Last night, after BDN Portland first revealed that the massive snakeskin found in Westbrook this month belonged to an anaconda, the Texas scientist who ran genetic testing on the skin reached out with an update: The skin came from a green, not a yellow anaconda.
“So, the bigger species, the one that gets 20-30 feet,” John Placyk, a University of Texas, Tyler herpetologist, wrote in an email.
Using the private dataset of a colleague who has devoted his life to studying the world’s largest species of snake, Placyk was able to identify the skin with greater specificity than the public genetics library maintained by the U.S. government had allowed.
There is no definitive link between the anaconda snake skin and the various sightings this summer of a large snake slithering around the Presumpscot River and chowing down on what might have been a beaver. But since the snake spotted by residents and police in Westbrook has displayed behavior characteristic of a green anaconda, we thought we’d share some facts about the massive snakes.
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