The mental scale, or mental, in snakes and other scaled reptiles refers to the median plate on the tip of the lower jaw. It is a triangular scale that corresponds to the rostral of the upper jaw. The reference to the term 'mental' comes from the mental nerve which addresses the chin and lower jaw in animals. In snakes, the shape and size of this scale is sometimes one of the characteristics used to differentiate species from one another.
Read more about Mental Scale: Related Scales
Famous quotes containing the words mental and/or scale:
“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“We honor motherhood with glowing sentimentality, but we don’t rate it high on the scale of creative occupations.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)