Researchers have identified a new, super-weird species of ancient snake. The crazy part? They didn’t find it in the jungle or in a remote cave. They found it in a drawer at a museum in London. And they believe it hasn’t been around for 37 million years.
According to research published in Comptes Rendus Palevol, all that’s left of Paradoxophidion richardoweni are 31 tiny vertebrae found at Hordle Cliff on England’s south coast. That was all it took for paleontologists to determine that these were, in fact, incredibly strange bones that didn’t belong to anything that had previously known.
So weird, in fact, that the peer-reviewed paper describing it repeatedly calls the animal “bizarre.” It’s unusual for a stuffy and astute scientific research paper to editorialize like that instead of providing a stuffy and astute technical assessment. But that choice highlights just how truly bizarre the whole situation, and the snake itself, is.
The Ancient Snake Found in a London Museum, Explained
The fossils were originally collected in 1981 and then archived at the Natural History Museum. Decades later, Dr. Georgios Georgalis of the Polish Academy of Sciences spotted the vertebrae and realized they didn’t match any known snake. The bones are complete enough to confirm they belong to a single species, yet they reveal almost nothing about its life.
They didn’t have a skull, so they couldn’t deduce anything about the diet. They had some spine, but it showed no obvious adaptations for burrowing, climbing, or swimming. It seems to combine traits now seen in very different groups of snakes, suggesting it may represent an early branch in snake evolution, or that it’s an early member of a family of aquatic snakes.
Another “or” suggests it could belong to a snake lineage that is now gone, lost to the sands of time. Save for this small collection of bones found in a drawer, which we can safely assume was not this snake’s natural habitat.
For now, the only thing scientists can say for sure about whatever this snake was is that they cannot say anything for sure about it, since what little they know so far doesn’t align with any single species.
There are fossilized snake remains in museum collections all over the world that remain woefully understudied. For all we know, this thing’s cousin or sibling could be hanging out in a drawer in a museum on the opposite side of the world, waiting to be noticed.
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