How do snakes hear although they do not have external ears?
Answers
Answer:
Modern reptiles still have three bones in their lower jaws, where they play a role in detecting vibrations, particularly those propagating through the ground. Most modern lizard ears are essentially like those of modern mammals, with a small external ear leading to a large ear drum close to the body's surface, which passes sound from the air (or the jawbones) to the columella and thence to the inner ear. In contrast, snakes lack all traces of an outer ear as well as an ear drum. Instead, a snake's columella is in direct contact with, and picks up vibrations from, its quadrate bone (the dark blue bone in the diagram above). You might suspect that this arrangement would only be useful for detecting ground-borne vibrations, and you'd be partially right: snakes are exquisitely sensitive to ground-borne vibrations. But, they can also detect airborne sounds.2
Answer:
the vibrations pass through the skin and muscles of the snake to a bone connected too its inner ear, from this bone the vibrations pass to the inner ear, which "hears" them.