Will you choose beauty? The carnivorous Wavy Bubble Snail, perhaps, with its billowing skirts shimmering under UV light. Or will it be age? Like the venerable 500-year-old Methuselah oyster.
Messelopython freyi. Image credit: Senckenberg Research Institute.
The newly-identified python species lived in what is now Germany, approximately 47.6 million years ago (Eocene period).
Named
Messelopython freyi, the ancient snake is the earliest-known member of the superfamily Pythonoidea.
“The geographic origin of pythons is still not clear,” said co-author Dr. Krister Smith, a paleontologist in the Department of Messel Research and Mammalogy at the Senckenberg Research Institute and the Institute for Ecology, Diversity and Evolution at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
“According to our findings, these snakes already occurred in Europe at the time of the Eocene, over 47 million years ago,” said lead author Dr. Hussam Zaher, a paleontologist in the Museu de Zoologia at the Universidade de São Paulo.