Archives of The Cold Blooded News

The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society

Volume 33, Number 5;   May, 2006

Giant Rattlesnake Rattles Rumor Mill in West Virginia

by Vicki Smith

Morgantown, WV: Just like a fish tale, it gets bigger with each telling. Captions accompanying a photograph of three men and a giant rattlesnake, passed from inbox to inbox by e-mail, claim the scary-looking serpent was found in the hills of Clay County. In some notes, it's purported to be 8 feet long and 50 pounds. Others claim it weighed in at 118.

But an expert in such matters says it's likely no more than 10 pounds, held closer to the camera, just like many a fish, to make it look larger than it really is. And it's not from West Virginia.

The photograph shows three men, two in jeans and matching tan shirts with embroidered name tags. The face of the third man, clad in a navy windbreaker, is obscured by the snake.

Though it was alive and healthy at the time of the photo, the snake is a western diamondback rattler, which does not live east of the Mississippi River, concludes Bruce Means, executive director of the Coastal Plains Institute and Land Conservancy in Tallahassee, Florida. "Any attempt to claim that this is a giant snake, or that it naturally occurs in the Appalachian region, is purely bunk," Means said Thursday in response to an e-mail from The Associated Press.

Keith Bartley has been saying the same thing for days, answering" a million questions" from Fola Coal Company headquarters in Bickmore, where the captions claim the snake was found. "It's unequivocally not ours," said Bartley, vice president of Fola. "It's a false story. There is no truth to it whatsoever."

It's unclear who took the original picture and where, and just how the West Virginia connection came to be. However, "That snake did not come from here," Bartley said. "Shoot, if there was a snake like that, I wouldn't go back out there." But that doesn't keep the rumors from spreading or the phones from ringing. "It's got a life of its own," he said.