Who’s eating who? (Image: Sculpture: Tyler Keillor, Photo: Xiimena Erickson)
Snake fossils are extremely rare, and this one was petrified just as it was about to eat a dinosaur hatchling
Discovered: Gujarat, India, 1986
Age: 68 million years
Location: Geological Survey of India
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Unlike some dinosaurs, the giant, long-necked sauropods did not care for their eggs. Adults have never been found near nests, so it seems that sauropod hatchlings had to fend for themselves from the start. And that left the way clear for predators to feast on them as they emerged.
One of these predators was a 3.5-metre-long snake called Sanajeh indicus. Towards the end of the age of the dinosaurs, one decided to raid a nest of a sauropod eggs, perhaps attracted by the noise of hatchlings breaking out of their shells.
Sanajeh could not open its mouth wide like modern egg-eaters and other snakes, says Jeffrey Wilson of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who helped describe the fossil (). The eggs were 14 centimetres wide so the snake could not down them whole, nor break the shells, which were over 2 millimetres thick.
Instead, the snake coiled itself around the eggs and waited for a meal to emerge. But just as it was about to gorge on a half-metre-long hatchling, a landslip buried the nest, snake and all.
The nest of the Geological Society of India in 1986. Another palaeontologist, Sohan Lal Jain, spotted a few snake vertebrae but his observation was not followed up. In 2001, when Mohabey showed him the fossil. He arranged for it to be taken to the University of Michigan, where much more of the snake was uncovered.
Snakes evolved about 150 million years ago, but fossils of early snakes are scarce and mostly consist of fragments of the backbone, so we don’t know much about them or what they did. That makes this fossil all the more amazing: not only was part of the skull found as well as many vertebrae, it was preserved as it was preying on dinosaur hatchlings.
Read more: “Stunning fossils: The seven most amazing ever found“
