Do you ever wish you could just crawl out of your own skin? Snakes are some of the few creatures on Earth that actually can. Dozens of times throughout its life, a snake slithers out of its old skin in a process called "ecdysis," leaving behind papery sheds delicately imprinted with the unique pattern of its scales.
It's not unusual to shed skin; humans do it, too. "But unlike us, whose skin sheds off in little flakes, snakes produce a whole new layer of skin, and the old layer of skin falls off in one big slough," said Jason Dallas, a postdoctoral researcher who studies bacterial-fungal interactions in snakes and amphibians at Middle Tennessee State University.
