Word: crotalus
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...macho types"--young men who handle venomous snakes carelessly. "Snakes are more afraid of us than we are of them," he insists. "They'll only bite if they perceive a threat." Of course, you'd expect to hear that from an ophidiophilic scientist whose E-mail handle is crotalus, the genus name for rattlers...
After being weighed, the snakes are dumped in a great braided mass into chest-high octagonal white plywood stockades, called pits. There they can be safely ogled and photographed in all their slithering, tongue-flicking, fang- baring, rattling, coiling, head-rearing glory. The Western diamondback, Crotalus (castanet) atrox (fearful), is indeed a horrible-wonderful creature. Its head is broad and flat, and its close-set, silver gray eyes with black pupils seem fixed and furious. A dry, cool skin of interlocking gray-and-brown diamond pattern leads to a pyramid of hard keratin nubs, acquired at the tail after successive...
...milk rattlesnakes, or how they taste French-fried, or whether their rattle is a love call, the place to find the answers is a monstrous (1,500 pp.) book called Rattlesnakes, published last week by Laurence M. Klauber (University of California Press; $17.50). The book covers rattlesnakes from A (Crotalus viridis abyssus) to Z (Crotalus zetazomae...
...shooter? Texan White had written, old-style, that the snake will follow the movement of the gun-muzzle so closely with its head that you cannot fail to hit the snake's head when you pull the trigger. Texan Howe experimented, fired many a shot at many a Crotalus adamanteus atrox, missed their heads again and again, then angrily wrote: "It is such bunk as this that is making the development of common sense in this country slow...
...Amaral's work developing serums against U. S. snake bites was relatively easy. He had the technique of production. There remained to make a survey of noxious U. S. reptiles. He found only 19 kinds of them. Thirteen belonged to the rattler (Crotalus) family. Others were massasauga and pigmy rattler (Sistrurus family), copperhead and cottonmouth moccasin (Agkistrodon family), coral and harlequin (Micrurus family). Harlequins and corals are rare, appearing only in the south. Moccasins and copperheads frequent the southeastern and eastern states...
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