In the third chapter of Genesis, the tale of Adam and Eve and the serpent who enticed them ends with God’s famous punishment for the wily reptile:
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“So the Lord God said to the serpent, `Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. . . .’ “
While the Bible does not specifically say it, the implication is that the snake once had legs to get around on, and God took them away.
In fact, paleontologists have long known that snakes, which evolved from lizards, once indeed did have legs. Now an article co-written by a Field Museum paleontologist and published in the Friday edition of the research journal Science analyzes a superbly preserved fossil that may give insight into some of the most hotly debated questions in paleontology:
Why snakes once had legs, why they lost them, when they evolved from lizard life and whether they originated on land or in the sea.
To this day, almost all land-living lizards remain so closely related physiologically to snakes that, if thrown into water, they immediately press their limbs to their sides and swim capably like water snakes.
For the last three years, the debate over the evolution of snakes has centered on three fossil snakes with legs found just 12 miles north of Jerusalem. The Science article is the latest volley in the debate.
Olivier Rieppel, the Field scientist, said he believes snake evolution may be a prime model that will one day solve the mysteries of the mechanisms of evolution and how animals physically altered themselves to adapt to changing environments.
His Science article attempts to refute a widely publicized theory published in the British research journal Nature in 1997 that snakes originated in the sea. Using two of the three Israeli limbed-snake fossils, the 1997 article made a strong case that all snakes were descended from long-extinct giant sea lizards called mosasaurs.
The Nature article sparked widespread interest both in scientific circles and among religious creationists.
The religious interest came about because the fossilized snakes with legs were found in a limestone quarry so close to Jerusalem. Many fundamentalists were convinced the quarry must be the site of the Garden of Eden. They assumed the fossils were skeletons of some of the last limbed snakes to live before God took their legs away in punishment for tempting Adam’s wife Eve in the garden.
Not surprisingly, the theological explanation was ignored in scientific literature.
Rieppel and his co-authors of the Science article are introducing the third of the three Israeli snake fossils to the scientific record, naming it Haasiophis.
“Haasiophis has an upper leg, a lower leg, an ankle and four digits,” Rieppel said. “It is a beautiful fossil.”
It is such a complete fossil, he said, that it proves the Nature article on snake origins to be wrong.
His effort to disprove the article has taken him twice to Jerusalem and once to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to study fossil records. It also has brought Israeli, Brazilian and American scientists to the Field to compare the Israeli fossils with the museum’s vast store of snake skeletons and fossils.
Their conclusion is that the Israeli fossil snakes are 95 million-year-old ancestors of modern, big-mouthed snakes known as macrostomatans, including pythons and boas.
The fossil snakes’ skull and jaw structures are remarkably similar to those of modern pythons and boas, he said. Some pythons and boas even have remnants of hind legs that are positioned much like those in the fossil snakes.
That evidence, Rieppel said, proves “these fossil snakes cannot be related to the primitive mosasaurs. Therefore, we cannot conclude that snakes had their origins in the sea.”
Rieppel said he didn’t expect his Science article to end the debate.
Though the three Israeli fossils have been at the center of debate for just three years, they were discovered around 30 years ago.
Israeli paleontologist George Haas did not think the three fossils he acquired from the quarry were snakes, but primeval sea lizards. He described two of them in a scientific article in the late 1970s that received very little attention.
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The fossils remained in Jerusalem after his death, but the third one was lost to science until Rieppel and his colleagues found it, using it for their Science article. They named it Haasiophis–which in Greek means “Haas snake”–in honor of the Israeli paleontologist.