Discover Magazine’s D-brief blog covers a 3-in-1 fossil:
An image from the study showing the juvenile snake that ate a lizard that ate an insect. The arrow points to tip of the lizard’s snout. (Credit: Krister T. Smith)
It’s not often that paleontologists uncover a fossil that reveals what its dinner ate for dinner.
Working in Germany’s Messel Pit, a prehistoric volcanic lake, researchers found an insect inside of a lizard inside of a snake (a snalizect?), all preserved for posterity in ancient sediment. It’s essentially a prehistoric turducken, although not one you’re likely to serve up at Thanksgiving dinner.
This particular example of fossil-ception let researchers peer into a 48-million year old food chain, and bolsters theories about the dining habits of this particular species of snake, likely belonging to the genus Paleopython.
For those who love dense, academic prose, this is from the original article by Krister T. Smith and Agustin Scanferia on Springer Link, aka Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments.
The distorted skull is seen in left dorsolateral view (Fig. 2c), but CT reconstructions allow the observation of most of the ventral side of preserved bones (Fig. 2b). The edentulous premaxilla exhibits long transverse processes as in most boines. The frontals bear a conspicuous thin supraorbital shelf, which confers a quadrangular shape in dorsal view. This configuration can be observed in Palaeopython fischeri, as well as in juvenile and adult boines.
