This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Lots of animals use mimicry to survive. Some copy the appearance of threatening predators, and others have evolved to resemble plants or rocks so they can blend into the background and avoid being attacked.
But a viper from Iran has found an even stranger strategy. The tip of this snake's tail looks like a spider, complete with a bulbous body and long dangling legs. And when a bird swoops in to try to eat this "spider," the snake springs into action and eats the bird.
The elusive spider-tailed horned viper is a relatively recently discovered species, and until now, scientists only knew what the outside of this snake's unusual tail looked like. But in a new study published in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers used XCT scanners to get a glimpse of the inner workings of this snake's spidery tail—and found that its tail bones are bizarrely normal. "Scientists first collected a specimen of this snake in 1968, and when they brought it back to the Field Museum, people thought that it had some sort of deformity at the tip of its tail, like a tumor," says Sara Ruane, the associate curator of herpetology and director of the Core Laboratories at the Field Museum in Chicago and the study's co-author.
"It sat on the shelves of the museum for decades, but it wasn't until another specimen with a similar tail was found in 2003 that people revisited it." In 2006, scientists described the snake as a new species, Pseudocerastes urarachnoides, the spider-tailed horned viper. When the researchers described the species, they used the specimen in the Field Museum's collections as the holotype, the specimen that serves as a standard-bearer for the physical characteristics of the species. Soon after, researchers captured a video of the snake using the spider-like appendage at the tip of its tail to lure in birds.
"I remember being a Ph.D. student around 2008 and first seeing the videos of this snake in the wild," says Ruane. "The appendage at the end of its tail is so outrageous, and I remember thinking it was so cool. It's truly unique among snakes." When Ruane began working at the Field Museum in 2021, she was excited to see the holotype of the spider-tailed horned viper in the museum's collections.
"It's my favorite specimen in the museum; I use it in show-and-tells and tours all the time," says Ruane. But Ruane isn't the only one who took notice of the snake specimen. In 2023, she attended a conference with Georgios Georgalis, an associate professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków.
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