For the first time, researchers mapped out exhaustively where snakes, one of the more mysterious members in the Animal Kingdom, come from.
According to Live Science, the most recent common ancestor of modern snakes dates back 128 million years, lived on land in swampy areas of the Southern Hemisphere. They also learned the ancestral snake was nocturnal and even had limbs.
The researchers published their work in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.
"We generated the first comprehensive reconstruction of what the ancestral snake was like," study lead author Allison Hsiang, a postdoctoral researcher of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University, said in a news release. "We infer that the most recent common ancestor of all snakes was a nocturnal, stealth-hunting predator targeting relatively large prey, and most likely would have lived in forested ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere."
With more than 3,400 species in the world today, snakes are one of the most recognizable reptiles in the world, most notably for not having limbs. The limbs would have been tiny, but also akin to those of lizards.
"Our analyses suggest that the most recent common ancestor of all living snakes would have already lost its forelimbs, but would still have had tiny hind limbs, with complete ankles and toes. It would have first evolved on land, instead of in the sea," study co-author Daniel Field, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, said in the release. "Both of those insights resolve longstanding debates on the origin of snakes."
For their study, the researchers examined DNA and anatomical samples from 73 species of snakes and lizards.
"Primate brains, including those of humans, are hard-wired to attend to serpents, and with good reason," study senior author Jacques Gauthier, curator of fossil vertebrates at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, said in the release. "Our natural and adaptive attention to snakes makes the question of their evolutionary origin especially intriguing."
