Ancient Snakes Lurked in Dinosaur Nesting

Ancient snakes lurked in dinosaur nesting grounds in order to gobble up hatchlings as they emerged from eggs, fossils from western India suggest.

Analysis of a clutch of Cretaceous-period dinosaur eggs shows that bones within the nest belong to a 3.5-metre-long predatory snake, coiled around an egg and near the remains of a sauropod hatchling1. The find offers a rare glimpse at the feeding behaviour of Cretaceous snakes and reveals a previously unrecognized threat that hatchling dinosaurs likely faced.

The eggs were first discovered in 1987 by Dhananjay Mohabey, who works at the Geological Survey of India. He identified them as Sauropoda, the long-necked group of dinosaurs to which Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus belong, and assumed that the accompanying bones were those of hatchling sauropods.

Twenty-three years later, Mohabey, palaeontologist Jeffrey Wilson at the University of Michigan and a team of colleagues now reveal that some of the bones belong to a predatory snake, which they call Sanajeh indicus.

Evolutionary ecologist Harry Greene at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says the find is "spectacular", as well-preserved snake fossils are so rare, particularly those that preserve substantial parts of the head.

"When Dhananjay first showed me the fossil, I was so stunned when I realized 'this is an articulated Cretaceous snake' that it didn't hit me until a few hours later that 'this is a Cretaceous snake in a dinosaur nest'," says Wilson.