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Nest-Raiding Snake Gulped New Born Titanosaurs

  • 02-03-2010 5:12pm
    #1
    Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 10,088 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    It appears that it was not only prehistoric crocodiles that were not safe from ancient snakes. Even the babies of one of the largest sauropods of all, Titanosaurs, were on the menu in the late Cretaceous for 3.5-meter-long Sanajeh indicus—Sanskrit .
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=snake-eating-dinosaur

    An extraordinary set of fossils recovered from Cretaceous period rocks in western India has offered a rare glimpse into a baby dinosaur's first—and last—day on Earth about 67 million years ago. The frightful scene, fossilized by a rapid flow of debris, reveals a titanosaur hatchling's unlikely predator—a snake.

    "The new fossils provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, of snake predation on hatchling dinosaurs and a rare example of non-dinosaurian predation on dinosaurs," says Jeff Wilson, a paleontologist from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the lead author of the study, published March 1 in PLoS Biology. Wilson and his team describe the partial skeleton of a new 3.5-meter-long snake named Sanajeh indicus—Sanskrit for "ancient gape (mouth opening) from India"—fossilized in what appears to have been a titanosaur nest. Coiled around one of three eggs, the snake was frozen in time with its jaws facing the remains of the 50-centimeter-long hatchling.


Comments

  • Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 10,088 Mod ✭✭✭✭marco_polo


    This is a reconstructed model of the snake, about to have dinner.

    025975_600x450.jpg


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭Galvasean


    Sanajeh indicus—Sanskrit, a double barelled second name. Don't get that too often in palaeontology.
    It always amazes me how such significant discoveries can lie idle for so long (in this case since 1987) before someone spots just how important they actually are.
    I wonder what occurence produced sucha spectacular fossil. A mudslide or sandstorm perhaps?


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