Audio By Carbonatix
Construction workers just north of Tucson stumbled upon a rattlesnake on their job site about three weeks ago.
Not too uncommon; this is Arizona.
Well, the thing had two heads — not necessarily a sign of the apocalypse, but something veterinarians at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum say they haven’t seen in their 25 years of snake wrangling at the museum.
“It’s unlikely they would have survived if left in the wild,” Craig Ivanyi, the museum’s associate executive director for living collections, tells AOL News. “They’d be easily picked off by a predator.”
When news happens, Phoenix New Times is there —
Your support strengthens our coverage.
We’re aiming to raise $30,000 by December 31, so we can continue covering what matters most to you. If New Times matters to you, please take action and contribute today, so when news happens, our reporters can be there.
The snakes were said to be joined at the neck. Your guess is as good as ours as to where the “neck” of a snake is.
Museum officials say that one of the snakes was “lame,” and that in order for the healthy snake to survive, the two would have to be separated.
No problem right? Not quite.
“Any time you deal with animals in surgery, you don’t know how long the anesthesia will last or how it will affect them,” Ivanyi says. “They can awaken agitated and unpredictable.”
Today, veterinarians at the museum managed to remove the lame snake from the healthy one, without pissing the deadly serpent off too much, and he will be put on display at the museum as soon as he is up and slithering.
.
