A family Greenwood County, South Carolina has recently found a two-headed snake in their backyard. Though the phenomenon is rare, National Geographic reports that it not unheard of.
What looks like something from a science-fiction movie, was found in South Carolina. The two heads of the sname are not side by side, they are on each end of it's slender body. It has two heads, two tongues and four eyes with each head seemingly controlling the body movements.
The snake was found near the home of Savanna Logan and her brother Preston who now have the snake and have been showing it to their classmates and friends.
Typically two headed snakes have heads that are side by side and they develop in the same way conjoined twins develop, but the one found in South Carolina is even more rare because of the heads figuration at each side of its body.
Identified by the high school biology department at Ware Shoals High School as a rough earth snake, the slithery creature grows up to only 10 inches at most and is thought to be harmless. They fead on mostly slugs and snails.
Gordon Burghardt, a herpetologist at the University of Tennessee who has studied several two-headed snakes said to National Geographic,
"We hear of one every several years."
He added about two headed snakes, "Just watching them feed, often fighting over which head will swallow the prey, shows that feeding takes a good deal of time, during which they would be highly vulnerable to predators. They also have a great deal of difficulty deciding which direction to go, and if they had to respond to an attack quickly they would just not be capable of it."
Like conjoined twins, two headed snakes often develop when an embryo begins to split into two identical twins but then stops part way.
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