Hugh Gabriel

In 2010, Illinois Natural History Survey Director Mike Dreslik found something strange on the road. It was a massasauga rattlesnake, an endangered species in Illinois, and its head was deformed, covered in strange sores. He called up his friend Matt Allender, a wildlife epidemiologist.
“I was thinking I was going just to find a smushed head from hits by cars, and what we found was not at all that,” Allender recalled.