The writer is a science commentator There is something otherworldly about snakes. The slithering creatures feature heavily in religion, folklore and mythology: the serpent in the Garden of Eden that tempts Eve to eat forbidden fruit; Medusa, a snake-haired Gorgon cursed with a gaze that turns observers to stone; the Nagas, the half-human, half-cobra beings of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, who dwell in underground palaces.

The serpentine presence across global cultures may reflect their extraordinary variety in the real world. There are around 4,000 snake species, living in oceans, lakes, deserts, forests and even underground. The longest species, reticulated pythons, regularly exceed six metres; the shortest, the 10cm Barbados threadsnake, looks like a curl of brown string.

In February, herpetologists from the US, UK, Australia, Brazil and Finland revealed the most comprehensive family tree of snakes and lizards to date — and found it contained a “macroevolutionary singularity”, or a relatively sudden, unexplained shift in the rate of snake evolution that began more than 100mn years ago and is still ongoing. The twists and turns of their evolutionary backstory are emerging just as other scientists are touting snakes as the new superfood.