First specimen I ever saw was like that....

Posted by Dr. Phil on May 04, 2002 at 22:35:46:

In Reply to: SMALL DWARF RUNTY Looking Indigos.....more.... posted by Fredrick Albury on May 04, 2002 at 15:50:34:

And it too seemed to be missing the middle of it's body. It also had a rather thick neck, and even the scales in the foreparts of the body had a compressed look to them, from front to back. The whole animal basically looked as if it had hit a mesa headlong at full tilt, like in a freak Wily Coyote-like cartoon mishap. But apart from that it seemed fine, despite maxing out at around five feet long. That animal had been born about 20 years ago, the lone hatchling from an entire batch of eggs, or so the story went. It's safe to assume that back then it had been incubated at temps that are commonly known to be too high these days, so this is what I suspect is the cause for such a deformity, meaning vertebral telescoping most likely in this case, as most other spinal malformations such as kinking and hairpin aberancies are known to occur in most snake species when developing embryos are incubated near the lethal incubational range.

But it's not immediately obvious how such a spinal problem would affect reproductive abilities, so I wouldn't worry too much about trying to breed such an animal personally....

Dr. Phil

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: And it too seemed to be missing the middle of it's body. It also had a rather thick neck, and even the scales in the foreparts of the body had a compressed look to them, from front to back. The whole animal basically looked as if it had hit a mesa headlong at full tilt, like in a freak Wily Coyote-like cartoon mishap. But apart from that it seemed fine, despite maxing out at around five feet long. That animal had been born about 20 years ago, the lone hatchling from an entire batch of eggs, or so the story went. It's safe to assume that back then it had been incubated at temps that are commonly known to be too high these days, so this is what I suspect is the cause for such a deformity, meaning vertebral telescoping most likely in this case, as most other spinal malformations such as kinking and hairpin aberancies are known to occur in most snake species when developing embryos are incubated near the lethal incubational range. : But it's not immediately obvious how such a spinal problem would affect reproductive abilities, so I wouldn't worry too much about trying to breed such an animal personally.... : Dr. Phil

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