They are truly wonderful snakes. They have the oddest behaviour, such as coiling in the perfect tight spiral with the head on the outside. Always seen in cartoons, rarely seen so perfectly in nature. The uniqueness of their behaviour shouldn't be all that suprising considering that they largely have as little in common with snakes as that other denizen of madagascar, the lemur, does with an ape. All of the Madagascar snakes are in a tight group with each other (except the boas, they are drift-ins from South America) that has been separated from the mainland for 150 million years. They left before the Elapidae (cobras, mambas) even were crawling around that part of Africa. The closet relative of this group are the the oddities such as mole vipers. They are totally unrelated to the other 'colubrids', actually being closer to elapid snakes than to say an American hognosed snakes. Cool



Cheers

BGF

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