67 Million Year Old Snake Fossil Found

[Dianna]

Found this article on wired.com, thought I'd share. Pretty amazing!! Check it out


67 Million-Year-Old Snake Fossil Found Eating Baby Dinosaur

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...intcid=postnav

[twistedtails]

Isn't that funny!! It doesn't have any hind legs!?!? Oh yeah evolutionists, I went there.

[sg1trogdor]

Isn't that funny!! It doesn't have any hind legs!?!? Oh yeah evolutionists, I went there.

Not exactly sure what point was trying to be made here.

Interesting though I never really think of snakes as being around at the time of the dinos I mean I knew they were but you don't hear of many jurassic period lessons including snakes. I guess they are easily over looked when you have giant iguanas running around lol. Cool article.

[DarkComeSoon]

Isn't that funny!! It doesn't have any hind legs!?!? Oh yeah evolutionists, I went there.

Well you better bring yourself back just kidding, but they did say "S. indicus lacked jaw joints that allowed it to open its mouth incredibly wide" and they never said the snake didn't have hind legs.

[BPHERP]

Not to be a stickler, but...

...just because they found a 67 million-year-old fossil of a snake coiled around dinosaur eggs (and a hatchling) does not mean it ate them.

I mean, it might be considered circumstantial evidence that it was eating them, but not actual evidence.

Also, I wonder how the "non-scientific community" reconciles the whole "67 million-year-old fossil" thing.

BrandonsBalls

[WingedWolfPsion]

Why else was it sitting in a nest of hatching eggs? Of course it was eating them. If you read, it also says they found other snakes in the area. The scenario they painted is very plausible.

I don't quite understand the comment about hind legs...if it had legs, it wouldn't be a snake just yet. It's a very primitive snake, though, without the jaw adaptations of modern snakes. Snakes first differentiated from lizards about 100 million years ago--nevertheless, that makes them the youngest suborder of squamate reptiles. That's actually pretty young, because placental mammals evolved 125 million years ago or so. So they haven't been around as long as live-bearing mammals.

The first dinosaurs showed up 240 million years ago, and the first true mammals about 200 million years ago. Prior to that, you had the pseudo-suchids--land-going crocs that may have been warm-blooded. These were the precursors to dinosaurs. The precursors to mammals were the proto-mammals, a group of possibly warm-blooded and furred reptiles with differentiated teeth.

The whole warm-blooded and cold-blooded issue isn't nearly as black and white as folks used to think it was--modern crodocilians show some ability to generate body heat internally, while some modern mammals have very POOR thermoregulation (hedgehogs). So, it's likely that different species had varying degrees of warm-bloodedness, regardless of whether they were mammalian or dinosaurian. Which has nothing to do with snakes, I realize, but I just love paleontology. It puts things into perspective.