This New “Two-Headed” Snake Species Has a Tail that Looks Like Its Own Head
A new species of reed snake, Calamaria incredibilis, has been identified in southern China. This snake is notable for its tail, which resembles its head, leading locals to refer to it as the two-headed snake. The discovery highlights the hidden diversity of reptile species in the region, with the potential for more undiscovered species nearby.
- ▪Calamaria incredibilis was misidentified as a known species before being recognized as new.
- ▪The snake measures approximately 8 inches and has a distinctive coloration with dark stripes.
- ▪It was found in two locations over 311 miles apart, suggesting a wider distribution than previously recorded.
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| Original publisher | Discover Magazine |
| Canonical URL | https://www.discovermagazine.com/this-new-two-headed-snake-species-has-a-tail-that-looks-like-its-own-head-49152 |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 16:35:00 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T16:47:50.047Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T16:47:50.047Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | sy2TUforCFqM |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
New species get named after places, people, and physical traits. Rarely does one get named after the reaction it provoked. Meet Calamaria incredibilis, a newly described reed snake from southern China whose stubby, blunt-tipped tail so closely mimics its own head that locals have called it the two-headed snake. When researchers finally realized it was an entirely new species, they reached for the Latin word for "unbelievable."A study published in Zoosystematics and Evolution formally describes the species from just two specimens collected in Guangxi, China.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Discover Magazine.
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