Early Snakes Explored Multiple Habitats, Not Single Evolutionary Path

Eighty million years ago, long before the modern world took shape, snakes were already conducting a quiet experiment in possibility — burrowing through soil, stalking across open ground, and threading through ancient seas, all at once. A remarkably preserved fossil from southeastern Brazil, analyzed through the lens of neuroanatomy rather than bone alone, reveals that the earliest snakes did not follow a single evolutionary path but fanned outward into multiple ecological lives almost immediately after losing their limbs. The discovery, led by researchers at the University of Helsinki and publ