Early snakes slithered into newly vacant ecological niches and rapidly evolved the ability to go after a wide array of prey.
Little is known about the earliest chapters of snake evolution because the animals are rarely preserved as fossils, Grundler says. So he and Rabosky used information from living species to probe their history. They gathered more than 34,000 reports of the diets of 882 species based on observations of wild snakes and dissected museum specimens. The researchers also drew upon family trees determined from the genetics of modern snakes.
“Shortly after that event we find a signal of a big explosion in dietary diversity,” Grundler says. “The survivors of that event went on to evolve this huge range of eating styles that we see today.” For snakes, this led to a spectacular collection of adaptations for dining on mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, other reptiles, and a host of invertebrates. The emergence of venom allowed vipers and other ambitious snakes to bring down prey that might otherwise be too dangerous for them to subdue.
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