FIRST and FOREMOST- this animal was not hurt or killed. How is that possible???
It’s necessary to know that the origin of the heart beat, the signal that tells the heart to pump does NOT come from the brain. Think about it… when somebody needs to have surgery to get a pacemaker to control their heartbeat, where does it go? Right, it goes into the heart to replace one of several nodes (AV, SA) that have failed.
The baby snake in this video was a stillborn among an otherwise healthy litter of 16 babies (boa constrictors give birth live!). As can be seen, it had significant defects so it was not surprising that it didn’t survive.
When I first discovered that the mother gave birth, I immediately saw the single baby with the twisted/ kinked spine and two friggin’ heads that was clearly dead. I set it off to the side and spent about two hours cleaning off the 16 babies and getting them weighed, photographed, and set up in a suitable enclosure. Because at the time I did not know the cause of the second head, I suspected there may have been two embryos that were conjoined. To investigate I made an incision to determine if there were two spines and/or multiple sets of organs. When I discovered the heart was still beating I realized that, despite the severe mutations, it had survived the entirety of gestation (and possibly even delivery- which I didn’t observe).
The condition that forms two heads is called parapagus diprosopus. And it happens in many different animals (including humans)!
