Image: Wikimedia Commons

snake

Limbless, scaly, elongate reptile

Entityorganisms known by a particular common nameQ2102

Also known as serpent · 🐍 · snakes · serpents

Instance of: organisms known by a particular common name
Subclass of: Reptilia

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Snakes are limbless reptiles of the squamate suborder Serpentes. Closely related to lizards and the tuatara, snakes are ectothermic, amniote, air-breathing vertebrates with an elongated rope-like body covered by overlapping scales, and they move around using undulatory, rectilinear, concertina, sidewinding or slide-pushing locomotion, with some arboreal species even capable of short-ranged gliding flight by flaring out the ribs to flatten and widen the body for aerodynamic lift. Snakes have skulls with significantly fewer sutures and more hypermobile articulations than their lizard relatives, enabling them to greatly widen the mouth and swallow prey much larger than their heads. To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most only have one functional lung. Despite being tetrapods from a cladistic prospective, snakes lack limbs completely, although pythons and boids retain a vestigial pelvic girdle. Some lizards have also independently evolved a snake-like elongated body without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards, who have eyelids, external ears and a fleshy non-forked tongue that snakes lack, although this rule is not universal.

Overview

All data

86 statements · 15% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Unicode character: 🐍
Means of locomotion: snake locomotion
Studied by: ophiology
This taxon is source of: snake meat
Different from: Wąż
Topic's main thesaurus: Thesaurus:snake
Hashtag: snake
Taxon known by this common name: Serpentes
North American legless lizards
Depicted by: Moses and the Brass serpent

On other databases

56 identifiers linking snake across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

15%

externally sourced

Source last edited September 28, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). snake (Q2102). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/snake-Q2102