Abstract
Author SummarySnakes first appear in the fossil record towards the end of the dinosaur era, approximately 98 million years ago. Snake fossils from that time are fragmentary, usually consisting of parts of the backbone. Relatively complete snake fossils preserving skulls and occasionally hindlimbs are quite rare and have only been found in marine sediments in Afro-Arabia and Europe or in terrestrial sediments in South America. Early snake phylogeny remains controversial, in part because of the paucity of early fossils. We describe a new 3.5-m-long snake from the Late Cretaceous of western India that is preserved in an extraordinary setting—within a sauropod dinosaur nest, coiled around an egg and adjacent the remains of a ca. 0.5-m-long hatchling. Other snake-egg associations at the same site suggest that the new snake frequented nesting grounds and preyed on hatchling sauropods. We named this new snake Sanajeh indicus because of its provenance and its somewhat limited oral gape. Sanajeh broadens the geographical distribution of early snakes and helps resolve their phylogenetic affinities. We conclude that large body size and jaw mobility afforded some early snakes a greater diversity of prey items than previously suspected.
Highlights
Snakes are limbless reptiles that first appeared in the fossil record in the middle of the Cretaceous, approximately 98 million years ago [1]
The new fossils provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, of snake predation on hatchling dinosaurs and a rare example of non-dinosaurian predation on dinosaurs [8,9]. We describe this new snake and its association with a sauropod egg clutch, resolve its phylogenetic relationships to other early snakes, and explore its implications for the evolution of wide-gape feeding in snakes and predation risks on sauropod dinosaurs
Snakes first appear in the fossil record towards the end of the dinosaur era, approximately 98 million years ago
Summary
Snakes are limbless reptiles that first appeared in the fossil record in the middle of the Cretaceous, approximately 98 million years ago [1]. The new snake is preserved in an extraordinary setting—within a sauropod dinosaur nesting ground in association with eggs and a hatchling (Figures 1 and 2).
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