Amazing: Look At A Fossil Snake With Four Legs

by National Geographic

These jaw drapping photos were featured on the National Geographic website about Dr David Martill, work.

Tetrapodophis: Snake with four legs. (Credit: via National Geographic).

The Reader in Palaeobiology from the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences University of Portsmouth Burnaby Building Burnaby Road Portsmouth PO1 3QL described the moment he came face to face with a snake with four lakes - a rare sighting.

According to the National Geographic, Snakes can famously disarticulate their jaws, and open their mouths to extreme widths.

But David Martill from the University of Portsmouth did his best impression of this trick while walking through the Bürgermeister Müller Museum in Solnhofen, Germany, and it appeared failed at some point because of what he saw.

He was pointing out the museum’s fossils to a group of students. “And then my jaw just dropped,” he recalls.

He saw a little specimen with a long sinuous body, packed with ribs and 15 centimetres from nose to tail. It looked like a snake. But it was stuck in unusual rock, with the distinctive characteristics of the Brazilian Crato Formation, a fossil site that dates to the early Cretaceous period. Snake fossils had been found in that period but never that location, and in South America but never that early. The combination of place and time was unusual.

“And then, if my jaw hadn’t already dropped enough, it dropped right to the floor,” says Martill. The little creature had a pair of hind legs. “I thought: bloody hell! And I looked closer and the little label said: Unknown fossil. Understatement!”

“I looked even closer—and my jaw was already on the floor by now—and I saw that it had tiny little front legs!” he says.

Fossil-hunters have found several extinct snakes with stunted hind legs, and modern boas and pythons still have a pair of little spurs. “But no snake has ever been found with four legs. This is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.”

Martill called the creature Tetrapodophis: four-legged snake. “This little animal is the Archaeopteryx of the squamate world,” he says.

Tetrapodophis catching a lizard. (Credit: via National Geographic)

Tetrapodophis specimen. (Credit: via National Geographic)

Tetrapodophis hindlimb. (Credit: via National Geographic)

Tetrapodophis forelimb. (Credit: via National Geographic)