India 5 Headed Snake Pictures

I was so surprised to see this picture when a friend of mine sent it to me. This is a snake found in a temple at Karnataka.

Looking like a creature from mythology, multi-headed animals occur in real life as conjoined or parasitic twins. It is not just in mythology that creatures are given to have two or more heads. This condition where an animal or human which has more than one head is termed as polycephaly caused due to developmental abnormality during gene mutation.

Many mythologies like Hindu, Chinese, Greek,etc has references to such a 5 headed snake in their epics. We have so far read about such a snake only in historic stories and epics . I'm sure it will be surprising to most of you as much as myself, to see such a rare species still being alive.