Snakes’ success is intriguing
And there is yet another set of terrestrial vertebrates that prospered post-impact, but which are sadly neglected by zoologists. These are snakes. With almost 4,000 representatives, they are not as speciose as mammals. But they are not far behind.
. Phylogenetically, in the way that birds are dinosaurs that sprouted wings, they are actually a group of lizards that lost their legs. But birds’ success is unsurprising. They were the only dinosaurs to master flight. By contrast, partial or total leglessness has evolved more than a score of times in lizards. Yet each abandonment of limbs, except by snakes, has led to only a handful of modern representatives.
The oldest snake fossils go back to the mid-Jurassic, about 170m years ago. These snakes were predators of invertebrates, mainly insects. Their diets thus matched those of most of the other groups of limbless lizards now alive. Just over 100m years ago, however, as the chart shows, Dr Grundler’s and Dr Rabosky’s analysis suggests some snakes started eating other lizards.
But that was just the overture. As the chart shows, ophidian dietary diversification really got going in an epoch called the Eocene, which began 56m years ago, 10m years after the dinosaurs’ demise. It was during the Eocene that many groups of animals now familiar first emerged . Snakes, preying upon this diversity, themselves diversified in response, developing such hunting tricks as the venoms for which they are notorious. The result is the plethora of slithery serpents found today.
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