My hands smell a combination of rotting flesh and latex gloves, hours after exhuming a sludge of a month-long-buried Oriental whip snake to pick out its skeleton: its skull pieces, much of the vertebrae, and some ribs have been retrieved with some assistance from a colleague (she had previous experience in sorting caterpillar frass, which is arguably an even tougher task), who suffered the odour and the mozzie bites with me. I didn’t expect the bones to be this tiny. When I first fingered through the muck of soil, I thought the remnants of the snake had totally disappeared. It was only after washing the contents through a three-dish sieve set with a bucketful of water that there appeared to be the first inkling of anything bone-like.
Tried cleaning the pieces as well as I could, and laid them out to dry in my bathroom. Assembling them like one would an airplane model would be too impossible a task so I’ll be contented to just leave it at that!
The whole exercise was one great lesson in snake anatomy. Photos to come when I have the time.
Leaving for Hong Kong tomorrow, for the Chinese New Year. Packing, among other things, is always a pain.