If you were
to travel back in time about 100 million years you’d see a whole lot of things
that you can’t see today. Dinosaurs roamed the land and those would have been pretty
neat to see in person, but something slithering beneath your feet would have
looked a lot like it does today: the snake.
Now, the
discovery of a baby snake in present day Myanmar is helping researchers to
better understand how snakes have changed over millions and millions of years.
The fossilized remains of the tiny snake, encased in amber, are thought to be
around 99 million years old, and it offers a rare window into the distant past.
The research was published in Science Advances.
Snakes are
incredibly successful creatures. They’re one of the few examples of an
evolutionary line that has been able to endure the worst hardships planet Earth
has ever seen, remaining largely unchanged for massive stretches of time. This
particular specimen, nicknamed the “Dawn Snake of Myanmar,” would have lived in
the shady forests of the Cretaceous period.
This was the
same time that hulking beasts like the Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, and
Spinosaurus were dominating the planet, and this newly-discovered juvenile snake
would have seemed incredibly tiny by comparison. The little hatchling measured
less than two inches long, which matches up with some species of snake that we
see today, but the fossil isn’t totally complete.
The body of
the little creature is now missing its head. The scientists aren’t quite sure
why or how the snake was decapitated, inviting images of a dinosaur chomping
down on the pint-sized snake as it tried its best to escape, but it’s equally
likely that the remains of the snake had begun to fall apart before the tree
sap managed to smother it.
It’s the
first example of a dinosaur-age snake that clearly lived on the forest floor,
and that’s significant for a number of reasons. The fact that snakes have
remained mostly the same for so long means that they must be doing something
very right, and discovering how snakes took to different environments allows
scientists to better explain why they have defied extinction again and again.
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