Snakes have appeared in myths and stories for as long as people have told them. But ask scientists how snakes lost their legs and evolved into their long, limbless form, and the answer is still not settled.
That may be changing. According to the journal Nature, researchers have described an exceptionally preserved, roughly 80-million-year-old snake fossil from Brazil that offers some of the clearest physical evidence yet about how the earliest snakes actually lived. The fossil, named Tametara mirim, was unearthed in São Paulo state and is only about 17 inches long, but it is already reshaping a debate on snake evolution that has run for more than a century.
