"When the cobra runs for her life, she goes like a whiplash flicked across a horse's neck," Rudyard Kipling wrote of the villainous cobra Nagaina in his story of the heroic mongoose Rikki-Tiki-Tavi. And this whiplash motion may have helped real-life cobras and their relatives spread from Asia, where they originated, to the rest of the world.
Scientists once believed that Elapoidea, the superfamily containing cobras, coral snakes and mambas, originated in Africa. A fossil of a file snake found in Tanzania and dated to the Oligocene Epoch (33.9 million to 23 million years ago) supported this hypothesis — it is the oldest relative of this group discovered in the fossil record.
