This Friday we’re gearing up for the St. Patrick’s weekend here in Ireland, so it seems only appropriate to have a snake for you to have a go at identifying:
It’s not an easy one, so if you need a clue to help narrow down the options, I can confirm that this specimen is most definitely not Irish and is in fact from a bit further afield.
Big thanks to our Terrestrial Zoology Curator Emma for sharing these photos.
I look forward to seeing how you do with this tricky St. Patrick’s themed mystery object!
Zygoma 
It is made considerably easier by having the name tag in frame when you click on the enlarged version! Or is that a red herring?
Ah no! My bad – I cropped out the label on the image, but obviously that doesn’t actually crop the image when it’s clicked on. Doh!
I wanted to make a comment on Ms. Antoinette losing her head…. but i can’t be sure it’s a female specimen.
I was going to be blunt and piggish but I’m not sure the coloration is right for the South American hint…
I wanted to be blunt and piggish at first but the coloration doesn’t seem quite right for the location…
As I said I think you can see a name scrawled on a tag in frame. I think that name is indeed correct.
In Australia, snakes have the name ‘nope ropes’. Here we have two sections. Both ropes belong to the one individual.
There are too many mid body scale rows to be a elapid, and the head (which has been lanced off) seems to have a pit in front of the eye. So that, and the weakly keeled scales leads me to think Paolo’s clue is very direct.