I suggest anyone living in Tx familiarize themselves with the 4 venomous snakes before trying to identify dozens of common harmless ones plus another dozen not so common harmless as well. Who cares what his scientific and common name is as long as you know wherther it's venomous? When I say we have 4,that is grouping all the different rattle snakes into a single group. There is also 2 corals but if you learn to identify either on sight,you will recconize both as coral emediatly. About a dozen of our harmless snakes memic the coral's red-yellow-black colors but they are simple to recconize with this little rhyme. Red touch black,friend of jack,red touch yellow will kill a fellow. Pull up pictures of Texas snakes and play a game with 2 or more players. Cover the names of the red,yellow and black snakes and have others say wherether it's a coral or not. Be wise and don't attempt to say what the snake's name is,just yes or no. Now you will recconize a coral as well as all the harmless with one good look. Do we even need to explain how to recconize a rattler? I do suggest listening closly any time you are near one in captivity so you might be aware of one some day when you havn't seen it. There,you already know how to id half the venomous snakes in Texas,work on the copperhead and cottonmouth and you will feel much better next time you cross paths with a snake. We had many more in times passed but the scorpions,alligators,spiders,fireants,wasps,yellow jackets,chiggers,ticks and wild hogs have been eating them up recently.

This is Kirtland's Snkake (Clonophis kirtlandi). It is a really neat snake that is only found in small areas of the US in IN, IL, OH, and a few spots in nearby states. It is an endangered species over most of its range. You are lucky to have such a unique and rare critter in your yard. I hope you will protect them. Although....if you didn't know what it was, why were you handling it? This post was edited by FHFchrish on Fri, Sep 5, 14 at 9:25

The snake is a Garter, exactly which species would depend on where you live, since you didn't include that information. It's harmless in any case, even if it were still alive. It's hard to say what might have killed it, but you said that you have a dog, so that would be my prime suspect, either that or a cat.

That is a baby ratsnake (Pantherophis obsoletus). Completely harmless rodent eaters.