- Okanogan — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
Okanogan is the county seat of Okanogan County in north-central Washington in the productive orchard lands of the Okanogan River Valley. This town site, on the west bank of the Okanogan River, was first settled in 1888 and was called Alma. In 1905, the town’s name was changed to Pogue, in honor of a prominent citizen. In 1907 the town voted overwhelmingly to change the name to Okanogan, in order to better reflect its place on the Okanogan River and its proximity to the fledgling Okanogan Irrigation Project…
- Snake (Wikipedia)
Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes (/sɜːrˈpɛntiːz/). Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes’ paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae).