Email Print Share
October 2, 2019

Skull of a puff adder showing hinged jaws

Skull of a puff adder showing hinged jaws. Like most venomous snakes, vipers -- a group that includes rattlesnakes, asps and puff adders -- have fangs that function primarily as hypodermic needles. But vipers tend to have hinged jaws that deploy the fangs when the animal opens its mouth to strike, and fold the fangs up into their mouths for storage.

A team of researchers at the University of Illinois studied which physical characteristics contribute to fangs’ sharpness and ability to puncture. Their research revealed that the angle of a fang’s tip contributed the most to its sharpness.

[Research supported by National Science Foundation grants IOS 1755336 and CMMI 1554326.]

Learn more about this research in the Illinois news story Team measures puncture performance of viper fangs. (Date image taken: April 2019; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: Oct. 2, 2019)

Credit: Photo by L. Brian Stauffer; specimen ©Field Museum of Natural History FMNH11006


Images and other media in the National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery are available for use in print and electronic material by NSF employees, members of the media, university staff, teachers and the general public. All media in the gallery are intended for personal, educational and nonprofit/non-commercial use only.

Images credited to the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, are in the public domain. The images were created by employees of the United States Government as part of their official duties or prepared by contractors as "works for hire" for NSF. You may freely use NSF-credited images and, at your discretion, credit NSF with a "Courtesy: National Science Foundation" notation.

Additional information about general usage can be found in Conditions.

Also Available:
Download the high-resolution JPG version of the image. (238.2 KB)

Use your mouse to right-click (Mac users may need to Ctrl-click) the link above and choose the option that will save the file or target to your computer.