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3 - The First 80 Million Years of Snake Evolution

The Mesozoic Fossil Record of Snakes and Its Implications for Origin Hypotheses, Biogeography, and Mass Extinction

from Part I - The Squamate and Snake Fossil Record

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2022

By
Jason J. Head ,
Alexandra F. C. Howard  and
Johannes Müller
Edited by
David J. Gower  and
Hussam Zaher
David J. Gower
Affiliation:
Natural History Museum, London
Hussam Zaher
Affiliation:
Universidade de São Paulo
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Summary

The Cretaceous fossil record of snakes demonstrates the origin and evolution of the snake body and the early ecological and biogeographic history of the clade during the first 80 million years of their history. Consisting primarily of isolated vertebrae as well as a small number of mostly complete specimens, the record shows the elongate body of snakes evolved no earlier than approximately 100 million years ago. Stem snakes are present in terrestrial and marine palaeoenvironments throughout the Late Cretaceous of northern and southern continents. Conversely, the oldest records of living clades are restricted to the Campanian of South America, Africa, and possibly North America, which requires episodes of dispersal, or unrealistically long ghost lineages extending back to tectonically-mediated vicariance, to explain geographic distributions. Most Maastrichtian-aged stem and primary living clades extend into the Paleogene, indicating that the K-Pg extinction event had little visible effect on the evolution of snakes, whereas major diversifications of crown clades are constrained from middle Paleogene to Neogene.

Keywords

snakesevolutionpalaeontologypalaeobiologyanatomysystematicsfossilsCretaceousvertebraeextinction
Type
Chapter
Information
The Origin and Early Evolutionary History of Snakes , pp. 26 - 54
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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