Ages ago on Sick Chirpse, we ran an article about a giant snake like mammal that was found in Brazil that looked kind of like a giant floppy penis. At the time, scientists were unsure of just exactly what the organism was but it seems like they’ve managed to finally identify just exactly what it was.
Unfortunately it wasn’t a new species or a giant penis, but was in actual fact a caecilian – a limbless amphibian that resembles an earthworm. A biologist named Julian Tupan identified the species as Atretochoana eiselti but little else is known about it other than its name, except the fact that it is thought to lack lungs and breathes through its skin.
Little is known about caecilians in general too as they are a fairly new creature discovery. They don’t have any eyes and navigate mainly through their sense of smell and they are also predators who feed off small fish, worms and other tiny aquatic lifeforms that are found in the Amazon. Sounds like they have a pretty useless and boring life to be honest, but then I guess when you haven’t got any eyes and look like a giant dick you haven’t really got much going for you anyway.
Interestingly, Atretochoana eiselti is the largest breed of caecilian to be discovered so far and is more than twice as long as the next known species. It’s unknown just how many of them exist in the Amazon, but they have been found at the mouth of the Amazon as well as the site where this one was discovered which was in a major tributary of the Amazon called the Madeira River. These are over 2500 km apart so it suggests that there might be a fair amount of these critters floating around all over the Amazon.
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