Earlier this week, this news:<\/p>\n
The fossilized remains of a 67 million-year-old snake found coiled around a dinosaur egg offer rare insight into the ancient reptile’s dining habits and evolution, scientists said Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The findings, which appeared in Tuesday’s issue of the PLoS Biology journal, provide the first evidence that the 11.5-foot- 3.5-meter-long snake fed on eggs and hatchlings of saurapod dinosaurs, meaning it was one of the few predators to prey on the long-necked herbivores.<\/p>\n
They also suggest that, as early as 100 million years ago, snakes were developing mobile jaws similar to those of today’s large-mouthed snakes, including vipers and boas.<\/p>\n
“This is an early, well preserved snake, and it is doing something. We are capturing it’s behavior,” said University of Michigan paleontologist Jeff Wilson, who is credited with recognizing the snake bones amid the crushed dinosaur eggs and bones of hatchlings.<\/p>\n
“We have information about what this early snake did for living,” he said. “It also helps us understand the early evolution of snakes both anatomically and ecologically.”<\/p>\n
Dhananjay Mohabey of India’s Geological Survey discovered the fossilized remains in 1987, but he was only able to make out the dinosaur eggshells and limb bones. Wilson examined the fossils in 2001 and was “astonished” to find a predator in the midst of the sauropod’s nest.<\/p>\n
“I saw the characteristic vertebral locking mechanism of snakes alongside dinosaur eggshell and larger bones, and I knew it was an extraordinary specimen,” Wilson said.<\/p>\n
Mohabey theorized that the snake \u2014 dubbed Sanajeh indicus, which means “ancient gaped one” in Sanskrit \u2014 had just arrived at the nest and was in the process of gobbling a hatchling emerging from its egg. But the entire scene was “frozen in time” when it was hit by a storm or some other disaster and buried under layers of sediment.<\/p>\n
Source:<\/i> Fossils of snake eating dino eggs found in India<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If Noah<\/a> hadn’t been ready and had been eating breakfast in his hut, this same event might have left his<\/em> entire scene “frozen in time” as well.<\/p>\n
Yup. That’s exactly what I’m sayin’. I got to that part of the story above and thought of that cataclysmic flood so long ago.<\/p>\n
Well, actually not that long ago. More like the bat of an eye compared to the number the story uses. They say 67 million years. Me? Well, I’d modify that “slightly” to .0067 million years ago (if I’m limited to using the same numerals they use).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Earlier this week, this news: The fossilized remains of a 67 million-year-old snake found coiled around a dinosaur egg offer rare insight into the ancient reptile’s dining habits and evolution, scientists said Tuesday. The findings, which appeared in Tuesday’s issue of the PLoS Biology journal, provide the first evidence that the 11.5-foot- 3.5-meter-long snake fed … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[871,632],"class_list":["post-1896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-suspension-of-disbelief","tag-evolution","tag-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prJUJ-uA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}