We received this Jayapura barneck scrub python as a small red hatchling in late 1990 and here she is in Jan 1996. Unfortunately she is dead from a symptomless RI.
At only a little over five years in ages she was 15' 10.5" in length without stretching her. She is the longest scrub from New Guinea ever measured and the second longest New Guinea snake of record. The record is held by a PNG Papuan python that died in the Knoxville Zoo and was 16' 10" in length.
That's Doug Mehaffey who's holding her tail and providing some perspective in this "Bob Clark style" picture.
We were surprised and saddened by her passing. She was a magnificant snake, but I have no doubt that she could have grown to a much larger size. She was pretty pleasant, but you really didn't want to get in her way at feeding time.
We're no longer keep scrubs and I doubt that we'll ever get back into them (well, maybe tracyae), so I'm waiting for one of you current scrub keepers to grow a really big barneck so we can see what their maximum size really is. There are reports from New Guinea that they get bigger than this...
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