apparently stupid too ;)

Nah I've had pet snakes. Watching them eat gets boring after a while (well, ten seconds ...) but ya see how it works :P

so..is that photo supposed to look weird? or does it make perfect sense to everyone else here?

I guess it makes sense, it's just kinda odd is all.

Well it probably doesn't help that the Pythons head is underwater. It took me a while to gigure it out but once you have it makes more sense ... slowly.

It looks very weird but it makes sense too.

Pythons, well snakes in general, don't chew their food (they only have sharp, fang teeth which can't be used for chewing) or manipulate it outside of their body (they have no limbs!). They swallow their food whole. Once inside the body the muscle which run along the snake squeeze in on the food, crushing it, while the digestive juices also help to dissolve the food. As the snake's body is also very flexible and stretchy they can swallow things which are wider than their own body (have you seen a small snake eating an egg?) and so can generally be optimistic about the size of food they are able to eat.

As the python (like the ones in this picture) is so big it probably doesn't meet many situations in which its prey is too large for it to digest. As a result it might have lost the instinct which other snakes probably have which tell it when something is too large to eat. So when it comes across a massive alligator it doesn't stop to think 'will I be able to eat this' and just starts chomping away until its insides burst!

If you look at the picture you'll see it was making at tight turn. Unless that happened due to much writhing (wouldn't amaze me), it's probably the case that the aligators serrated scaling combined with pokey tail and dead-rigidness meant that it broke out of the snake during the turn, snake writhes a hell of a lot and makes it worse, snake dies.

You're probably right.
I never even thought about how it happened.

Good point. You don't work in crime scene forensics, do you?

:laughing:

that was awesome