The ancestors of today’s snakes were fast and agile predators with a pair of small legs with ankles and toes. Legs, because the first snake would have come on earth and not in the water, according to biologist Allison Hsiang and his team at Yale University (USA).
The first snakes began to evolve 128 million years ago (during the Lower Cretaceous), probably in the southern hemisphere forests. However, the circumstances of its appearance are still widely debated.
Indeed, some biologists believe that early snakes have developed in marine environments. But the study of Hsiang and colleagues challenges this assumption.
According to the researchers, the first snakes hunted at night invertebrates or vertebrates with soft bodies. And it was only later that they would have colonized the water, and began to hunt during the day.
How are these researchers reached this conclusion? Researchers examined the fossil, genes and the anatomical structure of 73 species of snakes and lizards. The comparison of these data allowed them to not only reconstruct the evolutionary history of snakes, but also the potential appearance of one of these primitive creatures.
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