KEY POINTS:
The next time you claim to feel hungry enough to eat a horse, consider the python, true king of the super-size meal. This snake really can eat, if not a horse, then a deer in just one bite, as we saw in last night's Life in Cold Blood
(Prime, 8.35pm)
The secret of swallowing such a mouthful is to have an extremely stretchy head, and a digestive system that can crank up to 40 times its normal rate.
The next time you see a mate get outside a big burger in record time, you could comment on the python-like elasticity of his or her head.
The final instalment of David Attenborough's Life on Earth series of documentaries, Life in Cold Blood is a five-parter examining the habits and evolution of reptiles and amphibians.
The BBC-Animal Planet production features, of course, a feast of fine natural history film. Last night's opening episode employed a wealth of technical tricks from turtle-back cam, to infrared imaging, to that fantastic time-lapse sequence of the python devouring and digesting its enormous meal.
With their cold scaly skins, alien eyes and frightening accessories such as spines and fangs, reptiles and amphibians aren't usually top of the animal pops with humans. But Attenborough wants to make us see them in a new light.
"Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes thought of as primitive, dull and dim-witted. In fact, they can be lethally fast, spectacularly beautiful, surprisingly affectionate and very sophisticated."
To back up this claim, he travels around the world, starting in the natural historian's paradise of the Galapagos Islands.
The theme of last night's episode was temperature control, and most R and As are masters of the internal thermostat. Solar-powered reptiles should be all greenies' delight, taking much more of their energy from the sun than from food.
They also know when to switch off; turtles in North America simply go with the snow, freezing in winter and waiting until the warmth of spring to defrost.
In the world of California lizards, the best real estate really is hot property, the guy with the penthouse suite on top of the biggest warm rock is the one who pulls the babes.
So many intriguing species, so much we could learn from them.
South American waxy monkey frogs, for example, are such dedicated sunscreen appliers they should feature in a Cancer Society ad.
Male humans could learn a thing or two about romance from the reptile world, too, with its abundance of flank and back stroking and gentle strumming with claws. Even the most ferocious of the beasts, the salt-water crocs, blow bubbles at their sweethearts.
As we deal with the havoc greenhouse gases and an international financial crisis are wreaking on our world, it might pay to watch and see how solar-powered reptiles managed to rule the place for millions of years.
There's a virtue in being able to sit in the sun and wait.
