The site that yielded the snake — dubbed Sanajeh indicus, or "ancient-gaped one from India" — was located near a village in Gujarat in western India. It was a rich nesting ground for sauropods known as titanosaurs, with evidence for hundreds of egg clutches, each containing about six to 12 round, spherical eggs. Two other instances of fossil snakes found with these clutches suggest the newly described serpent species made its living plundering nests for young dinosaurs.
"It would have been a smorgasbord," said researcher Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. "Hundreds or thousands of defenseless baby sauropods could have supported an ecosystem of predators during the hatching season."
The dinosaur eggs likely were laid along the sandy banks of a small, quiet tributary and covered afterward by the mother with a thin layer of sediment. These dinosaurs did not seem to look after their young — no evidence for adults has been found at the site.
The fact the bones and delicate structures, such as eggshells and the snake's skull, are arranged in anatomical order (as they would appear in real life) points to quick entombment of a serpent caught in the act, as opposed to them all getting washed together after they died.
"Burial was rapid and deep," said researcher Shanan Peters, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin. "Probably a pulse of slushy sand and mud released during a storm."
Ivan Pavlov on 13 Nov 13The oldest big cat fossils ever found - from a previously unknown species "similar to a snow leopard" - have been unearthed in the Himalayas. The skull fragments of the newly-named Panthera blytheae have been dated between 4.1 and 5.95 million years old. Their discovery in Tibet supports the theory that big cats evolved in central Asia - not Africa - and spread outward.
