![]() In fact, Colubroidae may have done so well because it could adapt to daytime activities, the researchers said. This nocturnal behavior likely stopped when Colubroidae, a family of snakes that makes up more than 85 percent of living snake species, stopped going out at night as temperatures dropped. Although many ancestral reptiles were active during the daytime, the ancestral snake was nocturnal for about 45 million to 50 million years, they said. The team also found that snakes used to be night owls. In fact, the rise of snakes coincided with the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution, when there was thought to be an intense diversification of animals, including insects, reptiles and mammals, Hsiang said. The ancestor of all snakes followed about 20 million years later on the supercontinent Gondwana, which includes what is now South America, Africa, Antarctica and Australia, they said. ![]() However, the ancestor of all snakelike animals, which includes some lizards, likely developed during the middle of the Early Cretaceous period, about 128.5 million years ago, on Laurasia, a continent that included what is now North America, Europe and Asia, the researchers said. The ancestors also likely lived on land in "warm, well-watered and well-vegetated environments," they added. And unlike constrictors, these snake ancestors likely used needlelike teeth to snag prey before swallowing them whole. Although their prey were relatively large compared to prey eaten by lizards at the time, it does not appear that these ancient creatures could constrict and manipulate prey larger than themselves, as the modern boa constrictor can, the researchers said. Field)īoth ancestors likely hunted at night and ate "soft-bodied vertebrate and invertebrate prey" that was about the size of their heads, the researchers wrote in the study. ![]() A bull snake flicks out its black tongue.
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