Just when you thought evolution couldn’t get any creepier, here comes a new discovery: snakes with legs. But those legs weren’t meant for walking. They were meant for grabbing Things. As in living Things.  As in you if you’d been unlucky enough to live in the time of Tetrapodophis amplectus, the scientific name for the leggy serpent.

Researchers say a newly discovered snake species may have used its four limbs to snag prey or grapple with mates. The new species was discovered in Brazil’s Crato Formation according to the journal Science.

T. amplectus lived during the Early Cretaceous period, between 146 and 100 million years ago. Researchers said the skeleton they discovered is “insanely complete”. University of Bath paleontologist Nicholas Longrich said they found “every bone from the nose to the tail”.

But if it has legs, it must be a lizard, not a snake, right? Wrong. Turns out snakes and lizards have different skull shapes and other features. For example, snakes don’t have eyelids, but lizards do. And lizards have external ears; snake ears are internal.

“If the limbs were useless vestiges, we would expect them to be a reduced and simplified version of a lizard’s limbs,” Longrich says. “If they were for burrowing, they should be stout and powerful like a mole’s. Instead, they have very long, skinny fingers with the last bone in the finger being extremely elongate. That’s typical of animals that use their digits for grasping.”

I don’t know about you, but I think this is one Thing I’m glad went extinct a long time ago. It’s bad enough living with the legless variety!

See you next week,
Bobby