The animal kingdom is brutal.
Viewer discretion is advised. Bernie Worsfold of North Queensland in Australia captured some particularly gruesome footage of a python devouring its latest snack: an entire wallaby and its joey.
7 News Sydney posted some photos of the scene, and they’ve been shared over 27,000 times.
In case that wasn’t revealing enough, a close-up photo of the python’s jaws wrapped around the poor marsupial was also shared.
To find out more about the macabre event, ScienceAlert got some insight from Henry Kacprzyk, curator of reptiles at the Pittsburgh Zoo, who clarified that the images show a scrub python. Scrub pythons (Morelia amethistina) are one of the six largest snakes in the world, and the one caught on camera was estimated to be about 13 feet long (4 meters).
According to Worsfold, it took the snake several hours to swallow the wallaby. He tried to save the wallaby’s joey in the meantime, but says he was too late.
As Live Science explains, a snake’s jaw is equipped with tendons, muscles, and ligaments that enable the extreme flexibility required to swallow something as large as an adult wallaby.
As brutal as a snake swallowing a wallaby seems, it’s all part of nature.
A video of the event can be seen below.
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