Fernando F. Garberoglio, SebastiÃn ApesteguÃa, Tiago R. SimÃes, Alessandro Palci, RaÃl O. GÃmez, Randall L. Nydam, Hans C. E. Larsson, Michael S. Y. Lee and Michael W. Caldwell (2019)
New fossils from the legged snake Najash reveal the evolutionary origins of key features of the modern snake skull and body.
Science Advances 5(1): eaax5833
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax5833
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/11/eaax5833Free pdf:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/11/eaax5833.full.pdfSnakes represent one of the most dramatic examples of the evolutionary versatility of the vertebrate body plan, including body elongation, limb loss, and skull kinesis. However, understanding the earliest steps toward the acquisition of these remarkable adaptations is hampered by the very limited fossil record of early snakes. Here, we shed light on the acquisition of the snake body plan using microâcomputed tomography scans of the first three-dimensionally preserved skulls of the legged snake Najash and a new phylogenetic hypothesis. These findings elucidate the initial sequence of bone loss that gave origin to the modern snake skull. Morphological and molecular analyses including the new cranial data provide robust support for an extensive basal radiation of early snakes with hindlimbs and pelves, demonstrating that this intermediate morphology was not merely a transient phase between limbed and limbless body plans.