Oct 14, 2026 · 25 min · 11 segments
Carcinization is so 2025, say hello to Serpentization, the phenomenon in which non-snake animals keep turning into danger noodles.
Of all the animals that exist in the world, one that triggers our ancestral PTSD like no other are snakes.
These serpentines are still one of the deadliest animals to humans, killing over 100,000 people each year according to some studies.
And even in countries where snake deaths are low, people often score them as being the scariest or second scariest creature in surveys.
In fact, our relationship with snakes are so intertwined that certain research shows us that the threat venomous snakes and deadly snakes in general pose to us may have essentially forced our brains to evolve fast threat detection systems and superior eye vision, allowing us to better spot and avoid the dangerous noodles.
And if you ask me, you have to be pretty successful of a creature to literally impact the evolution of primates, who in many ways now rule the world.
And so clearly, their design has worked remarkably for them, and this does check out with their long survival tracing back over 100 million years to the Cretaceous.
But that does beg the question of then, what does it mean to really be a snake? Well, it's a lot of little things.
But I think some pretty major snake-like traits we can agree on include being limbless or near limbless, possess a gobsmack amount of vertebrates, rock a carnivorous diet, as fun fact, no snake has ever been known to be anything else, and then the big one is you kind of have to be noodle shaped.
Bonus points, of course, if it can constrict, it's venomous, has a forked tongue, et cetera.
But I'd say the previous three are kind of the big ones.
And this got me thinking, if snakes are so successful with their designs, has anything else followed in their footsteps? And the answer to this is a resounding yes, because just like carcinization, which is when things turn into crabs, I guess we also have, um, serpentization? Because through the history of life, not one but multiple groups have evolved into snake-like creatures, some pushing the needle or noodle more than others.
The interesting thing about all this is that when you wind the clock back, you realize that it wasn't even snakes that first evolved this design, as hundreds of millions of years before them, a remarkable group evolved that surely could fool just about anyone.
The Istopoda, an entire extinct order of specialized snake-like creatures that were commonplace over 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous and parts of the Permian.
They were a primitive kind of stegocephalians, which might sound funky, but actually we are also stegocephalians, and so is every other fully limbed group.
So it's pretty broad, to say the least.
And besides that, we don't know how to fully classify these guys further, as they were extreme oddballs with a very interesting fossil history.
It's pretty much one day they weren't there, and then the next day they were just like, boom, snakey things.
And that's about it.
And when I say snakey, there is a capital S there, as just like the majority of snakes, these guys were predominantly terrestrial predators that were very elongated.
In some cases, measuring up to one meter or 3.3 feet from head to tail, had plenty of vertebrates, which numbered nearly 230.
And then instead of vestigial legs, they just completely lacked any limbs, to the point that we can't even identify traces of them in the fossils.
Plus, on top of all of this, just like snakes, the more advanced members of these strange critters, like the Phlegothenidia, developed very light and open skulls supported by a series of struts.
A pretty remarkable case of convergent evolution, as the same thing evolved in snakes.
And so because of all these factors, many paleontologists assume that the Istopoda were the literal and metaphorical snakes for their time, occupying the same ecological niches, and they would have ranged extensively throughout the European and North American Pangea, terrorizing small prey with their small yet numerous and highly sharp needle-like teeth.
And their snake-like appearance was so eerily similar that it may lead some to believe that they really are ancestral to snakes.
Of all the animals that exist in the world, one that triggers our ancestral PTSD like no other are snakes.
These serpentines are still one of the deadliest animals to humans, killing over 100,000 people each year according to some studies.
And even in countries where snake deaths are low, people often score them as being the scariest or second scariest creature in surveys.
In fact, our relationship with snakes are so intertwined that certain research shows us that the threat venomous snakes and deadly snakes in general pose to us may have essentially forced our brains to evolve fast threat detection systems and superior eye vision, allowing us to better spot and avoid the dangerous noodles.
And if you ask me, you have to be pretty successful of a creature to literally impact the evolution of primates, who in many ways now rule the world.
And so clearly, their design has worked remarkably for them, and this does check out with their long survival tracing back over 100 million years to the Cretaceous.
But that does beg the question of then, what does it mean to really be a snake? Well, it's a lot of little things.
But I think some pretty major snake-like traits we can agree on include being limbless or near limbless, possess a gobsmack amount of vertebrates, rock a carnivorous diet, as fun fact, no snake has ever been known to be anything else, and then the big one is you kind of have to be noodle shaped.
Bonus points, of course, if it can constrict, it's venomous, has a forked tongue, et cetera.
But I'd say the previous three are kind of the big ones.
And this got me thinking, if snakes are so successful with their designs, has anything else followed in their footsteps? And the answer to this is a resounding yes, because just like carcinization, which is when things turn into crabs, I guess we also have, um, serpentization? Because through the history of life, not one but multiple groups have evolved into snake-like creatures, some pushing the needle or noodle more than others.
The interesting thing about all this is that when you wind the clock back, you realize that it wasn't even snakes that first evolved this design, as hundreds of millions of years before them, a remarkable group evolved that surely could fool just about anyone.
The Istopoda, an entire extinct order of specialized snake-like creatures that were commonplace over 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous and parts of the Permian.
They were a primitive kind of stegocephalians, which might sound funky, but actually we are also stegocephalians, and so is every other fully limbed group.
So it's pretty broad, to say the least.
And besides that, we don't know how to fully classify these guys further, as they were extreme oddballs with a very interesting fossil history.
It's pretty much one day they weren't there, and then the next day they were just like, boom, snakey things.
And that's about it.
And when I say snakey, there is a capital S there, as just like the majority of snakes, these guys were predominantly terrestrial predators that were very elongated.
In some cases, measuring up to one meter or 3.3 feet from head to tail, had plenty of vertebrates, which numbered nearly 230.
And then instead of vestigial legs, they just completely lacked any limbs, to the point that we can't even identify traces of them in the fossils.
Plus, on top of all of this, just like snakes, the more advanced members of these strange critters, like the Phlegothenidia, developed very light and open skulls supported by a series of struts.
A pretty remarkable case of convergent evolution, as the same thing evolved in snakes.
And so because of all these factors, many paleontologists assume that the Istopoda were the literal and metaphorical snakes for their time, occupying the same ecological niches, and they would have ranged extensively throughout the European and North American Pangea, terrorizing small prey with their small yet numerous and highly sharp needle-like teeth.
And their snake-like appearance was so eerily similar that it may lead some to believe that they really are ancestral to snakes.
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