In 2016, Stig Walsh from the National Museums Scotland was on an expedition on the Isle of Skye when he found a fossil. Nearly 40cm long from head to tail, it had snake-like jaws and curved, hook-shaped teeth – much like those of a modern-day python. Yet the animal’s body was short, and it had four limbs.
At first, this surprising mix of body parts led some researchers to believe the 167-million-year-old remains belonged to two different animals: a snake and a gecko.
Keen to find an answer, Walsh and a team of scientists spent almost 10 years preparing the specimen and analysing it with high-powered X-rays. The results of the study, recently published in the journal Nature, reveal that the remains do in fact belong to a single animal. According to the researchers, it’s one of the oldest and most complete Jurassic lizards ever found.
The new species has been named Breugnathair elgolensis, meaning ‘false snake of Elgol’ in Gaelic, referencing the area on the Isle of Skye where it was discovered.
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“Snakes are remarkable animals that evolved long, limbless bodies from lizard-like ancestors,” says the study’s lead author Roger Benson from the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Palaeontology.
“Breugnathair has snake-like features of the teeth and jaws, but in other ways, it is surprisingly primitive. This might be telling us that snake ancestors were very different to what we expected, or it could instead be evidence that snake-like predatory habits evolved separately in a primitive, extinct group.”
The researchers think Breugnathair probably hunted small vertebrates, such as early mammals and young dinosaurs. Though they admit there is still a lot they don’t know about the species and its exact place in reptile evolution. “This fossil gets us quite far, but it doesn’t get us all of the way,” says Benson. “It makes us even more excited about the possibility of figuring out where snakes come from.”
The specimen is now part of the National Museums Scotland’s collection.
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Top image: Elgol on the Isle of Skye, near to where the fossil was found. Credit: Getty
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