Museum fossil find pushes snake origins back by 65 million years
Source: Washington Post
Museum fossil find pushes snake origins back by 65 million years
By Rachel Feltman January 28 at 9:59 AM
According to research published Tuesday in Nature Communications, we may need to slither back the clock on snake evolution.
In fact, we may have been pretty wrong about just how snakes evolved from the common ancestors they share with modern lizards. Until now, the oldest-known snake fossils were only about 100 million years old. The new study presents not one, but four new specimens that are much older -- dating back as many as 167 million years -- found in neglected museum collections around the world. And these older fossils show the long, thin skulls that distinguish snakes from lizards today. Many scientists previously believed that snakes became long and limbless before they evolved their distinctive heads.
"The skulls of these animals are much more snakelike than even I thought they would have been," said study author Michael Caldwell, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta. "Which means that this quality of snake-ness had clearly occurred much earlier than we'd thought."
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Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/01/28/museum-fossil-find-pushes-snake-origins-back-by-65-million-years/
