Your tale made me curious to see which direction snakes went, land to water, or water to land, and the latest theorizing seems to go with your version of events!

NPR

Some scientists have speculated that snakes first evolved in water and that their long, slithery bodies were streamlined for swimming. But a new analysis suggests that the most recent common ancestor of all snakes actually lived on land.

This ancestral protosnake probably was a nocturnal hunter that slithered across the forest floor about 120 million years ago. And it likely had tiny hind limbs, left over from an even earlier ancestor, says Allison Hsiang, a researcher at Yale University.

"They probably weren't using them in locomotion in any way, but they did probably still have vestigial hind limbs stuck on the back of their bodies," Hsiang says.

The evolutionary origin of snakes has been a bit of a mystery for scientists, because the fossil record has an unfortunate dearth of snakes. "For a long time there weren't very good snake fossils," says Hsiang, who explains that researchers had not found "things that sort of told us what snakes looked like early on, or transitional fossils between snakes and their closest ancestors."

That's because snakes are mostly small, with fragile skeletons that aren't easily preserved — although there are some notable exceptions, such as Titanoboa, which lived 60 million years ago and could grow longer than 40 feet.

In the past decade, though, scientists have discovered a bunch of new snake fossils — some new species, as well as better-quality specimens of known species. "Previously, we just had, say, a few isolated vertebrae," says Hsiang, "which tells you it's a snake, but doesn't really tell you very much else."

The new fossils allowed Hsiang and some colleagues to do a rigorous, comprehensive analysis, to try to determine what the most recent common ancestor of all snakes might have been like. Besides fossils, the team studied the genes and anatomy of living snakes. "We had a total of 73 species, and I believe 15 of those were fossil species," says Hsiang.

Their analysis, described in the issue of BMC Evolutionary Biology published Tuesday, supports the idea of an early snake that slithered over the ground, and perhaps went into burrows to find food. "Snakes probably did not evolve, originally, to be in water," says Hsiang. "That's not why they developed this body plan; that's not what the earliest snakes were doing."

It looks like the ancestral snake had needle-like hooked teeth that it used to grab small, rodent-like critters, which it then swallowed whole. And it probably wouldn't have been able to eat anything much bigger than its own head.

Coming across things like this all the time while searching for my owl posts and wishing I had a good place to share them is what had me jump at helping you revitalize this community.

❤️ !

Oh man, it makes me feel really good that we've managed to get this place going again, as to me, animals are... life. Just life, indeed.

I've also been dropping little hints and sharing little samples of our work here and there, and if I'm not mistaken, we've managed to add ~100 users here in the past couple weeks. Still just a drop in the bucket in terms of how wonderful & vital animal facts, experience and sharing is/are, but at least it's a start, eh?

Btw, on SuperbOwl, on my old Lemm.ee acct, I once shared a very silly post in which a hybrid series of owls had been mashed-up with other animals and objects. I seem to remember people liking that pretty well, and am now sitting on top of a growing archive of 'animal-hybrid' silly, creative, fascinating mashups.

I'm kinda torn on posting some, though, based on something you expressed pretty early-on: that you were attracted to this place specifically because it WASN'T the usual cutesy-animal fluff, and so forth. So I'm respectful of that. Eh, do you remember my crazy owl-mashup post, though..?

From The vertebrate larynx: adaptations and aberrations

CONCLUSION

The phylogeny of the larynx shows a steady progression from the simple slit on the floor of the lungfish's pharynx to the exquisite precision of the human vocal apparatus. The frog has acquired a cricoid cartilage; the crocodile, an epiglottic ana- logue; the snake, an extendable larynx; the mam- mal, a cricothyroid joint and membranous vocal folds. In Homo sapiens, the vocal fold is adjustable in length, tension and shape, giving the human larynx top honors for vocal versatility. But somewhere along the course of evolutionary time, man must have been influenced by his chosen (or predestined) role as a speaker and singer, trading off airway protection for precise control of his vocal output. The cost has been surprisingly reasonable-only a rare "café coronary" and the need to learn the Heimlich maneuver. While natural selection among wild animals tends to perpetuate those features that meet the requirements of function and gradually elimi- nate those that do not, the process can be frustrated through selective breeding imposed by man. The crippled larynx of most Thoroughbred horses and brachycephalic dogs are outstanding examples.

Café coronary sounded like a fun term, so I looked that up too. It got its name from people choking on food in restaurants. Since choking is often silent instead of the loud affair it gets played up as in media, people mistake it for a heart attack, potentially delaying treatment for their actual condition.

All snakes have them, I believe.