Fossil find shows how snakes lost legs eons ago

A cache of well-preserved fossils show how snakes lost their front legs earlier than thought but retained their hind legs for eons.

Fossil remains prove theory that snakes probably lost their forelimbs at least 170 million years ago, early in their evolution.

The Bible says snakes took their present form when a serpent was instantly rendered legless in the Garden of Eden.

Now a cache of well-preserved fossils has shed light on how, in ­reality, this physical transformation took place in two stages.

The remains show how snakes lost their front legs earlier than had previously been thought — and that they retained their hind legs for tens of millions of years afterwards. Unearthed in northern Patagonia in Argentina, the fossils belong to the extinct Najash rionegrina group of snakes. They depict a reptile that retained two small hind legs and lived about 100 million years ago.

A study published in the journal Science Advances argues that snakes probably lost their forelimbs at least 170 million years ago, early in their evolution. “Najash shows how snakes evolved from lizards in incremental evolutionary steps, just like Darwin predicted,” Mike Lee of Flinders University and South Australian Museum, a paper co-author, said.

“These primitive snakes with little legs weren’t just a transient evolutionary stage on the way to something better. Rather, they had a highly successful body plan that persisted across many millions of years, and diversified into a range of terrestrial, burrowing and aquatic niches.”

The earliest snake fossils date from the Middle Jurassic epoch, which lasted from about 174 million to 164 million years ago. The fossil record for snakes is sparse, leaving much about their evolution unknown.

The Times