16 inches long and the thickness of a little finger – is now being studied at the Life Sciences Department at China's West Normal University in Nanchang.

Snake expert Long Shuai said: "It is truly shocking but we won't know the cause until we've conducted an autopsy."

A more common mutation among snakes is the growth of a second head, which occurs in a similar way to the formation of Siamese twins in humans.

Such animals are often caught and preserved as lucky tokens but have very little chance of surviving in the wild anyway, especially as the heads have a tendency to attack each other.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wil...-in-China.html

Aww I was just going to post this!

I admit my first thought is it was a deformed / mutilated lizard of some type, but if that photo's real IDK.

Too bad she killed it, though I guess I can kind of understand being a bit freaked out. Any chinese snake experts out there can ID the species?

I think the fact that the snake was "working" along wall with its talon is a little unlikely. Mutations, like an extra leg on a cow or a cat with two faces, usually are not able to be used by the animal. Im no expert, but my dads a biochemist and im really into biology and take college bio in high school. Too bad people always kill animals and then claim to have seen them doing something in question. Who knows though. Weird stuff out there.

The more I look at this photo, the more I think some poor snake ate a rat that managed to bust a foot through its stomach. Lady probably did it a favor :/

And yeah whatever was going on I doubt it was actually "using" the foot.

Maybe. Its hard to tell with just one picture. And theres nothing to compare it too. I know its said to be 16 inches and the thickness of a persons little finger but its still kinda hard to look at it without a reference. It does look a little fatter at the part with the leg, but the area where the leg is coming from looks like a tumor almost. It has the pattern of scales. It just looks all around strange. Haha

Looks like it ate something (by bulge on both sides of the leg) and the leg punctured through the snake.. and got infected or something (the swelling where the leg and snake meet)

just my guess at what we are looking at

Originally Posted by Miss Tuniwha

Looks like it ate something (by bulge on both sides of the leg) and the leg punctured through the snake.. and got infected or something (the swelling where the leg and snake meet)

just my guess at what we are looking at

Besides, someone tell me how that snake would be able to scale a wall with ONE 'leg'--especially where that leg is positioned. Maybe if it were closer to the head...MAYBE, and that's a big stretch. Logistics would dictate that foot to be useless for climbing a wall...

Yeah i would have to agree with Tiger Lilly. A one legged snake climbing up a wall? Little sketchy. How many things that are actually ment to climb walls can do it with just one leg, let alone a species that has no business climbing walls.

Yes, and it's completely in the wrong place to be a mutated pelvic bone, which it where you'd want a limb to develop. Looks to me like a food item that busted out.

If you look at the way the snake is swollen it appears to have had a recent meal that was very large compared to the snake. Maybe the youngster was a bit over zealous and swallowed a lizard far too large for it's own good before actually killing it and the leg was twitching or scraping the wall as the snake moved. She didn't actually say the snake was moving up the wall but "along" the wall. Just my guess anyhow.