Just because you've cut the head off a venomous snake, that doesn't mean that the snake is done with you. One Santa Cruz homeowner learned that after he decapitated a rattlesnake that wandered into his garage and the head kept on going.

Just because you're prey, that doesn't mean that you have to take being eaten lying down. At Hangzhou Zoo in Zhejiang province, eastern China, zookeepers witnessed an unusual sight after two live mice were placed in a snake's enclosure for supper. As the snake started to eat one of the mice, the other began biting the…

Last September we told you about how snakes are turning Guam into a spider-infested horror show. The island's brown tree snake population has reached epic proportions and is now threatening Guam's native bird species, along with neighboring islands. But where the U.S. government dropped shells on the island back in…

When three-year-old Kyle Cummings found a stash of eggs near his home in Townsville, Queensland, he did what any three-year-old would do: he gathered them up in a plastic container, took them home, squirreled them away inside a wardrobe and then tottered off.

Researchers scouring the Chocoan forest in northwestern Ecuador have discovered an unknown species of blunt-headed vine snake, what they're formally calling Imantodes chocoensis. And it's pretty neat — it's got an absolutely huge set of eyes, a head the size of a penny, and a long, stringy body that's proportioned…

Want to know what substance could revolutionize pain management? The venom of a black mamba! A study published in this week's Nature showed that compounds isolated from black mamba venom are just as strong as morphine, but with less tolerance and no breathing problems.

This is about as nightmarish as it must get for snakes: Scientists have finally identified an ebola-related disease that causes snakes to tie themselves into knots, stare off into space, and waste away. The condition, which was first discovered in the 1980s, is called inclusion body disease (IBD), and is known to…

The US Geological Survey (USGS) is full of extremely adventurous scientists. They walk around on volcanoes, hunt down giant mud slides, and — who knew? — wrestle with pythons in the Florida Everglades. USGS communications coordinator Ben Young Landis just emailed io9 to tell us all about this enormous snake:

As if you needed further proof that Australia is a phantasmagoric hellscape of arachnid horror, here's a charming photograph of a golden orb spider consuming a half-meter brown tree snake. This battle — which occurred over the course of an hour yesterday — was shot by photographer Ant Hadleigh in a backyard in…

Snake venom is not something one intentionally consumes — if anything, we tend to flee from snakes at any cost. But say you are at a rave and someone tosses you a pill touted to contain dried snake venom. From a biochemistry perspective, is it possible to use snake venom as a recreational drug?