The skin around the lips loosens first and is slowly forced back over the head, neck and body, inside out, as the snake crawls over rough surfaces and through narrow crevices. The snake now is shiny, the colors bright, and the eyes clear. The cast skin is a horny substance much like our fingernails and almost transparent. Rattlesnakes shed like other snakes except that a part of the skin on the tail is not cast off but is elaborately modified and added to the horn-like string of rattles. Thus, the number of rattles represents the number of molts and not years of age as is popularly supposed.
Lizards usually shed their skins in scraps, often starting by a split down the back.
The glass snake, actually a legless lizard rarely found in this region, molts in one piece as snakes do, except that the skin is not turned inside out. All turtles, with the exception of the soft-shelled species, are enclosed in a bony shell which is covered with horny shields. In the common painted turtle the outer layer of these shields is shed, leaving the vivid colors of the shell fresh and bright. In the snapper, and perhaps most turtles, new and larger layers seem to be added to the underside of these shields each year as the shell grows. Thus rings are formed which can be counted to determine age, at least during early life.