Interesting news from the Tri-Cities area of Washington state (the heart of a region that produces some mighty fine wines, by the way):
This story was published Friday, May 6th, 2005
By John Trumbo, Herald staff writer
Nancy McLeod of West Richland knew she had snakes in her back yard, but she had no idea one of them was a biped.
The 2-foot-long reptile, which McLeod believes is a rattler, was discovered Thursday morning on her Red Mountain Road property as a friend was helping her burn tumbleweeds.
Pedro Osorio, 46, said he shoved a pitchfork into a tumbleweed, lifted it and saw the snake on the ground. After placing the weed onto the fire, he forked the snake and tossed it into the flames also.
Osorio said he noticed the strange little appendages on the charred snake after the fire died down.
“I called to Nancy, ‘Come here and look at these little legs,’ ” he said.
Each leg, about a half-inch long, protrudes from the snake’s body about 4 inches from the tip of the tail.
“Obviously it is a mutant,” said McLeod, who wasted no time in trying to alert Kelly Cassidy, curator of the Conner Museum at Washington State University in Pullman.
“They were very, very interested,” she said, noting that the researcher told her to put the snake into a sealable plastic bag and to keep it in a freezer until someone from the university could pick it up.
Apparently, the story itself didn’t have legs, but rather something else:
Snake story lacks legs to stand on
This story was published Saturday, May 7th, 2005
By John Trumbo, Herald staff writer
The amazing story about a West Richland snake having legs was too amazing to be true.
Nancy McLeod contacted the Herald on Thursday, saying she had what she thought was a rattlesnake with a pair of tiny leglike appendages.
A reporter and editors ran with the tale, but more than a few readers savvy about snakes notified the newspaper Friday morning that those legs were more than likely the reptile’s sex organs, which were expelled from the body when it was tossed alive onto a pie of burning tumbleweeds.
“Those aren’t legs at all,” said Mike Wingfield, a Richland resident, self-described retired snake handler and amateur herpetologist. He said the appendages are the snake’s hemipenes, a sexual feature also present in lizards.
“When snakes die in agonizing pain, like being burned alive, the penises expose themselves,” he said.
Kenneth V. Kardong, who is a faculty member at Washington State University’s biological sciences division, said the picture of the dead snake in the Herald showed what looked to him like hemipenes.
“We don’t know why they have two, not one (penis). But it would give them great bragging rights in the locker room,” he said.
Indeed…