Scientists have reported for the first time the discovery of the fossil of a Madtsoiidae snake from the molasse deposits of the Ladakh Himalayas, indicating that they have been distributed on the subcontinent much longer than previously thought.
Madtsoiidae a extinctsnakes
Madtsoiidae is an extinct group of medium-to-giant snakes that first appeared during the Late Cretaceous and were distributed mainly in the Gondwanian landmasses, although their Cenozoic records are extremely sparse. The entire clade has disappeared from the fossil record in the Middle Paleogene on most of Gondwana’s continents, with the exception of Australia, where it survived into the late Pleistocene with its last known taxon, Wonambi.
Dr. NingthoujamPremjit Singh (corresponding author), Dr. Ramesh Kumar Sehgal and Mr. Abhishek Pratap Singh from Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, India in collaboration with Dr. Rajeev Patnaik and MrWasimAbass Wazir from Panjab University Chandigarh; drNavin Kumar and Mr. PiyushUniyal from the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar and Dr. Andrej Čerňanský from Comenius University Slovakia have reported for the first time a Madtsoiidae snake from the late Oligocene (part of the Tertiary in the Cenozoic lasting about 33.7 to 23.8 million years ago) in India or in the Molasse deposits of the Ladakh- Himalayas.
66 million years ago
The occurrence of Madtsoiidae from the Ladakh Oligocene shows their continuity at least to the end of the Paleogene (geological period and system spanning 43 million years from the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago). Research published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology shows that members of this group have been successful on this subcontinent for much longer than previously thought. Global climate shifts and the prominent biotic reorganization across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary (which correlates with the European Grande Coupure) have not led to the extinction of this important group of snakes in India.The newly described specimen is in the depot of the Wadia Institute, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology
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