Ney Matogrosso, who once hypnotized Brazil by proclaiming the inexistence of snake tracks and werewolf hides, was wrong – at least with regard to the first question. This is what an international team of researchers claimed in 2015 and they discovered fossils of a four-legged snake (fully capable, therefore, of leaving tracks) in rocks 120 million years old, coming from Ceará.
A new study, however, indicates that the four-legged snake was not much of a snake. And this is just one of the problematic aspects surrounding the fossil of Tetrapodophis, a creature that almost certainly left Brazilian territory illegally.
Let us start, however, with the scientific side of the controversy, even though it is not so simple to separate it from the legal and ethical aspects that are part of it. The new assessment of the extinct species, an animal whose length was not much longer than that of an index finger, will soon be published in the journal Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. Among its authors are the veteran paleontologist Michael Caldwell, from the University of Alberta, in Canada, and the Brazilian Tiago Simões, a researcher at Harvard University who is a leading expert on the evolution of the group of reptiles that includes snakes and their close relatives, the lizards .
Incidentally, it should be made clear that there is no doubt about the idea that snakes arose from ancestors with legs. It certainly happened; some snakes today still carry bony structures associated with limbs, and similar things can be seen in other reptile strains as well. And several fossils of snakes with hind legs have been found. The question is whether the four legs that lend Tetrapodophis its name in Greek really belong to a snake from the Age of Dinosaurs.
For Simões, Caldwell and company, the answer is a resounding “no”. One of the keys to their reassessment was gaining access to the fossil’s counterpart, which to date has not been described. To put it mildly: what happens is that the animal’s bones were preserved in two twin blocks of rock. One of them contains the reptile’s skull and a kind of stamp on the structure of the rest of the skeleton. The other, the counterpart, brings the “stamp” of the skull and the fossils of the skeleton themselves.
Detailed analysis showed that the correct thing would be to classify the animal as a dolicosaur – that is, a member of a group of semi-aquatic reptiles that would later give rise to the gigantic marine mosasaurs (if you’ve watched the movie “Jurassic World”, you know why animal I’m talking about – although the movie has greatly exaggerated the size of the monster).
And there are, of course, the ethical issues. The Brazilian specimen ended up in Germany, in the hands of a private collector, and ended up being loaned to a private museum. The point is that fossils found here have been Union property –belonging to the Brazilian State– since 1942. It is almost certain that the “no charge” left Brazil in the bush. To make matters worse, one of those responsible for the original study, Briton David Martill, often ridicules national legislation on the subject.
The new study calls for the fossil’s repatriation, a goal that has advanced in the case of other Brazilian fossils that also ended up abroad. It is a warning for researchers who still have colonialist views of science, in the immortal words intoned by Ney Matogrosso: if the animal runs, it catches, if the animal stays it eats.
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