Which came first, the split off of the venomous adaptation, or the rattle? Knowing which came first might help confuse everyone even more.



After reading all the arguments, some kind of childish, Im gonna side with the "grazer anti-trample warning mechanism" considering which animals are prone to the behavior and where they come from mostly.

Since snakes are solitary animals for the most part of their lives, I would doubt that any one type of snake developed a behavior to try to be like another species. If that were true, that would be an indication of a learned behavior, and their brains arent that complex. On the same token, milk snakes that end up looking like coral snakes were picked out by the hand of evolution, rather than as a result of wanting to look like a coral snake or trying to mimic another species because it "understands" that this was a good thing to do.
-----
Tom

TCJ Herps

"The more people I meet, the more I like my snakes"

[ Show Entire Thread ]