Scientists have reported sightings of the fossil of a Madtsoiidae snake from the molasse deposits of Ladakh Himalaya for the first time indicating their prevalence in the subcontinent for a much longer time which was not previously thought.
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Madtsoiidae is an extinct group of medium-sized to gigantic snakes. These firstly appeared during the late Cretaceous. It was mostly distributed in the Gondwanan landmasses, although their Cenozoic record is extremely scarce.
The term molasse refers to nonmarine conglomerate, sandstone, and shale produced from the erosion of mountains and deposited in rivers and lakes.
The Cretaceous Period was named for the immense chalk formations that blanket much of northwestern Europe, and the main components of this chalk are calcareous nannofossils.
Gondwana was an ancient supercontinent that broke up about 180 million years ago. The continent eventually split into land masses we recognize today: Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian Peninsula.
Cenozoic (66 million years ago until today) means ‘recent life’. During this era, plants and animals look most like those on Earth today.
According to fossil records, the whole group disappeared in the mid-Paleogene across most Gondwanan continents except for Australia. It survived with its last known taxon Wonambi till late Pleistocene in Australia.
The Paleogene Period is the oldest of the three stratigraphic divisions of the Cenozoic Era spanning the interval between 66 million and 23 million years ago.
The Pleistocene is the geological era that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the earth’s most recent period of repeated glaciations. Glaciations the process or state of being covered by glaciers or ice sheets.
Dr. Ningthoujam Premjit Singh, Dr. Ramesh Kumar Sehgal, and Abhishek Pratap Singh from Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, India in association with Dr. Rajeev Patnaik and Wasim Abass Wazir from Panjab University Chandigarh; Dr. Navin Kumar and Piyush Uniyal from Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, and Dr. Andrej Čerňanský of Comenius University Slovakia have reported for the first time a Madtsoiidae snake from the late Oligocene of India or the molasse deposits of Ladakh Himalaya.
Oligocene is part of the Tertiary Period in the Cenozoic Era, and lasted from about 33.7 to 23.8 million years ago.
The occurrence of Madtsoiidae from the Oligocene of Ladakh indicates their continuity at least to the end of the Paleogene.
Paleogene is a geologic period and system that spans 43 million years from the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago.
The research published in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology shows that the members of this group were successful in this subcontinent for much longer time than previously thought. The global climatic shifts and the prominent biotic reorganization across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, did not cause the extinction of this important group of snakes in India.
The Eocene-Oligocene boundary correlates to the European Grande Coupure. The Grande Coupure is a well-documented major faunal event that greatly modified the European fauna.
The newly described specimen is housed in the repository of Wadia Institute. This institute is an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology.