Why do snakes have forked tongues?

WHAT IS THIS PAGE?

This is the first of a series of public informational pages I will be putting together to address commonly asked questions about biological issues—particularly issues that I have direct or personal knowledge of. I have been motivated to create these pages because of running into web pages that purport to provide 'answers' to searchers questions. While some of the answers provided are reasonably accurate, I have found that most are misleading or downright false. The answers are usually written by people who, if good-intentioned, are mostly ignorant about the topic they are addressing and in any case, they are dependent on secondary and tertiary sources of information. I am both surprised by the number of people who google these biological queries and appalled by the poor quality of the information they usually get.

WHO AM I?

My name is Kurt Schwenk. I am a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. I have a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, and did 5 years of postdoctoral training at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Harvard University before coming to UConn. My research specialty is comparative evolutionary and functional morphology of vertebrate animals, particularly lizards and snakes. In other words, I study the morphology (anatomy) of lizards, snakes and other animals and figure out how they work and how they evolved. Although I am interested in a variety of topics, my special interests are feeding systems and chemosensory systems (smell and taste). A third component of my research deals with evolutionary theory about how form and function evolve. I have almost 30 years of professional experience in this area and have published over 100 papers and edited one book. A such, I believe I qualify as an 'expert' on the topics I write about in these informational web sites.

You can link to my professional site HERE