Joyce St. Germaine, age 11, of Coventry, R.I., for her question:

How many bones does a snake have?

The slithery snake has no arms or legs, but he is perhaps the boniest of all the world's animals. The spine of an animal's skeleton is a string of small interlocking bones called a vertebra, and most backboned animals have about 30 vertebrae. A human being has 32 or 34. The snake may have 100 or 200 vertebrae, and some of the largest species have as many as 300.

A pair of ribs is attached to most of the vertebrae in the snake’s spine, which means that a big snake may have some 800 separate bones in his body. He has skull bones, and the two sections of his jaws have separate bones.