Posted on 09/18/2021 10:49:02 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The study, led by scientists at the University of Bath and including collaborators from Bristol, Cambridge and Germany, used fossils and analysed genetic differences between modern snakes to reconstruct snake evolution. The analyses helped to pinpoint the time that modern snakes evolved.
Their results show that all living snakes trace back to just a handful of species that survived the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, the same extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The authors argue that the ability of snakes to shelter underground and go for long periods without food helped them survive the destructive effects of the impact. In the aftermath, the extinction of their competitors – including Cretaceous snakes and the dinosaurs themselves – allowed snakes to move into new niches, new habitats and new continents.
Snakes then began to diversify, producing lineages like vipers, cobras, garter snakes, pythons, and boas, exploiting new habitats, and new prey. Modern snake diversity – including tree snakes, sea snakes, venomous vipers and cobras, and huge constrictors like boas and pythons – emerged only after the dinosaur extinction.
Fossils also show a change in the shape of snake vertebrae in the aftermath, resulting from the extinction of Cretaceous lineages and the appearance of new groups, including giant sea snakes up to 10 metres long...
The study also suggests that snakes began to spread across the globe around this time. Although the ancestor of living snakes probably lived somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, snakes first appear to have spread to Asia after the extinction.
(Excerpt) Read more at heritagedaily.com ...
They used to have arms. At least Michelangelo thought so.
Hey everyone here loves science that is why we all got the Jab. Well not me personally but everyone else trusts Fauci's science.
Maybe when a magic asteroid made a direct hit on a dinosaur it blew it up into hundreds of snakes. It could happen.
Fauci has no science, and shares your lack of interest in astronomy and paleontology.
Magical explanations are for the superstitious.
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