It's a beautiful spectacle, graceful and calm. Not that (dancer Pamela) James really has any choice in the matter. She says she quickly noticed that Sunshine, the snake, gets nervous when the dancer moves up and down too quickly. Not thinking it a terribly good idea to make a boa constrictor nervous, James decided to pattern her dance on the snake's twisting movements.

"We're partners: she leads, I follow," says James, describing the relationship with the 20 pounds of muscle wrapped around her neck.

The scene in which she dances is written as one of the dramatic highlights of the entire work. It's a big responsibility for a young performer, one that's made both easier and harder by executing it in tandem with a predatory reptile.

The team has created a 3-D computer model of the skull of the tuatara to investigate the feedback that occurs between the jaw joints and muscles in a creature that lacks periodontal ligaments.

"Tuatara live happily for over 60 years in the wild without replacing their teeth because they have the ability to unconsciously measure the forces in their jaw joint and adjust the strength of the jaw muscle contractions accordingly", said Dr Curtis.

Although this explains why tuatara and people with false teeth manage not to break their teeth and don't end up with jaw joint disorders, it is still clear that having a periodontal ligament is very useful, in particular for fine tuning chewing movements. This may explain why it has evolved independently in the ancestors of mammals, crocodiles, dinosaurs, and even some fish.

aher, professor and curator of the collections of herpetology and paleontology at the Museu de Zoologia of the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, worked with the Museum of Natural Science in Houston to get Clarisse to Methodist for the scan. He believes Clarisse could be an evolutionary link between snakes who take a lot of small bites to eat their prey and snakes who swallow their prey whole.
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Clarisse is the best preserved Caenozoic snake known in a U.S. scientific collection. According to preliminary analysis, this snake is believed to be closely related to Boavus indelmani, a booid snake described in the late 1930s. Zaher and the Houston museum hoped that getting a look at the underside of this unique fossil, as well as the inside of bones like the skull would shed some light on the evolutionary history of the species, and its relationship to booid snakes (like pythons and boas).

Training on an outside field near their home ground of Skilled Park, the snake had woken from its winter slumber and slithered through the adjacent bushland to get a closer look at training.

It had settled itself in near a walking path before the fearless Ridge picked it up by the tail and relocated it 30m down beside a nearby creek.

The Titans players gathered around as Ridge expertly handled the curious reptile, with Preston Campbell among those who appreciated his exploits with the potentially dangerous creature.

Wilcox... said Guinness wants to discourage future attempts like this.

"Snakes are solitary animals, and we've been advised to not encourage Guinness World Records record attempts where they are forced to live together for long periods of time as there is a possibility of opportunistic cannibalism depending on the species," she said. "Our animal expert has also advised against exposing such animals to human presence for long periods of time."

Jones said that Guinness told him they haven't acknowledged any previous sit-ins and have no interest in adding the category.