I watched an infamous video of a snake engulfing a whole egg. It didn’t bite it down or anything, it just extended its mouth like an elastic band. You can see the egg travel down the snake. How does this process not hurt it?
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Snake jaws are very different to ours. [Look at this picture.](https://v.etsystatic.com/video/upload/q_auto/Python_skull_1_edd5vl.jpg)
See how the lower jaw is split into two pieces? They don’t have a chin.
They can stretch those two ‘arms’ of their lower jaw quite wide apart, as well as twist them at strange angles. This helps them fit things down their throat that look like they should be too wide.
This is quite obvious in videos that [show snakes yawning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV4qPpKRpk0). (Trivia; snakes often ‘yawn’ after eating to re-align their jaws and generally stretch out their mouth and put it back to normal after eating something big.)
A common urban myth is that snakes “dislocate” their jaw to eat. This is both wrong and also kind of silly.
Once the food is inside the snake, it probably does feel a bit tight and full, like we do after we eat a big meal. But it doesn’t hurt the snake any more than having a full bulging belly hurts us – it just tends to look a bit more extreme on a snake because they’re just… all body, no limbs.
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