'Very Rare' Two-Headed Snake Goes on Display at Texas Zoo

A very special snake is back on display at Cameron Park Zoo in Texas.

Tucked away in the freshwater aquarium building slithers a two-headed rat snake, with two brains and one body.

"It is very rare," a spokesperson for Cameron Park Zoo told Newsweek. "It is even less common for them to survive long. They often have mobility issues and can have trouble catching prey or escaping from predators which makes life tough in the wild."

The snake's heads, called Pancho and Lefty, often give their shared body conflicting demands, so his movements can be sporadic and uncoordinated. "They seem to have different personalities in that the right head is more dominant in terms of feeding and movement," the spokesperson said. "The left head will occasionally eat but it seems to mostly go along with wherever the right head wants to go."

Sometimes this can cause real problems. "He can easily injure his neck by trying to go in different directions and getting stuck on branches, rocks, and other obstacles," the zoo said in a Facebook post.

For that reason, Pancho and Lefty had to be taken off display in February 2021. "He had a wound on his left neck so we took him off exhibit to heal," the zoo said. "Our veterinary and reptile teams worked hard to keep the wound bandaged and clean. It took until June last year for the wound to fully heal. Now that he has been eating well and the wound has been fully closed for a year, we are excited to put him back out in the freshwater aquarium building."

Just to be safe, the enclosure doesn't have any obstacles, except for the grass. "We are hoping that this design provides enough cover for the snake to feel secure while also being physically safe, so he does not injure his neck again," the zoo said.

Having two heads is more common among reptiles than mammals, although it's still extremely rare. The condition, called polycephaly, can result from the incomplete division of a single embryo, or the incomplete fusion of two separate embryos.

This particular snake was found by a family in Waco in their backyard in 2016. Rat snakes as a species are fairly common across the central and southeastern U.S., but not specimens that look like this.

Pancho and Lefty are a little smaller than a normal eight-year-old rat snake, at around two to three feet long, but his health is consistently monitored by the zoo staff.

"We love how invested our community is in the zoo and in this snake," the zoo said.