Comptes Rendus Palevol<\/a>, all that\u2019s left of Paradoxophidion richardoweni are 31 tiny vertebrae found at Hordle Cliff on England\u2019s south coast. That was all it took for paleontologists to determine that these were, in fact, incredibly strange bones that didn\u2019t belong to anything that had previously known. <\/p>\nSo weird, in fact, that the peer-reviewed paper describing it repeatedly calls the animal \u201cbizarre.\u201d It\u2019s unusual for a stuffy and astute scientific research paper to editorialize like that instead of providing a stuffy and astute technical assessment. But that choice highlights just how truly bizarre the whole situation, and the snake itself, is.<\/p>\n
The Ancient Snake Found in a London Museum, Explained<\/p>\n
The fossils were originally collected in 1981 and then archived at the Natural History Museum. Decades later, Dr. Georgios Georgalis of the Polish Academy of Sciences spotted the vertebrae and realized they didn\u2019t match any known snake. The bones are complete enough to confirm they belong to a single species, yet they reveal almost nothing about its life. <\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t have a skull, so they couldn\u2019t deduce anything about the diet. They had some spine, but it showed no obvious adaptations for burrowing, climbing, or swimming. It seems to combine traits now seen in very different groups of snakes, suggesting it may represent an early branch in snake evolution, or that it\u2019s an early member of a family of aquatic snakes.<\/p>\n
Another \u201cor\u201d suggests it could belong to a snake lineage that is now gone, lost to the sands of time. Save for this small collection of bones found in a drawer, which we can safely assume was not this snake\u2019s natural habitat.<\/p>\n
For now, the only thing scientists can say for sure about whatever this snake was is that they cannot say anything for sure about it, since what little they know so far doesn\u2019t align with any single species. \u00a0<\/p>\n
There are fossilized snake remains in museum collections all over the world that remain woefully understudied. For all we know, this thing\u2019s cousin or sibling could be hanging out in a drawer in a museum on the opposite side of the world, waiting to be noticed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers have identified a new, super-weird species of ancient snake. The crazy part? They didn\u2019t find it in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":693372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[933,748,393,4884,1429,257,12,70,34722,5776,16,15,416],"class_list":{"0":"post-693371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-animals","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-life","13":"tag-london","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-snakes","17":"tag-trending","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom","20":"tag-viral"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115888443383557444","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/693372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}