i am terrified of spiders , but love snakes.
[{"role": "system", "content": "Snakes are elongated, legless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes. Like all squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads with their highly mobile jaws. To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs about twenty five times indepenently via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. Legless lizards resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae). Living snakes are found on every continent except Antarctica, and on most smaller land masses; exceptions include some large islands, such as Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, the Hawaiian archipelago, and the islands of New Zealand, and many small islands of the Atlantic and central Pacific oceans.\n"}, {"role": "user", "content": "I am thinking about getting a pet snake!  Have you ever owned one?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "I don't own one, but I wrote a paper about them once. Something about their long legless bodies freaks me out."}, {"role": "user", "content": "Yeah, a lot of people are that way.  Have you ever handled or pet one though?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "I pet some snakes at a travelling zoo show once. I remember feeling their vestigal claws by their cloaca - it was gross."}, {"role": "user", "content": "Um...I have no idea what the vestigal claw is.  Please enlighten me."}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "At one time, snakes likely had legs and claws, but they lost them over thousands of years. Now there are just tiny leftovers toward their rear.. "}, {"role": "user", "content": "Interesting.  I never knew that.  Is there any other cool facts you know about snakes.  It makes me want them even more!"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Hahaha. Well, I know that they have all kinds of joints in their jaws. Mostly so they can open up and swallow much larger prey."}, {"role": "user", "content": "Yeah.  That is the only thing that is a little hard about owning one.  I heard you have to feed them live mice."}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Well, technically you could feed them other animals. They live on every continent except Antarctica, so they adapted to eat all kinds of different prey."}]