No, it’s not the plot from The Land Before Time: Nightmare Fuel. Rather, it’s a 3.5m Cretaceous snake from India, now identified as Sanajeh indicus. A fossil of S. indicus has been found coiled in a dinosaur’s nest, indicating its likely prey. Unlike modern snakes it wasn’t able to detach its jaws to swallow large objects like eggs, but was plenty big enough to tackle newborn dinosaurs. Jason Head, paleontologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga said, “this is the first direct evidence of feeding behavior in a fossil primitive snake, and shows us that the ecology and early evolutionary history of snakes were much more complex than we would think just by looking at modern snakes today.”
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