What is AIDS or what? According to biblical legend, it is a terrible and poisonous serpent with horns, with white and black spots of sand color, scattered on the skin. He imagined people as a winged dragon with two legs and a bird's beak. On medieval tablets it was said that Aspid lives in the mountains, that he never sits on the ground, preferring only huge stones. According to legend, this monster allegedly devastated the neighborhood, destroying livestock and people. And nothing to kill him, except to burn in a blue flame. So, aspid - who is it really: the biblical serpent-tyrant or the real reptile living on our planet? Find out!
Who is asp?
The word "asp" is currently not a proper name, and therefore, in the middle or at the end of a sentence it is written with a lowercase, and not with a capital letter. Aspids are a vast family of poisonous snakes that includes over 347 different species. All of them are united in 61 genus, or superfamily. In Greek, asp is a "poisonous snake." The modern classification includes in this family a whole group of sea snakes that previously belonged to a completely different family.
The most prominent representatives of this group of reptiles are:
- water cobras
- flap cobras,
- mambas
- kraits
- decorated aspids
- collar cobras
- African motley aspids
- king cobras
- wood cobras
- denisonia
- false aspids
- deadly snakes
- tiger snakes
- Solomon Aspids, etc.
Aspid family. Sizes and colors
Aspid is an amazing snake! The body length of most representatives of this family ranges from 40 centimeters to 4 meters. For example, the Arizona Aspid stretches up to 60 centimeters, and the so-called black mamba - up to 3.8 meters. The body color of these snakes can be different, but often it is of two types. For example, woody and terrestrial species of aspids (cobra, mamba, viper) are painted mainly in plain gray, brown, green or sand color.
But there are species that have obscure and even vague tones. So, small and burrowing species of poisonous snakes can be painted in coral color or even have a bright contrasting pattern consisting of red, yellow, black and alternating rings. By the way, such a coloring directly indicates the toxicity of its owner. Many species of tree frogs, by analogy painted in orange-green color, pose a serious danger to predatory animals.
The structure of the poisonous tooth of aspids
As mentioned above, an asp is a snake with deadly poison. All species of this family, without exception, are poisonous. The deadly substance is in their teeth. Let's find out what the legendary teeth of poisonous snakes - aspids look like. To begin with, there are two of them: paired teeth are located on the front end of the maxillary bone, which has a noticeably shortened shape.
Both teeth are significantly larger than the rest and have a peculiar shape: they are bent back and equipped with a venom conduit from which deadly poison is injected into the victim’s blood. It is worth noting that the poisonous teeth of all members of the aspid family are quite primitive, since they are located in the oral cavity motionless.
The most primitive species of these snakes have in their mouths from 8 to 15 small teeth located on the upper jaw, but most of their relatives still have 3-5 teeth. It is noteworthy that in such aggressive aspids as African mambas, all upper small teeth (except for two poisonous ones) already independently fell away in the process of evolution.
