Why did snakes lose their legs?
Moment of Um
American Public Media
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2025
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Happy Snake Week! Every episode this week explores a different question about our slithery friends. Here’s a mind blower for you: did you know the ancestors of snakes used to have legs? Somewhere along the zigzag path of evolution, they traded in their lizardy legs for a more streamlined look. But why did snakes go legless? We asked biologist and snake researcher Emily Taylor to help us find the answer.
Got a question that’s snaking around your brain? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll find a fangtastic answer!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey friends. It's Moment of Um producer Anna Goldfield. I want to just take a minute to talk to the adults listening about public media. You may have heard that public media is facing federal budget cuts, and that includes Moment of Um and all your favorite Brains on Universe podcasts. If you want to protect your favorite public media programming and podcasts, like this one, visit Americanpublicmedia.org slash action to learn how you can help. |
| 0:27.4 | One more time, that's Americanpublicmedia.org slash action. |
| 0:32.8 | Thanks so much for standing up for public media. |
| 0:36.6 | From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um. |
| 0:44.2 | Um, um, um, um. |
| 0:47.3 | Moment of Um comes to you from APM studios. I'm Anna G. |
| 0:52.0 | Um. |
| 0:54.1 | I'm not the world's most graceful person. |
| 0:58.0 | Sure, I can hop, skip, jump, and even bop around on the dance floor. |
| 1:02.2 | But I also fall down a lot. |
| 1:05.5 | Like, a lot. |
| 1:07.5 | I trip over my own feet or over a bump in the sidewalk. I've tripped over logs. I've tripped over |
| 1:13.8 | dogs. One time, I got startled by a car honk and I walked straight into a street sign. So embarrassing. |
| 1:22.3 | Sometimes I think moving around would be a lot easier if I didn't have legs. I mean, snakes don't have |
| 1:27.2 | legs and they don't trip, right? mean, snakes don't have legs, and they don't |
| 1:28.2 | trip, right? Plus, even if they did fall, they're already on the ground, so it wouldn't hurt so |
| 1:34.5 | much. I know millions of years ago the ancestors of snakes had legs, so what happened? Were they as |
| 1:41.6 | clumsy as me? Why did they evolve to be legless? |
| 1:44.7 | We got this question from a listener, too. |
| 1:47.5 | I'm Ken. |
| 1:48.8 | I'm a warrior from Thomas, Indiana. |
| 1:53.4 | My question is, why did snakes lose their legs? |
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