Fossil Leads To Discovery Of New Evolutionary Mechanism For Body Elongation

A third, previously unidentified reason for the extreme elongation of snake and eel bodies has been discovered by a team of University of Zurich paleontologists who published their findings Monday in the journal Nature Communications.

The lengthy, slender and flexible bodies possessed by these creatures have evolved many times independently in the over 500 million years of vertebrate animal history, the study authors explained.

Scientists had previously reported the characteristic formed in one of two ways: either through the elongation of the individual vertebrate of the vertebral column, or through the development of additional vertebrae and associated muscle segments.

Now however, University of Zurich professor Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra and his colleagues have found a third mechanism of axial skeleton elongation.

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