2019年6月20日 · Clearly, these cold-blooded, slithering, legless creatures evolved from four-legged reptilian ancestors, either small, burrowing, landbound lizards (the prevailing theory) or, just possibly, the family of marine reptiles called mosasaurs that appeared in the earth's seas around 100 million years ago. Why is snake evolution such an enduring mystery?

Snakes are thought to have evolved from either burrowing or aquatic lizards, perhaps during the Jurassic period, with the earliest known fossils dating to between 143 and 167 Ma ago. [9][10] The diversity of modern snakes appeared during the Paleocene epoch (c. 66 to 56 Ma ago, after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event).

2024年2月29日 · Not long after the origin of snakes—when certain lizards began to lose their legs more than 150 million years ago—a burst of evolutionary innovation paved the way for the variety of...

While the habitats of early snakes are debated, there is agreement that the most recent common ancestor of modern snakes had a small skull with a shape suited to burrowing. The oldest snakes are thought to have been terrestrial but non-burrowing (Da Silva et al. 2018).

2024年2月23日 · A new study published this week in Science explains why: genomic data has revealed that snakes experienced a burst of adaptation around 125 million years ago —early on in their...

2024年2月23日 · This rapid evolution, encompassing significant shifts in traits related to feeding, locomotion, and sensory processing, has allowed snakes to occupy ecological roles and prey on species inaccessible to other reptiles.

2018年1月25日 · Here, the authors use an integrative geometric morphometric approach that suggests evolution from terrestrial to fossorial in the most recent common ancestor of extant snakes.

2024年6月4日 · As far as researchers can tell, snakes evolved from lizards roughly 100 million to 120 million years ago. The oldest snake ancestors yet discovered still had four legs—a 2015 study described four such species. The oldest of those four was Eophis underwoodi, discovered in England and dating back to the Middle Jurassic about 167 million years ago.

2015年5月20日 · Our study provides new insights into when, where, and how snakes originated, and presents the most complete picture of the early evolution of snakes to date.

2019年11月20日 · Scholars of snake evolution were left to guess at what the head of these ancient animals might have looked like. We know from their shared anatomy that snakes evolved from lizards. We also know...