A friend sends a link concerning snakes with feet. The MSN News link is mildly cute:
The slab of stone in an obscure museum was labeled “unknown fossil vertebrate.” But when British paleontologist David Martill saw it, he knew at once that it was something extraordinary.
“I thought, ‘Blimey! That’s a snake!’ … Then I looked more closely and said, ‘Bloody hell! It’s got back legs!'” says Martill, of Britain’s University of Portsmouth. When he noticed the fossil also had front legs, “I realized we’d actually got the missing link between lizards and snakes.” …
The new specimen, as befits a proper snake, has a long, slender neck and back. The fossil coils and writhes on its slab, which the researchers take as a sign that it was able to squeeze its meals into submission. Thus its scientific name: Tetrapodophis amplectus, or “four-footed snake that embraces.”
“Huggy the Snake,”Longrich jokes, “because he hugged his prey.”
LiveScience notes:
The roughly 120-million-year-old snake, dubbed Tetrapodophis amplectus (literally, four-legged snake), likely didn’t use its feet for walking. Instead, the appendages may have helped Tetrapodophis hold onto a partner while mating, or even grip unruly prey, said study co-researcher David Martill, a professor
of paleobiology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. …
Tetrapodophis and other ancient snakes hail
One can only hope all prey is unruly. Photos of the fossil and artist’s conceptions of action shots of the live animal provided by LiveScience are here. Science Magazine notes it has a murky provenance:
The specimen’s provenance seems to be murkier than the silty waters that once buried its carcass. Whereas the team’s analyses strongly suggest the fossil came from northeastern Brazil, details of when it was unearthed and how it eventually ended up in the German museum where it now resides remain a mystery. Those details matter to many researchers and especially to some from Brazil, because it’s been illegal to export fossils from that nation since 1942. …
The fossil had resided in a private collection for several decades before it gained the attention of team member David Martill of the University of Portsmouth. He stumbled across the specimen during a field trip with students to Museum Solnhofen in Germany. No notes about when or where it was collected are available, the researchers say. But certain characteristics of the limestone that entombed the fossil, as well as the distinct orange-brown color of the bones themselves, strongly suggest it came from a particular area of northeastern Brazil, Longrich says. The sediment that became those rocks accumulated in calm waters on the floor of a lake or a lagoon sometime between 113 million and 126 million years ago, he notes.
Not all paleontologists are sure this is a snake:
Tetrapodophis “has a really interesting mix of characters,” says Susan Evans, a paleobiologist at University College London. Although the creature’s teeth look snakelike, she admits, “I’m trying to carefully sit on the fence as to whether this is actually a snake.” A radical elongation of the body and reduction in size or loss of limbs has occurred many times in other groups of reptiles, she notes.
Another puzzle, she adds, are why the bones at the tips of the creature’s digits are so long. Longrich and his colleagues suggest the long-fingered feet are used for grasping prey or possibly used during mating. But Caldwell notes that such feet “are remarkably unusual unless you’re a tree-climber.”
And I just happened to glance at the comments section of the Science Magazine article and saw this fascinating tidbit:
