Snakes.

Snakes on a plane sounds like a terrifying ordeal for passengers, but in this case it was the reptile who had a wild ride. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a python found itself trapped on the wing of a Qantas plane traveling from Australia to Papua New Guinea. Twenty minutes into the "Down Under" flight, a passenger noticed a strange hitchhiker from her window: a three-meter-long python. The surprisingly calm snake-spotter informed a flight attendant about the snake, pointing out the reptile's head and body peeking out from inside the wing. Snake expert Rick Shine later identified the snake as an "uncomfortable" scrub python, the longest snake species in Australia. ''There's no ...

For an Australian woman and her 3-year-old son, seven was an unlucky number. According to the Daily Mail U.K., Donna Sim discovered seven deadly Eastern brown snakes living in her son's wardrobe. Sim was bewildered by how the reptiles got there, until she remembered the snake eggs her son, Kyle Cumming, found several weeks earlier. Kyle stored the eggs in a container after finding them, and apparently he tucked it away in his dresser. Wildlife experts say that it is good that Sim found the snakes before they grew too large. Eastern brown snakes are the world's second deadliest species. After a few more days, the snakes would have been able to break out and potentially deliver a fatal ...

According to CNN, a cobra smuggled aboard an Egypt Air flight from Cairo to Kuwait managed to slither out of its crate, bite a man and force an emergency landing. An Egypt Air official said that the 48-year-old passenger who brought the scaly friend along owned a reptile shop in Kuwait. He reportedly tried to sneak the Egyptian cobra in a carry-on bag and could not contain it underneath his seat, so it bit him and escaped. After the plane made an emergency landing in Al Ghardaqa, an Egyptian resort town, officials brought the bitten passenger to receive medical treatment, but he refused. He claimed that the wound was only superficial. But according to doctors, anyone who gets bitten by a ...

SYDNEY - A man has died in Australia after being bitten by one of the world's most venomous snakes -- a rare fatality despite the country being home to the planet's 10 deadliest species. Andrew Vaughan's body was found by a search party last week after he went missing while checking power lines in dense bushland near Yeppoon, 700 kilometres (430 miles) north of Brisbane. An autopsy had determined that the 57-year-old died from a taipan bite, his employer Ergon Energy said. Vaughan became separated from colleagues in thick scrub at the remote site last Thursday and the alarm was raised when he ceased responding to radio and phone contact. "Andrew was working with another workmate and a ...