The Indian python (Python molurus) is a species of large, non-venomous, true pythons that is the type species of the genus Python and family Pythonidae. It is also known by other common names such as the black-tailed python, the Asian rock python, or the Indian rock python.

As its common name would imply, the Indian python is native to nearly all of the Indian subcontinent. As a python, the species are ambush hunters who bite prey to hold on to them before coiling their serpentine bodies around their victim — both of which can be rather large as adult Indian python average at three-meters-long (9 ft. 10 in.) and weigh in the tens of kilograms, making them one of the largest snakes overall — to constrict the lungs and veins until the prey suffocates or the heart stops. Females are oviparous, laying clutches of up to 100 eggs in nests they lay in, incubating them constantly until her 45–60-centimeter-long (18–24 in.) hatchlings emerge.

The Indian python was originally and erroneously classified by Carl Linnaeus as a boa in 1758, as Boa molura, but was resorted into its own genus in 1803 by François Marie Daudin, who used Python molurus as the defining species. The closely related Burmese python (Python bivittatus) was considered a subspecies of the Indian python from 1820 until 2009.

The most famous depiction of an Indian python is the character Kaa, from Rudyard Kipling's story book The Jungle Book (1894) that has been widely adapted, with the 1967 animated film by Disney reinterpreting Kaa as an antagonist to reflect negative connotations of snakes in the Western Hemisphere.

See also

• reptile (class: Reptilia)
• snake (suborder: Serpentes)
• alethinophidian (infraorder: Alethinophidia)
• afrophidian (clade: Afrophidia)
• pythonid (family: Pythonidae)
• Python
• Indian python (Python molurus)

External links

• Wikipedia — Indian python