Unborn Snake! (warning graphic images)

[muddoc]

I took these pictures for those of you who may be interested. I initially was going tocall this a fetus, but after further study, I found out that that applies to mammals. If someone knows the term for a snake prior to it's birth, please let me know the correct term. For now I will still call it a snake.

The preliminary information is that this was part of a clutch of Cinnamon to Normal. The clutch consisted of 5 eggs. The remaining goods eggs, I cut yesterday, and contain 2 Cinnamons and 2 Normals. I believe that this snake would have been a Cinnamon from the faint pattern that I can see. This egg was originally marked as infertile when it was laid. After about 2 weeks, the veins started to come in, and I thought the egg would be fine. 40 days in to incubation, the egg still looked good, and had even started to dimple. At day 42 when I attempted to candle the eggs, to see what we were going to hatch, I have no patience, I could not make out any pattern in this egg. Somewhere around day 47, the egg started to go bad. I decided to leave the egg in the box, until day 52, when I normally cut eggs. Well, by day 52, it was definitely a goner, but I thought some of you may want to see what is going on inside of an egg. Here are the pics.

This is right after cutting the top off of the egg.


This is a pic, for size comparison, of the snake next to the egg, and next to a pair of cuticle scissors.


This last pic is a closer picture of the head. I have cutopenmany eggs at different stages of going bad, and this is typically what the head looks like. It is usually very round looking, even at day 4 or 5 into incubation. I have never had one go bad at say day 45 or so, so that I could cut and see what they look like at that stage. Even though the egg went bad, visually, at day 47 or so, my guess would be that the snake was actually dead somewhere in the late 30's.


Thanks for looking, and I thought some may find this interesting,