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Snake origins: Tametara minim is tiny and old

Tuesday, July 28, 2026 9:33

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A new, small Late Cretaceous articulated 3D snake fossil
from Brazil (80mya) named Tametara minim (Figs 1, 2) was recently described by Simões et al 2026. It compares well with even smaller Najash (Fig 2).

Too little is known of the Tametara skull (Fig 2) to add it to the LRT. See a YouTube video.

Simões (of Princeton U) reported,
“Our findings reframe a long-running debate about how the earliest snakes lived. We set out to settle the century-old question of what turned snakes into snakes with the firmest reconstruction yet of how the earliest of these reptiles lived. Instead, we may need to reframe the question: It was never simply sea or soil. Indeed, our best-preserved early snake was a committed burrower. But the pathway toward modern snakes branched and meandered. No single fossil, however exquisite, can capture the whole of that journey. Each is only a spotlight thrown across a bigger, more convoluted scene.”

You heard that here (Figs 3-6) first.
Taxon exclusion still manages to hobble this study.

Figure 2. Tametars skull µCT scans from Simoes et al 2026 here compared to scale and to size with the smaller Najash skull showing how much is missing from Tametara. Too little is known of Tametara to invite it into the LRT. Simoes et al did not provide a ghosted image of Najash to illustrate the likely extent of the missing parts of the skull. Perhaps they should have done so.

Roy Ebel, writing in ‘The Conversation’
“Sea or soil? Snakes are essentially highly modified lizards. Sometime in the age of dinosaurs, one lizard lineage lost its limbs and stretched out its body. The key question is why. For more than a century, several ideas have competed with each other. One says the first snakes colonized the water, with a long, limbless body suited for swimming, much like an eel. A second says they lived on the surface of the land, among leaf litter and vegetation, where reduced limbs could have eased their movement through dense ground cover. A third says they went underground, losing their limbs and elongating their bodies to pursue a head-first burrowing lifestyle, much like modern blind snakes.”

The LRT says: all three arose from basalmost gecko ancestors, then Early Cretaceous taxa, some terrestrial, some aquatic, some tiny. The Simoes et al study excludes a long list of pre-snake taxa in the LRT.

Figure 3. Dolichosaurus added to the lineage of snake origins.

Figure 4. The origin of snakes alongside the origin of mosasaurs and the origin of Lanthanotus, all in phylogenetic order. Not to scale. Note the branching off of burrowing snakes.

Add taxa to your own LRT
in order to test the hypothesis of snake origins recovered by the LRT.

References
Hsiang AY, Field DJ, Webster TH, Behlke ADB, Davis MB, Racicot RA & Gauthier JA 2015. The origin of snakes: revealing the ecology, behavior, and evolutionary history of early snakes using genomics, phenomics, and the fossil record. BMC Evolutionary Biology May 2015, 15:87 DOI: 10.1186/s12862-015-0358-5
Simões TR et al (10 co-authors) 2026. Exceptional brain and ecological diversity in the earliest snakes, Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10809-9

reptileevolution.com/loxocemus.htm

https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2015/09/20/norellius-nyctisaurops-a-very-basal-pre-snake-very-close-to-geckos/

https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/dolichosaurus-coniasaurus-and-the-origin-of-snakes/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG6vYuBYIl8&list=TLPQMjAwMTIwMjYB55dz-FY6Kg&index=3

Tiny Late Cretaceous Najash: basal to burrowing snakes

Squamate origins and radiations: how to lead journalists and students down the path

Publicity
phys.org/news/2026-07-80millionyearold-snake-fossil-lizards-lost.

Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2026/07/28/snake-origins-tametara-minim-is-tiny-and-old/

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