The first published monograph on the New World’s deadliest snake takes the reader through every aspect of the morphology, distribution, life habits and venom of these rare and extraordinary rainforest snakes.

The largest viper in the world, reaching a length of 12 ft (3.6 m), the bushmaster has long inspired excitement and dread among travelers to the jungles of Central and South America. Indeed, it has been implicated in unprovoked, chasing attacks, and its bite is almostalways fatal. In one Costa Rican study, 80 percent of bite victims died even with antivenom treatment. Although the bushmaster has earned a nearly legendary status in popular writings, it remains an almost unknown character in herpetology. Rarely seen in the wild, bushmasters are so thinly populated, so secretive, and live in such remote forests, that even many dedicated field scientists have never actually encountered one for themselves. Their danger, and the difficulty of keeping them alive when captured from the wild, have made them equally difficult to study in captivity. To date, no scientific book has yet been published on the bushmaster’s real life habits.