By editor
Originally published on Wed June 19, 2013 6:13 am
Carla Dove smiles as she tears open a small, flat cardboard box. She is sitting at a lab bench in her office at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
"It's kind of like Christmas for me because I never know what's going to be in the packages," she says.
Inside the box are a bunch of sealed sandwich-size bags. Dove counts the bags.
"Eight samples today," she notes. Each sample consists of grayish pieces of feathers, and sometimes bones, all from inside the stomachs and intestines of Burmese pythons.
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