The fossilized remains of a snake that lived 67 million years ago and was found coiled around a dinosaur egg offers rare insight into the ancient reptile’s dining habits and provides some important clues to its evolution, scientists said yesterday.
The findings, which appeared in the journal PLOS Biology, for the first time offer evidence that an ancient, 3.5m long snake fed on the eggs and hatchlings of saurapods.
It also offers evidence that snakes as early as 100 million years ago were developing mobile jaws that had some similarities to large-mouthed snakes like vipers and boas that roam the earth today.
“This is an early, well preserved snake and it is doing something. We are capturing its behavior,” said University of Michigan paleontologist Jeff Wilson.
“We have information about what this early snake did for a living,” he said. “It also helps us understand the early evolution of snakes both anatomically and ecologically.”
Dhananjay Mohabey of India’s Geological Survey discovered the fossilized remains in 1987, but he was only able to recognize the dinosaur eggshells and limb bones.
Wilson examined the fossils in 2001 and was “astonished” to find a predator in the midst of the sauropod’s nest.
“I saw the characteristic vertebral locking mechanism of snakes alongside dinosaur eggshell and larger bones and I knew it was an extraordinary specimen,” Wilson said.
Mohabey theorized that the snake, dubbed Sanajeh indicus, which means “ancient gaped one” in Sanskrit, had just arrived at the nest and was in the process of gobbling a hatchling as it emerged from its egg. But the entire nest was “frozen in time” when it was hit by a storm or some other disaster and buried under layers of sediment.
“We think the hatchlings had just exited its egg and the activity attracted the snake,” Mohabey said, adding that the site in the Western state of Gujarat has revealed about 30 sauropod nests and at least two other snake specimens.
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