Legless lizards look a lot like snakes, but aren’t. Most of their body is actually tail and they have tiny vestigial limbs and a non-forked tongue. Unlike snakes, they have eyelids and external ear openings.
All this being said, there are a few ways to tell snakes apart from the majority of legless lizards. For example, snakes tend to have relatively longer bodies and shorter tails than their limbless reptilian cousins. Further, serpents don’t have eyelids or external ears, while most lizards do. And many “legless” lizards actually have tiny vestigial limbs, while snakes generally sport no external appendages at all.
There also tend to be big ecological differences between snakes and limbless lizards. Most serpents take relatively big prey items on an infrequent basis, while lizards tend to eat large numbers of small creatures such as insects.
But you can’t always rely on these guidelines. Pythons and boas, for instance, have rudimentary hind limbs that males use during courtship and mating. And the species that I studied in grad school — Burton’s legless lizard, Lialis burtonis — has no eyelids, just like a snake. It eats like a snake, too, attacking other lizards up to half of its own weight, choking them out and swallowing them whole.
Credit : Live Science
Picture Credit : Google
