In 2016, Lida Xing was painting Myanmar's amber markets when a merchant lured him to his stand with what he said was the skin of a crocodile caught in l & # 39; amber. When Xing inspected the sample through his honey-colored envelope and noticed the diamond-shaped pattern of his scales, he realized that what he was holding was actually a 99 million snake skin. ; years.
Xing, who is a paleontologist from the Chinese University of Geoscience in Beijing, had previously recovered a feathered dinosaur tail and a baby bird in the amber markets. But he said that hundreds of thousands of pieces of amber discovered in the area, no one had ever found a snake.
He bought the snakeskin and organized a meeting with Michael Caldwell, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta. . A few minutes before Xing boarded for his flight to Canada, a different colleague alerted him of another specimen of newly discovered snake that was more amazing than the first: Entombed in a piece of amber The size of a dollar of money was a baby snake. continues the advertisement below
"The fossil is the first baby snake and the oldest snake to be found," said Xing. Before this discovery, paleontologists had not discovered a fossilized snake baby, even in the fossil record, says Caldwell.
Xing and Caldwell reported their findings from both specimens on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The book gives an overview of the evolution of snakes, their early anatomical development and their prehistoric spread throughout the world.
Only the lower part of the sinuous body of the snake has been preserved in amber, which is a fossilized resin. Because the skull was missing, the people who found the fossil thought that the tiny creature was either a centipede or a centipede.
But further inspection revealed his bones. And thanks to the use of a micro-CT scanner and a synchrotron, scientists confirmed that the specimen was a baby snake, a new species that they called Xiaophis myanmarensis. . It looks like existing species of pipe snakes and grass.
The researchers determined that the fossilized snake was an embryo or newborn based on the development of its spinal cord. Like modern baby snakes, the preserved baby had tiny vertebral bones but a large tube of the spinal cord, according to Caldwell. This is a telltale sign that the snake was still developing, as well as the first direct evidence that the observed developmental processes in the spine of a baby snake were established there are at least 100 million dies. Years and have remained relatively unchanged since then.
It can not be said whether snake skin belonged to the same species as the baby snake.
Ryan McKellar, a paleontologist at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada and an author on paper, said the fossilized snakeskin was trapped with plants. , cockroaches and insect droppings. These clues indicated that the old snake lived in the forest. This may seem like a likely place for a crawling snake, but before this discovery, paleontologists did not have direct evidence of the presence of snakes in the forests during the Mesozoic era.
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Scientists do not know where snakes are coming from and how they are spreading around the world. The new specimens offer clues to a potential pathway of their prehistoric movement around the planet, Dr. McKellar said.
100 million years ago, snakes were trapped in resin, Myanmar was part of a migratory island Asia and Australia. This island eventually floated to the coast of Laurasia, a supercontinent that then included Europe and present-day Asia.
"These snakes would have been for the turn," he said.
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