Every year on 1 May, San Domenico di Sora gets some spectacularly bizarre accessories. During a religious procession in the Italian village of Cocullo, a statue of the saint is adorned with harmless snakes (above). The origins of this festa dei serpari, or festival of the snake-catchers, may date back centuries.

Gianpaolo Montinaro, a biologist at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, was eager to study the snakes, but it took him years to convince the villagers that a long-term research project would help, rather than harm, the reptiles. Legally, the serpari can only catch local snakes, such as green whip snakes (Hierophis viridiflavus) and four-lined snakes (Elaphe quatuorlineata, shown top and below), in the weeks up to the procession. Shortly after, the animals are released (pictured bottom) at the exact spot where they were found, which leaves little time for Montinaro and his team to study them.

Before each procession, the researchers transform the local museum into a pop-up health clinic for snakes. They measure each animal’s length and weight, take swabs and blood samples, and implant microchips to identify repeat visitors. They also treat wounds and remove parasites from the snakes’ bodies and mouths (pictured above).

Almost 20 years’ worth of data indicates the snakes are thriving, with no sign of a dangerous fungal disease that has appeared in other European populations. We might benefit as well. “Snakes pick up microbes on the ground,” says Montinaro. “That helps us to look out for novel pathogens that could infect humans.”

A commonly used blood thinner could prevent hundreds of thousands of people from needing amputations after a cobra bite.

, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South and South-East Asia. Another 400,000 people have complications, such as the death of body tissues and subsequent amputations.

Focusing on complications from cobra bites, at the University of Sydney, Australia, and her team found that the venom targets a molecule called heparan sulfate, which lines the surface of cells at the site of the bite, and a naturally occurring substance called heparin, which is produced by certain immune cells.

Next, the researchers exposed human skin and blood cells to the venom of two cobra species from Africa: the red spitting cobra (Naja pallida) and the black-necked spitting cobra (Naja nigricollis). Adding heparin, which is commonly administered as a drug to thin blood, prevented the toxins from killing the cells.

Similar experiments in mice also reduced the risk of tissue death. In mice, heparin “could almost completely block the local damage at the bite site”, says team member also at the University of Sydney.

The scientists think the treatment could be effective for bites from many different types of cobras but is unlikely to work on non-cobra species, unless their toxins use a similar chemical pathway to destroy cells.

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Unlike existing antivenoms, heparin is stable at room temperature, which could improve access when prompt treatment is needed, says Du. This could be done via an auto-injector, such as an EpiPen, she says.

Another advantage of heparin is that existing antivenoms don’t prevent necrosis, says Du. However, at the University of Newcastle in Australia says that is probably because they are not generally available immediately after a snakebite.

“What they didn’t do in this article was compare this to antivenom, because it is highly likely that antivenom would be just as effective,” he says. The mice were given heparin immediately, which may have been why it was effective, says Isbister. “But will it work after 1 hour, 4 hours or [the] 24 hours that it takes to get from a remote location in Tanzania to a person bitten by a cobra?”

Fossil remains discovered in India have been identified as belonging to an enormous, 47-million-year-old extinct snake. Though only a few of the animal’s vertebrae were recovered, researchers estimate that it could have been up to 15 metres long, putting it in contention for being the longest snake of all time.

Back in 2005, palaeontologists including at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee were searching for fossils in a coal mine in Gujarat in western India.

“We were actually prospecting this locality for fossils of early whales,” says Bajpai, “but we found not just whales but a host of other vertebrate fossils, including those of snakes.”

Among these fossils was a collection of 27 vertebrae measuring up to 6 centimetres long and 11 centimetres wide. Due to their large size and the fact that their anatomy was somewhat obscured by sediment, these were first thought to belong to some sort of extinct crocodile, says , also at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.

After a closer analysis, Datta and Bajpai now believe the vertebrae belonged to an exceedingly large snake from an extinct family called the Madtsoiidae. Only the extinct species Titanoboa cerrejonensis, which had slightly larger vertebrae and is estimated to have grown to a maximum length of between 12.8 and 14.3 metres, is of a comparable size.

The new species has been named Vasuki indicus, after Vasuki, a serpent in Hinduism that is often depicted curled around the neck of the god Shiva. The researchers say it is likely to have been an ambush predator living in either a terrestrial or semi-aquatic environment, such as a marsh or swamp, similar to many of today’s large species of python.

Using data from modern-day snakes that compares the size of their vertebrae with overall length, Datta and Bajpai estimate that V. indicus was between 10.9 and 15.2 metres long. While this is potentially longer than Titanoboa, the researchers emphasise that we don’t have complete skeletons of any Madtsoiid snakes, so it is impossible to know whether their length and vertebrae size would correlate in the same way as living species.

“Caution is always warranted whenever you are extrapolating beyond the available data set,” says Jacob McCartney at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York. “But the vertebrae of this new species are so big that they really are second in size only to those of the Colombian species Titanoboa.”