A dinosaur-age fossil heralded as the first four-legged snake known to science might actually be an entirely different beastie, a new study claims.
The tiny fossil, about the length of a pencil at 7.7 inches (19.5 centimeters) long, is likely a dolichosaur, a now-extinct marine lizard with an elongated body that lived during the Cretaceous Period (145 million to 66 million years ago), the researchers of the study found.
After studying the remains of the creature, known as Tetrapodophis amplectus (the genus in Greek means "four-legged snake", while the species is Latin for "embracing") the new team found that the specimen doesn't have key anatomical features characteristic of snakes, said study lead researcher Michael Caldwell, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Chair of the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
