A group of researchers led by Argentine scientists from CONICET found skulls and skeletons with the legs of snakes of the genus "najash" coming from rocks that are approximately 95 million years old.

The discovery, which has just been published in the journal Science Advances, provides material to overcome the controversies that existed for some time in the scientific community regarding the anatomical changes that snakes had to go through before becoming what they are today.

This happened because until now, there were few fossils in a state of preservation that was good enough to do research in depth.

The new fossils were found from 2013 in several locations within the Paleontological Area of La Buitrera in Río Negro, Patagonia, which in the past was an extensive desert area of sand dunes-

As they are very delicate bones, they are hardly preserved, so until now there was practically no articulated skull from this era like the one we found, which would allow us to study and interpret the anatomy of a fossil snake in such detail," explained Fernando Garberoglio, a doctoral fellow from CONICET, of the Félix de Azara Natural History Foundation, in Buenos Aires.

Podcast: Bajar

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