SSC Tuatara

There are two species of tuatara-adjacent thought worth having here, and the Ophidiary intends to have both.

The first is biological. The tuatara looks like a lizard and is not one. Its order, Rhynchocephalia, was globally diverse in the Mesozoic and then lost, comprehensively, to the squamates — the group containing every lizard and every snake alive today. One genus survived, on offshore islands of New Zealand, and it is still there: slow, long-lived, with a third eye on the top of its skull that is functional in juveniles, and a body temperature preference low enough that it can be active at temperatures which would immobilise most reptiles.

It is, in other words, the closest living thing to a snake’s aunt. Not an ancestor. A sister lineage — the other branch, the one that did not win.

The name is Māori, and means something close to “peaks on the back”: the spiny dorsal crest, which is exactly what SSC’s designers borrowed for the car’s spine.

The second thought is about numbers. In 2020 SSC claimed a two-way average of 331 mph, which would have been the fastest a production car had ever gone by a very wide margin. The claim did not survive scrutiny: independent analysis of the released footage found inconsistencies, SSC acknowledged a data problem, and the run was withdrawn. The company then went back and did it again properly, recording verified two-way runs in the high 280s and later around 295 mph — genuinely, and by any historical standard, extraordinary.

The Ophidiary has enormous sympathy for this sequence, because it is an entirely reptilian story. An animal makes a display that is larger than the truth, is challenged, and then has to actually be that size. Almost every threat display in nature is a bluff that occasionally has to be honoured. SSC honoured it.

For that reason, and for the sheer quality of the lineage, the Tuatara is granted the only honorary membership in this bestiary. It is not a serpent. It is the last living witness to what the world looked like before there were any.