How the Unique Wriggling Motion of Snakes Once Made Them the Most Effective Predator of All

In a creepy-crawly episode of Minute Earth, host Kate Yoshida explains how a snake uses its unique way of moving to capture oblivious prey and how early primates were ill-equipped to defend themselves against a moving stick.

.Our early ancestors were tasty snacks for everything from carnivorous mammals to birds of prey; luckily, they had developed a basic predator pattern recognition system that located general threats and gave the primates time to escape. But when predatory snakes first came on the scene, that system totally failed. That’s because snakes are essentially stick-look-alikes whose hundreds of rib muscles and huge ventral . scales help them move in a way that no other predator does, which kept them incognito and helped them chow down on unsuspecting prey.