John Bois wrote:
Is there any way of telling from fossil skulls whether these snakes had thermal sensing abilities? Even if they didn't, there are nocturnal snakes around today that rely mostly on large sensitive eyes, like the 'night tiger' here in Australia that has done so much damage in Guam when it was accidentally introduced there.Coincidentally, for tiger snake lovers there was a great story on This American Life yesterday: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/all/play_music/play_full.php?play=402&podcast=1
Note that the 'night tiger' is a striped form of the Brown Tree snake (Boiga), a colubrid, rather than the tiger snake Notechis (which is an elapid). The snakes causing a problem in Guam is the Brown Tree snake (although I don't know if the striped form, which occurs in N.W. Australia, is on Guam).
-- Colin McHenry Ph.D. Computational Biomechanics Research Group http://www.compbiomech.com/ School of Engineering (Mech Eng) University of Newcastle NSW 2308 t: +61 2 4921 8879 m: 0412 659541