When a vast asteroid smashed into our planet 66 million years ago it drove most life on Earth to extinction, including the dinosaurs. However, new research shows how snakes ended up as winners from the wipe-out.
Scientists from the universities of Bath, Bristol and Cambridge, in England, worked out a snake “family tree”. They compared genes (chemical instructions that tell their bodies how to grow and develop) from modern snakes with the features of extinct species. They found that all 3,700 modern snake species are descended from a handful of ancient serpents that survived the extinction.
These species survived because they could already go without food for a long time, and their long, thin bodies allowed them to hide underground. When they emerged, they quickly adapted to a different world,…
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