Snake has how many legs

What is an entoprocta? What is a rotifer? How is the mollusk mantle related to its shell? What is the phylum mollusca? See all questions in Animal Classification. Impact of this question views around the world. Noon Edition. Home Archives About Contact. Media Player Error Update your browser or Flash plugin. Loss of Limb Decades ago, private fossil collectors found something amazing in northwestern Brazil but didn't recognize it. Leggy and Long Although Tetrapodophis is related to living snakes, it probably wasn't their immediate ancestor.

Become an Indiana Public Media supporter. Learn More ». Tweets by wfiu. The second hypothesis says that snakes evolved from burrowing lizards, which stretched their bodies and lost their limbs to better wheedle their way through the ground. In this version, snakes and mosasaurs both independently evolved from a land-lubbing ancestor—probably something like a monitor lizard. Tetrapodophis supports the latter idea. It has no adaptations for swimming, like a flattened tail, and plenty of adaptations for burrowing, like a short snout.

It swam through earth, not water. It hunted there, too. Its backward-pointing teeth suggest that it was an active predator. So does the joint in its jaws, which would have given it an extremely large gape and allowed it to swallow large prey.

And tellingly, it still contains the remains of its last meal: there are little bones in its gut, probably belonging to some unfortunate frog or lizard. This animal was a bona fide meat eater, and suggests that the first snakes had a similar penchant for flesh.

Martill thinks that Tetrapodophis killed its prey by constriction, like many modern snakes do. In particular, why have a long body with an extreme number of vertebrae in your midsection? None of the other legless lizards have that, even burrowing ones. Martill thinks that this feature made early snakes incredibly flexible, allowing them to throw coils around their prey.

Their stumpy legs may even have helped. But is it even a snake? He says that Tetrapodophis lacks distinctive features in its spine and skull that would seal the case. In the squamates alone, a snake-like body has independently evolved at least 26 times, producing a wide menagerie of legless lizards. These include the slow worm of Europe, and the bizarre worm-lizard Bipes , which has lost its hind legs but has kept the stubby front pair.

True snakes represent just one of these many forays into leglessness. Susan Evans from University College London, who studies reptile evolution, is on the fence. The specimen is also more complete than many other recently alleged snakes, some of which are known only from fragments of vertebrae or jaw. Some of these features are found in other legless lizards, but only snakes have all of them.

Their analysis produced a family tree in which Tetrapodophis came after the earliest known snakes like Eophis, Parviraptor, and Diablophis , but is still very much a snake. But how could that be?