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It has two small hind legs and is considered a transitional form between Cretaceous lizards and limbless snakes. The feature, described as vestigial, was most likely useless to Eupodophis . [ 1 ] The type species Eupodophis descouensi was named in 2000 and resides now in the paleontology section of the Mim Museum in Beirut, Lebanon.
Since first appearing during the age of dinosaurs, snakes have authored an evolutionary success story - slithering into almost every habitat on Earth, from oceans to tree tops. Scientists ...
The snake detection theory (SDT), [1] [2] [3] also sometimes called the snake detection hypothesis, suggests that snakes contributed to the evolution of visual systems in primates. According to the theory, predatory pressure on early primate populations from snakes selected individuals who were best able to recognize them, improving their ...
How the Snake Lost Its Legs: Curious Tales from the Frontier of Evo-Devo is a 2014 book on evolutionary developmental biology by Lewis I. Held, Jr. The title pays homage to Rudyard Kipling 's Just So Stories , [ 1 ] [ a ] but the "tales" are strictly scientific, explaining how a wide range of animal features evolved, in molecular detail.
Pachyrhachis was originally described by Haas (1979, 1980) who noted it had a puzzling melange of snake and lizard features; its status as an early snake was later confirmed (Caldwell and Lee 1997). The position of Pachyrhachis within snakes has been debated (e.g. Lee and Scanlon 2002; Rieppel et al. 2003).
Why did it have to be snakes?” The reptile, christened Tachymenoides harrisonfordi, measures 16 inches long and is a pale yellowish-brown colour with black spots and a black belly.
The evolution of tetrapods began about 400 million years ago in the Devonian Period with the earliest tetrapods evolved from lobe-finned fishes. [1] Tetrapods (under the apomorphy-based definition used on this page) are categorized as animals in the biological superclass Tetrapoda, which includes all living and extinct amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
The skull of a snake differs from a lizards in several ways. Snakes have more flexible jaws, that is, instead of a juncture at the upper and lower jaw, the snake's jaws are connected by a bone hinge that is called the quadrate bone. Between the two halves of the lower jaw at the chin there is an elastic ligament that allows for a separation.