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A hundred million years ago, in the humid Cretaceous forests of Myanmar, dinosaurs and lizards were bombed, birds and insects flew and, now we know, snakes snake the trees
found the first fossilized baby snake, beautifully preserved in ancient amber.
An illustration shows baby snakes emerging from their eggs on the floor of the Myanmar Amber Forest 99 million years ago. (Yi Liu)
" It is spectacular to have a baby snake in the fossil record because, of course, they would be so tiny and delicate," said Michael Caldwell, a professor of biology at the University of Alberta who called the discovery "beyond the exciting."
Caldwell co-authored a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances that describes the baby snake, as well as another amazing discovery: a piece of snake skin by a much larger snake that preserves part of its original pattern, bright and dark.
Together, they provide the first evidence of snakes living in forests at the very beginning of their evolution – at a time when a wide variety of dinosaurs flourished. (Other snake fossils of the same age have been found in deserts.) They also help to show how snakes have grown and spread around the world.
Fossils have been found in amber deposits of 99 million years ago. amazing treasures, including dinosaur feathers, chicks and lizards, as well as insects and plants usually found in amber.
After being mined in Myanmar, amber is often sold to Chinese collectors and museums. This is the inferred diagram of the light and dark pigmentation on the largest snake, based on a fragment of skin found in Burmese amber. (Yi Liu)
Lida Xing, the main author of the new journal, is an associate professor and paleontologist at the Chinese University of Geosciences in Beijing, who makes frequent trips to Myanmar in search interesting amber fossils. He is currently in this country and without reliable telephone access, but described in an e-mail how he found the snake fossils.
Erroneous identities
A street vendor approached him early 2016, saying that he had found the skin of a crocodile But when Xing visited his kiosk at the market and saw the diamond shape From the scales, he recognized her as a snake – something that had never been found in the hundreds of thousands of fossils of these amber deposits.
" This is a big problem," he wrote
A dealer told researcher Lida Xing that he had a specimen containing a crocodile skin. But Xing recognized him as a snake-shaped diamond-shaped scales (Ryan McKellar / Royal Saskatchewan Museum)
Xing met Caldwell while Xing was doing his master's degree at the University of Alberta between 2010 and 2012. Since Caldwell Xing proposed to collaborate on a study on snakeskin.
While Xing was preparing to fly to Edmonton, he received a call from a group of Chinese fossil hunters about another specimen considered huge. centipede or centipede. It has turned out to be something even more extraordinary – the little snake. After Xing confirmed that it was what it was, the fossil hunters, described by Xing as "scientific citizens", bought the fossil.
The head was missing, but the rest of the body was largely intact CT scanners to reveal the details of each bone.
Some snakes give birth to live young, including those who are closest to the fossilized baby snake, such as the red-tailed snakes of Southeast Asia. Others lay soft, leathery eggs that are not easily preserved and have not been found in the fossil record to date.
In the case of the fossil snake, researchers do not know whether it's an embryo or a newborn, or if it was a birth alive or hatched from an egg.
Sea Amber
Xiao Jia, a Chinese amber specialist, holds the amber fossil of the baby snake that she donated to the Dexu Institute of Paleontology. The snake has been named Xiaophis myanmarensis in his honor. (Lida Xing / Chinese University of Geosciences Beijing)
What is clear, is that something unfortunate happened very early in the life of the snake, and he ended up being immersed in a drop of sap. When the sap hit the forest floor, she picked up all sorts of other materials – like "insects and plants and cockroach droppings," said Caldwell – who provide valuable information about the plant life. ecosystem where the snake livedthen washed in the rivers and finally the sea.
" There are literally tens of thousands of these small amber spots," said Caldwell. "They gather like plastic debris, I guess, on the edge of a beach and they're covered by beach sands."
That's how they end up being embedded in sandstone deposits like those mined in Myanmar
The researchers do not know what would have been the size of the baby snake had it survived, but Caldwell estimates that it would probably have made about a meter of long.
The new snake species was named Xiaophis myanmarensis which means "dawn snake of Myanmar".
The name also honors Xiao Jia, the amber specialist who gave the specimen to the Dexu Institute of Paleontology, the museum in Chaozhou, China, which now houses the baby snake. She was a member of the group who called Xing about the fossil.
As for the snakeskin, Caldwell believes that it was spread from a snake as long as a wand and "big enough", but it is impossible to say [19659002] In addition to Caldwell and Xing, the study also involved other researchers from Canada, China, the United States, and Australia. It has been funded by the National Science Fund of China, the National Geographic Society of the United States, the Fundamental Research Fund of Central Universities of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Center, the University of China. Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. and the Australian Research Council.
The members of the research team, from left to right: Lida Xing, Michael Caldwell, Randall Nydam and Ming Bai, as well as the fossil baby snake. (Shenna Wang)
